I just found this – and I’m posting it completely as is, I haven’t even read it all myself yet. I’m still trying to find time to watch all of the extended editions in one long 12 hour chunk (I’ve still not even seen the extended final film in the trilogy) so I’ll likely update this big time when that time comes. What this is, is my first review, from January 2002, long before I started writing reviews here, when Ambival.net was just my blog/brainfart chamber lol. I wrote the day before, “I went to see ‘Lord of the Rings’ this morning – I was pretty surprised, but also it wasn’t exactly my kind of movie.” First of all: not my kind of movie? Second of all: a movie, in the morning? So you can see how much I’ve changed in 10 years lol)

6th January 2002

I have to begin by saying that my expectations of this movie were ultimately non-existent. I heard word-of-mouth in spits and spats, mostly relating to the ‘annoyance’ of a cliff-hanger ending, of which I’ll write more later, and I saw the obligatory hype, and I chose my path in supporting the rival, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I should also begin with the pointless but popular comparison to that movie: the only, repeat only, similarity between the two being their adaptation from extremely popular novels.

The differences abound. For while Chris Columbus’ more mainstream family flick was an almost page-by-page visual transcript of JK Rowling’s novel, and firmly followed the classical hero’s journey, Peter Jackson’s Fellowship, and I’ll quickly admit I have no intention of ever trying to read Tolkien’s novels again, completely redefines the very term “hero”.

Several rings of power were created thousands of years before the story begins, distributed about Middle Earth, the world of the story. An evil presence created a counter-ring, a single ring that could enslave all. A battle destroyed the evil, but not the ring, and instead of being destroyed, the ring fell into the hands of man. The story follows Frodo and a gathered “fellowship” as they run from remaining dutiful evil forces and try to protect the ring from ever being used.

The classical hero’s journey has a single hero, who is offered a quest to save his people – he rejects the quest, meets a mentor who gives him powers, finally accepts the quest, the mentor leaves him, and he goes to confront the usually physical evil presence to retrieve the object of the quest. For the mentor, consider Yoda the ever-wise creature of the Star wars movie, or even Obi-Wan Kenobi, the equally-wise Jedi. We never doubted these characters. But almost instantly the moment Jackson introduces the wizard Gandalf (played brilliantly by Ian McKellen – and I don’t usually like his work), we are shown that he is just as weak as the other characters. The ultimate nemisis for our heroes (note the plural, for each and every member of the fellowship is displayed as an individual here) is not evil itself, not a physical presence, but man’s innate capacity for the evil within themselves – the ring as an evil catalyst. It is truly extraordinary for me to see such complicated characters in the kind of world usually home to archetypes – those who have read the novels, perhaps, might not be so surprised. But still I believe that this movie has redefined what it means to be a hero, and especially in these times (I hate to say it), boy do we need a movie like that.

The only thing wrong with the film, in fact, is the editing. It seems like someone lost faith in the cutting room and decided to make it a normal 2 hours, and then they previewed and decided it was marvellous, so a producer or other brainless wonder told the editors to pad it out with montages made from bits and pieces from piles A and B. I imagine the film’s rough cut was around 5 hours.. the finished product is neither too short nor too long, more just plain wrong. The ending – despite what you may have heard (and I heard plenty) – is not jarring, there is closure and resolution and emotional peaking as expected in any ‘epic’. But the editing is genuinely what I think they call ‘choppy’.

To grudgingly return to the Potter Comparison, I pick Potter. This film, while proving that Jackson is as frightening and unique directing event pictures as he was making video nasties in his back garden, seems somehow late and sticky-taped together – there’s a slew of production errors, and some pretty shoddy ADR work. But, and a huge but at that (“and no mistakin’”), it is a perfect construction – the effects are bigger and scarier than ever seen, the ring’s power is as fully conveyed as possible, and the themes are surprisingly disturbing (instead of having friends there as a failsafe fallback, Frodo has to earn and learn those – that – friend, and is even told early on “yes, you are alone,” a brutally honest statement rarely heard in the movies). As a complete trilogy, I’m convinced it will go down in cinema history and it deserves to; as I’m convinced that it deserves any of the Oscar nominations and wins I’m certain it will achieve; but, in the end, my reaction was still a solid, “coulda, shoulda, been better…”

The first I heard of this movie was that it was to be Isabelle Fuhrman’s followup project to Orphan, which in itself was enough to put it on my watch list of 2012. I had no idea of the books or their Twilight-level following – it was only as the release date approached that I became aware that this was how it was being set up. There’s every chance if I’d come to the title via that route I might’ve flat refused to see it, lol. Well thank god, I didn’t. As it was, it seemed to me to look a lot more like (as many, I know, have already said) The Running Man or Battle Royale than Twilight, and with a much more capable, compelling actress than Kristin Stewart in the lead – I was never going to be that easily dissuaded.

