Why LOTR Sucks: A Note About Pacing

We’re now some two and half hours into the movie, so let’s take a moment to look at the overall structure.

So far, we’ve had two big action scenes, the chase scene with the Black Riders and the Mines of Moria. We’ll have one more big action scene at the end. So that’s three large-scale, action-packed episodes. That’s about right if your movie is an hour and forty-five minutes. This movie is over three hours long though.

Each of the action scenes so far can actually be subdivided. With the Black Riders, you actually have four parts. The initial encounter and the escape across the ferry. The near miss at Bree. The fight on top of the mountain. And the final escape across the river. Most of this action was poorly planned out, repetitive (black riders on black horses galloping here and galloping there), hackneyed, and lacking in tension. Over all, the first big action sequence was a big failure. Prior to that you had a long, slow introduction that included a completely unnecessary seven minute opening montage. Afterwards, you had the council of Elrond that repeated much of the information from the opening scene. You also had some nice montages of New Zealand scenery.

Then we finally get to Moria, which for the most part is awesome. It can also be sub-divided, this time into three parts. Their entrance, the fight against the cave troll, and their escape. All together, this part lasts about 30 minutes.

So far, we’ve had an introduction, a long drawn out encounter with the black riders that totally sucked and was boring, a boring council meeting, some boring travel, 30 minutes of kick ass action, and now we return to some boring conversation with some ugly elves.

This movie is horribly paced. I blame Peter Jackson.

BTW, we had two more close-ups of Boromir crying.

Minutes Watched: 2:37.27

Number of Montages: 5

Number of slow motion close-ups of people crying: 21

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