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The most amazing thing about this movie is that there's an even longer version due for release on DVD in November - WHY?! It's such a slow and dreary effort already that after two nights'
viewing I still haven't gotten to the end. It's no doubt stuffed with irrelevances that make it faithful to the books, but to a non-aficionado like me it's just a string of encounters with unconvincing monsters in
equally unconvincing surroundings, punctuated by swoopy aerial shots of what I assume are the much-heralded New Zealand locations. With no plot to speak of, I guess it's supposed to be a sort of medieval 'Star Wars'
extravaganza but instead it's just dull, pretentious and really not that extravagant. What is particularly annoying is the way the story (such as it is) seems to rest on the conflicts and alliances between races, and
yet we have to tell them apart by slight differences in the shapes of their ears or the fact that they look shorter in long shots. Empire magazine called this 'the best fantasy epic in motion picture history',
although I don't recall many other 'fantasy epics' to compare it with. My guess is that somebody screwed up at the printers, and somewhere a bunch of people are scratching their heads over a review describing 'Attack of
The Clones' as 'a three-hour Enya video'... |
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