DVD Reviews

The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy - Blu-ray Review

By Frankie Dees Apr 5, 2010, 18:15 GMT

Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Based on J.R.R. Tolkien\'s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is an epic adventure of good against evil, the power of friendship and individual courage. The saga centers around an unassuming Hobbit named Frodo Baggins who inherits a Ring that would give a dark and powerful lord the power to enslave the world. With a loyal ...more

So let’s go ahead and address the cave troll in the room -- yes, after years of waiting for the ‘Lord of the Rings’ pics to arrive on Blu-ray, we get….the theatrical versions only with no new extras. By the foul feet of the orcs, what were they thinking?!

Well, we know what they were thinking. It’s an obvious bid to get all the fans to buy the trilogy twice. That being said, for all those people up in arms about the decision - is it really that surprising?

Or even disappointing? We know Guillermo Del Toro is hard at work on ‘The Hobbit’ and that it would only make good business sense to hold off the be all end all mega Blu-ray set until closer to that film’s release. 

So maybe we should just regard this appropriately-priced theatrical BD set as a teaser – something to hold the fans off for a couple years. After all, the films in this set are the exact pics people fell in love with in theaters, the latter of which took home Best Picture. I may be splitting hairs here, but did the extended edition of ‘The Return of the King’ win Best Picture? Nope. 

Okay, so I made my admittedly lacking case for justifying this theatrical cut only release. Now for the good news that isn’t highly subjective.

Despite a slightly softer image on ‘Fellowship of the Ring’, the films look and sound absolutely fantastic on Blu-ray which should be the most important part of this release, yes? But I’m jumping ahead. If you’re just interested in what the pics look and sound like in high-def and what extras are included, skip down nine paragraphs.

Still here, huh? That means you must have been living under a rock this past decade if you’re actually curious about the story or a critical reception.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of these films - which doesn’t mean that I don’t think their worthy of all the critical and geeky kudos but more that parts of the adaptation are just a tad bit stale for me personally.

Jackson did his best to beef up Tolkien’s written word with elongated action sequences – an example is The Helm’s Deep battle sequence that in the book is what, a couple paragraphs?

But there’s no denying what an achievement this was for Peter Jackson who, up to this massive undertaking, was mostly known for dementedly over-the-top low-budget splatter horror pics like ‘Dead-Alive’ and whose previous film was the box office bomb ‘The Frighteners’.

What exactly could Jackson have said in that New Line conference room so many years ago to convince them to hand over hundreds of millions of dollars and make one of the biggest gambles in motion picture history?

Well, we all know how it turned out and it immediately shot Jackson to the super-director’s list right alongside Spielberg and Cameron. And also started and rejuvenated half a dozen careers - most notably Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom.

So instead of providing a ho-hum synopsis of the films which I doubt anyone needs or wants, I’ll just quickly hit upon my personal high and low points of the pics.

For ‘Fellowship of the Ring,’ Jackson immediately falls into a tone that perfectly captures the gravity of what’s at stake in this fictional universe but isn’t afraid to balance it out with a light charm and humor. 

It also shows that Jackson was at apt attention during auditions as everybody from Elijah Wood to Ian McKellan is perfectly cast. And key was that Jackson wasn’t afraid to apparently second-guess his own instincts as Viggo Mortensen famously replaced Stuart Townsend when Townsend didn’t prove to be substantial enough.

It is no doubt the best recasting since Michael J. Fox replaced Eric Stoltz in ‘Back to the Future’. 

So the first film established the world and characters with Jackson using his homeland New Zealand to make a beautiful surrogate for Middle Earth. Standouts in this first pic include Ian Holm as Bilbo (a particularly important character in the film now that Del Toro will need to keep continuity) and the passage through the Mines of Moria where the first big action sequence plays out against a cave troll and Gandalf makes a stand against the demonic Balrog in what might be the best isolated fifteen seconds in all three films. 

I might be typing sacrilege here but this first pic is just too long for the version of the story Jackson wants to tell - i.e. making it commercially friendly with long battle scenes but losing a few integral parts of the book like Tom Bombadil.

So I guess it’s not so much the length that bothers me, but that Jackson did it at the expense of action over storytelling. 

And I might tend to think the same thing with ‘The Two Towers’ except that the action is so damn well-handled that only a stuffy churl would complain. This is along with the fact that middle sections are famous for being heavy on the action anyway as they don’t have the initial curiosity of starting the adventure or the last rush of the finale.

