My Thoughts On The Lord Of The Rings Movies
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
196.58806
Summary
The Lord of the Rings is one of the longest movies in the series, at over three hours long. Can they cut it down to less than that? And why the heck is it so long? Matt and Matt debate this and much more.
Transcript
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Matt, I agree with you that The Brutalist is slow and way too long.
00:00:06.300
However, each Lord of the Rings movie is three and a half hours long or longer,
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But I'll concede that no other movie has any right to be that long.
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A lot of comments about this, too, saying, you know, I said no movie should be three and a half hours long
00:00:28.160
And a few attempts to come up with exceptions to the rule,
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and Lord of the Rings was mentioned by several people.
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Sorry, not only is Lord of the Rings not an exception,
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but it's actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
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Okay, so let's just take Return of the King, which I think was the longest one of all three movies.
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But the theatrical release of Return of the King was about three and a half hours,
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And then there are all these extended cuts that are four and a half hours long,
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If I pick up the Blu-ray, not that I watch Blu-ray anymore,
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but if it says four and a half hours long, I'm offended by that.
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That you would put that on the shelf for anyone to watch.
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So, but no, let's just take three and a half hours.
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You could have cut at least 45 minutes out of that movie.
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And if you cut 45 minutes, it's still a movie that's two hours and 45 minutes long.
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Can you just cut it down from epic marathon length to very long?
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I mean, the movie really ends with Frodo and Sam.
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They're stranded on the rock and the lava's all around.
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And as many people, so many people, of course, have pointed out, and it is true, it's a major plot hole,
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that, well, why didn't they just ride the bird to Mordor?
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If they just hopped on the bird, go drop the ring off in the volcano or whatever, and they'd be fine.
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So the bird picks them up, and they're flying away on the bird into the sunset.
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You know, last shot, you've got the, they're flying away from, you've got the lava and everything,
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But then you see them on the bird, and they're going off into the distance,
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and you see it's green, and green pastures ahead.
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And it kind of, it tells you everything you need to know.
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We don't need to then see, oh, now he's laying in bed,
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and he's meeting, and he sees his friends again, and he's happy,
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We get, like, five scenes after the end of people congratulating Frodo.
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And it's even more grating, because Frodo didn't even do a good job in the first place.
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and then he tried to turn back at the last moment and not even do the job.
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And it only happened because Gollum tackled him.
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So by accident, he actually completed the journey.
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And then we got to go through 45 minutes of just watching people kiss this guy's ass.
00:03:39.280
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00:03:42.140
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00:03:45.060
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00:03:47.700
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00:03:51.500
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00:03:54.720
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00:04:00.500
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00:04:05.560
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00:04:11.420
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00:04:22.240
And you could have cut the whole subplot of the ghost soldiers, or whatever it was,
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where Aragorn goes and recruits these ghost soldiers, right,
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And you could have cut the whole thing with the ghost soldiers,
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and that would have saved you 40 minutes or so, probably.
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which is that the ghost soldiers show up halfway through the battle.
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You know, we get this great battle scene, and then the ghost soldiers show up,
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They're like swarming army ants, and they easily kill everybody.
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They kill all the bad guys, and the battle's over.
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And they're able to easily kill everyone because they're already dead.
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They're these corporeal creatures that can't be harmed, can't be killed.
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So why didn't you just get the ghost soldiers from the beginning?
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You could have had the ghost soldiers fight every battle through all three movies.
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oh, you've proven yourself in battle, ghost soldiers.
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It required no courage for them to fight that battle.
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They were already dead, and they're hanging out in a cave somewhere for eternity.
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They're bored to death, literally, hanging out in a cave underground.
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You let them come up to the surface and fight a battle where they can't lose,
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And now that the curse is lifted, they just disappear into nothingness.
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So anyway, now I have complained about Lord of the Rings,
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and it has taken as long for me to complain about it as the movie is also.
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May I watch all the extras on the extended version?
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But which is the best film franchise of these three?