Don’t ever let me hear anyone criticising Peter Jackson’s films again.
That is all.
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Doctor Who, Series 5
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I assume you do know what it’s supposed to be?
As a kid, I loved these films; have not rewatched in oh, 20 years or more :) One of them made me hide behind a couch when I was little.
Well, it looks *just* like Tolkien’s descriptions of a Balrog, note-perfect in all respects and a thoroughly superb example of the animator’s art. There’s just one tiny little mistake.
Balrogs don’t have wings.
Watching this film recently, it is hard to grasp that this film totally blew me away as a kid. I had never watched anything like it before in my short little life. It captured my imagination, even though I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening in the film. So when I got home I was delighted to find three big hardback books making up the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don’t think I had ever read a “grown up” book before, but I was determined to make sense of what I had seen that night. My inner world had been captivated and expanded. That night I was initiated into the world of Tolkien, sci-fi and fantasy and grown up literature in general. And that’s what contemporary kids fed on CGI can lose out on – having their imaginations enriched by being made to work hard to make sense of a story. I pity kids (& adults) who read LoTR post-Jackson because their imaginations have been crippled in the way a butterfly is ruined if you open the cocoon for them. (Though I admit you can ruin a butterfly by sticking its wings on a humanoid lion!)
It is not so easy to say if they have wings or not; as Wiki sums up nicely:
His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings.
… suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall …
So.. figurative or actual, hard to say..
Hobbit. Rankin and Bass. Jus’ sayin.
The movie, overall, doesn’t hold up. It was all we had for a long time though. And it does have it’s moments. (The Balrog obviously wasn’t one of them.)
A blast from the past. I vaguely remembering see this dud on a very cold winter night in Edmonton back in the 1970′s. It left me with the sense that there would never be a “decent” film version of the Lord of the Rings. Jackson proved me wrong. His version is decent but it is still a far cry from the books.
Peter Jackson’s work, be it Kong or LOTR, has a tendency to put me straight to sleep.