Bah! It still only counts as one!
I finally went and saw it last night.
*sniff*
Absolutely wonderful.
Update: Vaguely spoilerish commentary added 12/30/03.
As you might have inferred from the title, my favorite action scene is where Elf-boy Legolas single-handedly takes down an Oliphant. Haven't seen the movies? Well, then, an Oliphant is sort of like an elephant, only bigger, badder, and pissed the fuck off. In the massive battle of Minas Tirith, the army of Sauron includes not only trolls, siege engines, and about a Godzillion orcs, but also a few dozen oliphants, each carrying a howdah full of excessively-tattooed mercenaries who haven't had much to do since the last Mad Max flick.
Seeing these beasts tromping across the battlefield reminded me of another cinematic battle: the assault on Hoth in The Empire Strieks Back. I remember some "making of" piece where the Industrial Light and Magic guys talked about modeling the movement of the AT-ATs after elephants. Of course, there's the scene where whiny midichlorian-infested farmboy Luke takes down one of these walking tanks all on his lonesum after his snowspeeder crashes. Obviously, Rings director Peter Jackson has seen this scene too, because he wiped the floor with it.
Back on Middle Earth, the oliphants are pretty much wrecking anything in their path; all of a sudden, Legolas jumps into action. He leaps up, starts free-climbing the oliphant, shoots mercs with his bow before they can shoot him (while hanging onto the damn oliphant, mind you), cuts loose the howdah and its crew, jumps up on top of the beast, and fires three arrows at once into the back of its head. And then slides down the trunk of the dying beast, finishing with a flying dismount. When the extended edition of the RotK DVDs comes out next year, I'm going to be watching this scene repeatedly.
No doubt remains: George Lucas may have been an inpiration, but now he has been 0wnZ0r3D.
Oh come on, you can do better than that! I mean, isn't it a weblogger law that if you see an LoTR movie you MUST post a review/reaction? And you MUST detail at what point you had to get up for the bathroom??
You could lose your membership over this ;>
Bathroom? I went to the bathroom before the movie, thankyouverymuch. Geeks these days have no discipline.
If it makes you happy, I'm considering expanding this entry by comparing Elf-boy's single-handed assault on the Oliphant with Luke's attack on the AT-AT in Empire.
Hmm, compare and contrast...works for me.
I went before the movie, too. Fat lot of good it did me. I was so tense through the whole frickin' movie (I mean VIBRATINGLY tense) that within 2 hours I was hopeless. The funny thing was catching movements in the corner of my eyes as almost everyone else in the theatre chose their moment...
Glad to see someone else noticed the oliphaunt/AT-AT similarity. I thought a good few of the shots of the rohirrim riding between their legs were straight from the frozen plains of Hoth. Maybe if the empire had added some tusks they might have rounded up ALL those pesky rebels and saved themselves some trouble.
I had a catheter fitted for the duration of the film.