Overall Rating
  Awesome: 28.89%
Worth A Look: 4.44%
Average: 13.33%
Pretty Bad: 13.33%
Total Crap: 40%
1 review, 39 user ratings
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| Lord of the Rings, The (1978) |
by Tyler Sciortino
"Non-hack director makes movie that makes him look like one."
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What a shitty monstrosity this film is. This is what happens when a decent director makes an adaptation to a classic novel and combines it with his style of film-making. This style might be OK for his other work, but not here, to put it mildly.Let's skip the mutilated story, and go to the characters, who lack any of the development they had in the books, and are ruthlessly altered to bland, generic, talkative simpletons. Boromir looks like a viking; Gimli is the size of any human, though he is meant to be a dwarf; Chief Chowig...I mean Aragorn...looks like an indian; Gandalf's hands move like he is trying to shoo a fly; Aruman (Saruman's name altered for dumbed-down fools so they don't confuse it with Sauron) looks like a fat, slightly younger Gandalf with a Popeye voice and lighter hair; Frodo and Sam act like gay lovers; Balrog looks like a demon straight out of Looney Tunes with a lion head and butterfly wings; Treebeard looks like a piece of broccoli; Sauron looks like a less muscular offspring of Boromir with a gas mask; Gollum looks like Nosferatu the Vampyre; the Black Riders are brown; the Uruk-Hai look like human-shaped Balrogs wearing pillow cases; and Galadriel is a giggly ditz.
The screenplay is a tangled mess. Plots go nowhere, the three-book story is chopped to pieces to fit a 2 hour and 15 minute length (too small to carry one half of a thousand-page epic book), the movie ends with a hilariously off narration, and the characters have NO development.
Ralph Bakshi's direction is schizophrenic and confusing. Generally a good director (though not here or Cool World), he uses way too many tones. In one scene, he switchs the tone three times: happy, cheerful, dark, happy. He also has a hard-on for making an action scene dull and screwy: basically a mix of scary images, warped atmosphere, lifeless situations, and unintentional hilarity.
The animation is distracting. The rotoscoping is over-exposed and noticeable, the characters look as cheap as any Saturday Morning Cartoon character, and the colors are either horrifically bright, or smeared and drab.
The grating, out-of-place, and irritating music is so bad and overbearing that it's a miracle that my speakers didn't work. Awful. Simply awful.
The crappy editing is jumpy and shaky, and never calms the hell down. Look at the "17 Years Pass" scene (if you dare), some of the most dizzy and shoddy editing I've ever seen.
And there's the acting. The actors are great, but here they feel embarrassed and uncomfortable, making them look bad. But you can't blame them, with the look in their eyes, you can tell they knew they were in a pile of shite.Ralph Bakshi is generally gifted, but he has also directed two of one of the worst films ever. Ironic. 0/10.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2321&reviewer=328
originally posted: 12/26/02 11:51:23
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USA
02-Jul-1978 (PG)
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A
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