Both the siege on Helm’s Deep and Gollum as a character are amazingly set-up creations with Gollum getting a tip of the hat by James Cameron himself for making him realize that the technology to make believable CGI characters is now a reality.

I also love the Ents attack on Saruman so even if you could make some mild complaints about the hobbits being pushed to secondary characters and frankly not much narrative progression being made, who cares?

And so we arrive at the Best Picture winner, ‘The Return of the King’, which finally sees the forces of good vanquish the forces of evil in a grand feat of epic filmmaking that deserves no less than three separate endings. 

Despite the action being a bit more redundant here following the more enthralling battles of ‘The Two Towers’, it excels in returning back to the more intimate details of the quest and finalizing the tale on an appropriately beautiful note.

If the multiple endings still grate a bit, I have to concede that it’s only fitting that a nine-plus hour trek deserves a more drawn-out conclusion. 

For their Blu-ray debut, the pics get 2.40:1 VC-1 1080p encodes that peculiarly get better as the films progress.

For ‘Fellowship of the Ring’, the image is a bit softer than the others but certain scenes will still drop the jaws like the first sequences in the shire that will make you want to dig a hole and move in. There is a little light grain but nothing terribly distracting.

‘The Two Towers’ improves immeasurably from the DVD with the once murky scenes of Helm’s Deep now becoming fully realized and detailed. Had the effects not held up, this might have been a concern, but I only remember a couple of sore CGI spots out of the entire trilogy that seem dated. Impressive indeed for a trilogy nearing it’s tenth birthday. 

The DTS-HD Master Aud tracks are as rousing as the action and as pumping or eloquent as you could hope for. The nine-disc set includes the three films on Blu-ray with the only HD extras being the teaser/trailer assortment on the respective discs.

Three other discs are digital copies of each film with the final three discs being standard def DVDs which are essentially straight ports of the original bonus discs of the underwhelming two-disc DVD sets back in the day. 
 
The ‘Fellowship of the Ring’ bonus disc includes ‘Welcome to Middle-earth: Houghton Mifflin In-Store Special’, a fifteen-minute featurette on the novel’s publisher. A 20-minute Fox promo ‘Quest for the Ring’ is next and is mostly fluff.

Better is the 40-minute A Passage to Middle Earth’ and then we get fifteen or so quickie featurettes from website lordoftherings.net. TV Spots, a, ahem, preview of the extended edition DVD, and a music video round things out. 

For ‘The Towers’, we get ‘On the Set of The Lord of the Rings’, a quick Starz TV special, the 45-minute ‘Return to Middle-earth’, a WB special where get to hear from the stars of the film.

Sean Astin shows us his ‘The Long and Short of It, a seven-minute short film that he directed along with a making-of. Eight lordoftherings.net featurettes and the requisite extended edition DVD preview and music video end it. 

‘Return of the King’ gets ‘The Quest Fulfilled: A Director’ Vision’ a 23-minue making-of with cast and crew interviews, ‘A Filmmakers Journey: Making The Lord of the Rings’ and the meatier National Geographic’s ‘Behind the Movie: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ which runs 45-minutes.

Six featurettes from lordoftherings.net along with TV spots and the extended edition DVD preview finish off the been there done that extras. 

Only the digital copies and previews for some upcoming videogames are new. It’s a little surprising that New Line/WB didn’t come up with a couple new things. I mean, I know they are waiting to throw all the new bells and whistles on the presumably coming extended edition Blu-ray set but they couldn’t have found a key grip or caterer or somebody to throw a new commentary in there? 

This will be quite the decision for a lot of you out there – wait what might be two years or more for the extended editions on Blu-ray out of what will mostly be for spite or bite the bullet and go ahead and pick up this streamlined edition?

I say if the most important thing to you is to have the films in high-def then don’t’ hesitate. If you were a huge fan of the extended editions and imagine that every time you sit down to watch these ‘short’ versions, you’ll get annoyed, then pass. It’s probably not worth it. The extras are certainly a disappointment but the pics look and sound great so…tough call. 

Visit the DVD database for more information. The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy is also available On Demand and for download at http://bit.ly/WB_TheLordOfTheRings.

Editor’s note: Lord of the Rings images in this review are not from Blu-ray release.