I was taking a risk seeing this in its first screening at the multiplex – a risk I’d long forgotten, usually going to smaller movies at graveyard times, till the noisy, chatty, snack munching, packet rustling, nuclear phone screen brigade came into the screening. It was astonishing to hear how fast this audience went silent as the film began. It seemed to surprise them with its directness, to grab them with its dreamlike (or rather, nightmarish) cinematography and subtle use of visual effects, just as quickly as it got me, and never let go.

I love dystopian visions like this. But they’re never so powerful as when they find their way into something that will actually be widely seen – by audiences who will react just like the audience I saw it with… people genuinely not expecting something so unsettling… people, perhaps, expecting Twilight. By that token, I found its scathing commentary on reality TV culture and its logical conclusion – even if it is, as some have written, not quite as pointed and thorough as we’ve seen elsewhere – all the more powerful than those movies mentioned at the start of this review. This isn’t a bargain bin 80s memory or Asian art house (not meaning to dismiss those movies, but that’s how they are seen at this level) – it’s apparently the movie Hollywood hopes will take up the Twilight mantle and keep the money rolling in. That it even suggests the ideas that it does had me walking out of the cinema simply wondering how it got made in this world. (It’s worth remembering that director Gary Ross made his debut with Pleasantville, another relatively large production that was startlingly provocative in its way).

I didn’t know till very recently (as I polished this review, in fact) that the violence had been cut a little to get a UK 12A certificate – this is something that actually prevented me from seeing The Woman in Black recently (I’d rather wait and see if there’s an “unrated” cut on the blu-ray, thank you). But thinking about it, this is almost exactly what the movie is about. If we come out of the movie wishing we’d seen more of the bloodshed, then we’re dangerously close to the monstrous people portrayed in the movie itself. As it is, the violence is so powerfully suggested that I barely thought about how little I actually saw.

Likewise, I’ve seen some criticism of how little we get to know of the other contenders in the games. Though I understand the book does this too, focussing almost exclusively on Katniss’ perspective, what this did for me in the movie was induce pure anger. The ruling classes of this world, dressed in garish pinks and purples, their very appearance flaunting injustice – the audience of the hunger games TV show – give no thought to the interior lives of these pawns either. When we do see the other kids, they too seem to have a strange detachment from the matter at hand – Isabelle Fuhrman’s vicious Clove displays outright glee as they descend to their (23:1 odds against) inevitable deaths. In another film I’d probably share the objection to the cold emotional detachment that’s rife here – but in this case I found the portrayal of desensitisation, the feeling of “this is just how things are and there’s no use trying to change it” as terrifying and unexpected as it was an upsettingly believable speculation on where we’re headed.

When I fawn over a movie as popular as this I start to feel a little dirty at this stage of the review and scrape around for something negative to say. I will say that the movie could maybe lose 10 or 20 minutes somewhere at the end of the second act/beginning of the third act. When the control room brings the sun down prematurely Truman Show -style, Jennifer Lawrence even says something along the lines of “They can’t wait to end it,” by way of explanation. The CGI dogs in the finale kind of do a disservice to the wonderfully subtle (if slightly cheap-looking in longer shots) effects of the first hour, and some of the “shaky cam” of that dreamlike cinematography I mentioned sometimes had me a little worried, effective though it ultimately is at suggesting the extent of the violence.

One of the movie’s most powerful lines is spoken by Donald Sutherland explaining why they bother having a survivor in this show. “Hope is stronger than fear,” he says. A cynical voice inside me whispers that arguably this is exactly the kind of hope a movie like this delivers. We come out of the movie enraged and inspired but we’re probably still not going to do anything about it. Also, Roger Ebert burst my bubble of excitement a little by writing that as a parable, everybody sees what they want in the movie – mentioning the fact that some Tea Party folks in America relate to the kids… These are points I have no answer to but felt I should also slip in here somewhere. I think in the end my optimism reigns – the fact that so many will see this movie means simply by the law of averages that many young people will see what I saw, and perhaps one of them will do something about it. I don’t know.

There is also the hint of the beginning of a Twilight-y love triangle towards the end and I’ve already seen hashtags like #teampeeta and #teamgale on Twitter but, y’know what? I’m as surprised by how little this bugs me as I was that those initial Twilight comparisons didn’t put me off going to see it in the first place. I’ve put all 3 books on my iPad/iPhone and intend to read them at the soonest opportunity. I can’t wait to the next movie to see where this goes, and I look forward to reading the original book from whence it came.

