Sunday, February 20, 2011

The Lord of the Rings (NaBloPoMo #19)

Last night I finished watching the final movie in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Wow... I have not read the novel by Tolkien, so I've no idea how closely the movie stayed true to the book, I'm understanding as the "making of" is playing in the background now, that they did have to leave certain characters untold and had to transfer some lines between the characters. I wonder how novel fans feel about the movie...?

While watching, I was affected and constantly challenged by the themes that ran through the movie. For that, I appreciated the story. Multilayered and complex, intoxicatingly unique yet universal, it was great story-telling.

Certain scenes really did get to me... at the very end, I could not help it, I tried to control the sobs, but some broke through. Sterling held me from behind to comfort. It was amusing, naturally, but there was an aching sense of feeling all too real. A true sign of having fallen in love with the characters and somehow coming to have a stake in the outcome of the story. Certainly became emotionally invested... Definitely a phenomenal narrative.

I am looking forward to reading the book soon.

When I was at UC Irvine, I was a Resident Advisor for a year and a quarter. The first year, I was at Mesa Court, but the second year, I was assigned to the Middle Earth complex. There, all of the buildings and actual residential halls are named for places and objects (buildings, etc.) in the book. I had been assigned to Isengard. If I was familiar with the book, I'm not sure how I would have felt about that! (For those not familiar, Isengard if one of two evil towers in Middle Earth. It did not start out evil, but turns so.) What is strange enough is that through circumstance, I ended up leaving Middle Earth after just one quarter. (Long story!) Leaving Isengard may make sense now...!

What spurred the watching of the three films was that Sterling thought I should see it. The reasons for that were for the themes, of course, which are powerful, but also unexpectedly, he told me that some of the visual scenes and characterizations of less-than-savory entities were actually quite "accurate." He told me that the images from the film are quite close to the spiritual world that most of us cannot see nor ever experience.

Sterling is a spiritual warrior, something I will understand better as our union continues and strengthens.

1 comment:

  1. It doesn't matter if I read the book first or watch the movie first, I always prefer the book to the movie. However, in the case of "The Lord of the Rings", I prefer the movies. I have seen the extended footage and behind the scenes. I understand why they made the changes they did. The books were just not as exciting as the films to me. The movies were very powerful that I became a geek and visited several of the filmming areas in New Zealand.

    ReplyDelete