The Matt Walsh Show - March 08, 2025


My Thoughts On The Lord Of The Rings Movies


Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

196.58806

Word count

1,306

Sentence count

106

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 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,
00:00:10.000 and that's more than justified.
00:00:13.960 But I'll concede that no other movie has any right to be that long.
00:00:22.540 A lot of comments about this, too, saying, you know, I said no movie should be three and a half hours long
00:00:26.200 like The Brutalist, that awful movie, was.
00:00:28.160 And a few attempts to come up with exceptions to the rule,
00:00:33.100 and Lord of the Rings was mentioned by several people.
00:00:35.720 Sorry, not only is Lord of the Rings not an exception,
00:00:38.660 but it's actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
00:00:42.000 And you know what this dwarf says to that? 0.78
00:00:48.660 Okay, so let's just take Return of the King, which I think was the longest one of all three movies.
00:00:53.540 And I like those movies, by the way.
00:00:54.980 But the theatrical release of Return of the King was about three and a half hours,
00:00:59.520 so it's about what The Brutalist is.
00:01:00.820 And then there are all these extended cuts that are four and a half hours long,
00:01:04.440 which is just obscene.
00:01:06.160 That's offensive.
00:01:07.600 I'm offended.
00:01:08.280 If I pick up the Blu-ray, not that I watch Blu-ray anymore,
00:01:10.640 but if it says four and a half hours long, I'm offended by that.
00:01:13.640 That's so insanely long.
00:01:15.800 How would you...
00:01:16.220 That you would dare even sell that.
00:01:18.560 That you would put that on the shelf for anyone to watch.
00:01:20.860 Four and a half hours?
00:01:22.520 So, but no, let's just take three and a half hours.
00:01:24.880 That was way too long.
00:01:27.260 Okay?
00:01:28.120 That...
00:01:28.720 You could have cut Return of the King.
00:01:30.900 You could have cut at least 45 minutes out of that movie.
00:01:35.500 At least 45 minutes.
00:01:37.000 And it would have been a better movie.
00:01:38.700 And if you cut 45 minutes, it's still a movie that's two hours and 45 minutes long.
00:01:43.140 It's still a long movie.
00:01:45.000 Can you just cut it down from epic marathon length to very long?
00:01:50.880 Can we just make that...
00:01:52.420 It would be a better movie.
00:01:53.580 I hate you.
00:01:55.180 Why would you be without me?
00:01:57.500 Quite infamously, the movie has three endings.
00:01:59.720 Let's start with that.
00:02:00.820 Okay, pick one ending.
00:02:01.800 I mean, the movie really ends with Frodo and Sam.
00:02:05.640 They're stranded on the rock and the lava's all around.
00:02:07.980 And then the bird comes and picks them up.
00:02:09.520 And as many people, so many people, of course, have pointed out, and it is true, it's a major plot hole,
00:02:14.440 that, well, why didn't they just ride the bird to Mordor?
00:02:16.600 I get this same question.
00:02:18.860 Why didn't they just fly the eagles to Mordor?
00:02:23.060 You know, shut up.
00:02:25.020 It could have been 30 minutes total.
00:02:26.820 If they just hopped on the bird, go drop the ring off in the volcano or whatever, and they'd be fine.
00:02:32.180 But fine.
00:02:34.280 So the bird picks them up, and they're flying away on the bird into the sunset.
00:02:38.860 You know, last shot, you've got the, they're flying away from, you've got the lava and everything,
00:02:44.460 and Mordor's collapsing.
00:02:45.760 But then you see them on the bird, and they're going off into the distance,
00:02:48.460 and you see it's green, and green pastures ahead.
00:02:51.540 And it's a great closing shot.
00:02:53.900 And it kind of, it tells you everything you need to know.
00:02:56.360 We don't need to then see, oh, now he's laying in bed,
00:03:00.100 and he's meeting, and he sees his friends again, and he's happy,
00:03:02.660 and he's jumping on the bed and hugging them.
00:03:04.540 God, die. 0.97
00:03:05.740 We get, like, five scenes after the end of people congratulating Frodo.
00:03:13.800 Which, again, we get it.
00:03:15.260 And it's even more grating, because Frodo didn't even do a good job in the first place.
00:03:20.580 He whined like a baby the entire time,
00:03:23.780 and then he tried to turn back at the last moment and not even do the job.
00:03:27.660 And it only happened because Gollum tackled him.
00:03:29.720 So by accident, he actually completed the journey.
00:03:32.960 And then we got to go through 45 minutes of just watching people kiss this guy's ass.
00:03:36.620 It was a little bit, it's a little much.
00:03:38.300 It's a little much.
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00:04:22.240 And you could have cut the whole subplot of the ghost soldiers, or whatever it was,
00:04:28.520 where Aragorn goes and recruits these ghost soldiers, right,
00:04:32.600 to go and fight the big battle at the end.
00:04:34.880 And you could have cut the whole thing with the ghost soldiers,
00:04:37.940 and that would have saved you 40 minutes or so, probably.
00:04:41.020 And then you lose this massive plot hole,
00:04:45.100 which is that the ghost soldiers show up halfway through the battle.
00:04:49.380 I don't know why they're late.
00:04:50.220 And then they just go, it's pretty lame.
00:04:52.640 You know, we get this great battle scene, and then the ghost soldiers show up,
00:04:55.280 and they just go through.
00:04:56.380 They're like swarming army ants, and they easily kill everybody.
00:05:00.360 They kill all the bad guys, and the battle's over.
00:05:02.180 And they're able to easily kill everyone because they're already dead.
00:05:05.620 They're invincible, right?
00:05:07.020 They're these corporeal creatures that can't be harmed, can't be killed.
00:05:11.780 There's no stakes for them in the battle.
00:05:13.460 They got literally nothing to lose.
00:05:14.620 They're already dead.
00:05:16.840 So why didn't you just get the ghost soldiers from the beginning?
00:05:20.180 Release us.
00:05:21.560 Badadir.
00:05:23.280 Very handy in a tight spot, these lads.
00:05:25.520 Despite the fact they're dead.
00:05:26.760 You could have had the ghost soldiers fight every battle through all three movies.
00:05:30.700 They would have easily won.
00:05:31.960 Again, the movie's over in an hour.
00:05:33.700 And then at the end of that, Aragorn is like,
00:05:36.540 oh, you've proven yourself in battle, ghost soldiers.
00:05:39.300 Be free now.
00:05:40.680 How do they prove themselves?
00:05:41.960 It required no courage for them to fight that battle.
00:05:44.560 They were already dead, and they're hanging out in a cave somewhere for eternity.
00:05:49.380 So you did them a favor.
00:05:50.580 They're bored to death, literally, hanging out in a cave underground.
00:05:55.280 You let them come up to the surface and fight a battle where they can't lose,
00:05:59.780 and somehow they've proven their mettle.
00:06:01.620 They've proven their courage.
00:06:03.180 And now they get the curse lifted.
00:06:04.980 And now that the curse is lifted, they just disappear into nothingness.
00:06:07.900 They become dust.
00:06:09.280 So anyway, now I have complained about Lord of the Rings,
00:06:14.220 and it has taken as long for me to complain about it as the movie is also.
00:06:18.320 So this has just been a total waste of time.
00:06:21.260 But let's get to the daily cancellation.
00:06:27.780 I'm a huge over Lord of the Rings fan.
00:06:30.560 May I watch all the extras on the extended version?
00:06:32.600 But which is the best film franchise of these three?
00:06:35.060 I'll say this one.
00:06:37.320 So there you have it.