As mentioned previously, I was kind of out of the habit of reviewing anything except things about which I had a lot to say last year, and the Star Wars movies were no exception despite my working through the new blu-ray set, extras and all. It’s not like I didn’t have anything to say about them, either, particularly the prequels. I know them well, I watch them frequently – and I’m likely to watch them even more frequently in the next few years as each hits the big screen again in 3D (it’s one of those series I always have to watch in its entirety even if I really just want to watch one part – more on that in a sec).

So the occasion here is the first of these post-converted 3D re-releases. Some were angry that George Lucas wished to tinker with these movies yet again at all; some were angry that he chose to start with the “inferior” prequels; some just don’t like 3D at all. I have to admit, I’ve been slow to come around to the new 3D stuff in general. I’ve written often of my love for Mark Kermode’s weekly film show/podcast on BBC Radio 5 Live and respect his opinions on the matter greatly, at the same time as spending (just looking at last year) a good quarter-to-a-third of my time in the cinema wearing those silly glasses. There are some things I just want to see in 3D. Even if it’s just so I can be allowed a valid opinion on how it looks (especially where post-conversion, as here, is concerned).

Since I’d already watched the whole Star Wars saga mere months ago, I wasn’t sure how bothered I’d be to see this one – which, however you look at it, is easily the worst in the series (this doesn’t mean I don’t still like it) – again. But when I saw the trailer before A Monster in Paris on Monday, I knew I had to. The 3D, simply put, looked fantastic, and it even looked like they may have tweaked the visual effects even more than the blu-ray release (the final battle on Naboo here has always bugged me – looking as it does like an unfinished animatic taking place literally on a Windows XP desktop).

At the time of this writing, my opinion on the whole Star Was saga is thus: it is one long story, the best and worst parts of which are scattered throughout. The prequels as a whole were not necessary, sure; the original trilogy stands alone perfectly fine, just as the very first movie (sans “Episode IV” title) stood fairly well alone. HOWEVER… The last hour of Revenge of the Sith – and I realise this will upset some people – is for me as powerful as anything in much grander cinematic sagas – I’ll even invoke The Godfather – and places it far and away as the best film in the whole series. Everything in Revenge of the Sith after Anakin kills Mace Windu makes everything else in the prequels absolutely essential, and makes even the original trilogy, if I’m honest, a little pale to my eyes.

The Phantom Menace is a necessary beginning to all this. It’s overly verbose politically, relatively humourless, and yes – even here, surely the best it will ever look – some of the effects look frankly unfinished (that last battle? I guess it’s just the total absence of human figures… I just don’t know…). But it’s worth it, if for nothing else, for the two key set pieces: the pod race (simply stunning in 3D) and the “Duel of the Fates” (the three way – four way, if you count Darth Maul’s double ender? – light sabre duel between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and Maul). For me personally, I’d add Padme/Amidala’s wardrobe – some of the most beautiful dresses I’ve ever seen in movies. I’d even add fragments of Jar-Jar which honestly do make me laugh – his whole Buster Keaton act in the final battle on Naboo is fantastic fun. And then there are the few fragments of story that resonate later on in the series (just one, for example, I noticed this time around, Anakin’s telling Padme “I can fix anything,” echoed later in Attack of the Clones after his mother’s murder) making the best of what’s to come just that bit better.

Is the 3D necessary here? No more necessary than it has been in any 3D movie I’ve ever seen. I will say that, as with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II (eep, I really ought to review that soon I guess!), I was more than impressed by the post-conversion… I don’t know how they do it but the technology is certainly getting better. Most of all, provided your eyes can physically “do” 3D, it’s a great excuse for seeing what I find to be at the least an interesting movie again on the big screen looking fresh as the day it was made.

I find it so easy to look past this movie’s flaws because some people simply get so laughably venomous in regurgitating them and being blind to the many good things in it. At one stage Qui-Gon tells Anakin, like the Neil Diamond song, “Feel: don’t think.” And while The Phantom Menace might not have the emotional weight it aspires to, I’m convinced if the audience is just as empty as they think the movie is, they’re only adding to the problem.

Older review: October 10th, 2006:

This one always surprises me by being so perfectly watchable as it is – moreso, in fact, each time I sit down to it. It’s true that it has its flaws – slightly flaky visual effects, acting at its lowest ebb for the series (and, considering the series, that’s pretty damn bad), and a general absence of energy, spark, je ne sais quoi … and, of course, Jar Jar. But I’m of the opinion that the whole Star Wars series has just as many, similar flaws, that it’s real value in cinema comes mostly from the combo of the powerful story and John Williams’ score, both of which are present enough here. I really view all six movies as one work, and the more I watch it, the more I see that this sixth is just as valid as the rest.

Star Wars: Episode II | Episode III