Digressing here, the LotR films are incredible achievements in film making and incredibly enjoyable but for my liking there were too many unnecessary changes from the original source material, mostly in terms of plot. Gimli is a wonderful character in the books, in the films he is turned into Jar Jar Binks. I also couldn't stand the whole Elves being constantly surrounded by backlight and talking in slow motion, it felt very contrived.
I never really liked the films much. Actually that's not true, I think they're fine fantasy films, but for me they were about as wide of the mark as one can get when it came to capturing what was for me the overall "feel" of LotR. In part I guess it's two rather polarised subjective takes on it, but it didn't help that Jackson was rather overly liberal with "re-imagining" or just ignoring huge swathes of stuff. That and the seemingly excessive amount of
epiiiiiiiic!!! and that he managed to put most of the focus on the parts of the books I skimmed and completely ignored the bits I enjoyed. I suppose it was very much "Peter Jackson's LotR" in that it's a significantly different vision and one that feels rather appropriated. I mean Middle Earth isn't in NZ, it's here. And here features more mud than appeared in the films.
Yeah I know, "it wasn't as good as the book!" said nobody ever who read the book any given film was based on.
I've spent so long shaking my fist at nobody in particular I've now completely forgotten what my actual point was. Oh well, it's time for me to go to bed anyway.
