“This is my ACTING helmet.”
In keeping with Peter Jackson’s style of pacing, I briefly considered using the first thousand words of this review to describe just my journey from the box office counter to the concession stand. Sure, we wouldn’t get to the climactic culmination of our stated quest for another two or three reviews, but, so many fascinating things happened along way there! Me fixating on the ticket taker’s weird mole, fights over whether my compatriots and I should buy nachos or whoppers, debates over popcorn butter, conflict over who should be allowed to sit in our section… What seemed at first to any rational person like only a tiny hint at a complete story could, the more I thought about it, scrutinizing every asinine detail, surely become a tale all its own! HUZZAH! I SHALL NOW SING A 10-MINUTE SONG ABOUT MY QUEST, ACCOMPANIED BY THE PAN FLUTE!
O’er to the sneeze guard I didst go, yonder through the Starburst candies ‘neath flecked glass belooooowwww…
Phew! That was hard. And tedious. Luckily for you, reader, I am no Peter Jackson. I lack that level of dedication.
Okay, so I understood going in that was to be the first of three separate, nearly three-hour movies covering Tolkien’s shortest middle Earth book, and maybe that shouldn’t be the first complaint. Hell, I even liked that book. But it’s impossible to overstate how swindled you feel coming out of a movie where the characters spend hours talking about a climactic battle at a place they don’t even get halfway to. Think Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday Walk One Third of the Way to the OK Corral: A Very Peter Jackson Western (featuring a carefully-shot, 90-minute scene of Doc trying to mount his horse). I’m convinced Peter Jackson’s version of Chekhov’s Gun would hold that if you show a loaded gun onstage in the first act, someone better have gone on a side quest to buy an ornate holster for it at the end of three hours. What I’m saying is, there are ways to tell a story episodically (see: almost any cable show). The way not to do it is to constantly remind the audience of where the final ending will be and then not produce. If beer doesn’t show up until the second movie, don’t spend half the first giving us bottle openers, cozies, beer menus, steins, etc. F*CK, MAN, WHERE’S THE BEER?! OH THERE IT IS, OFF IN THE DISTANCE!
