objective quality of a media (show/game/anime/etc) has almost zero meaning compared to: what you go in expecting, what you need emotionally in that period of your life, and how you see it through the lens of resonant thematic elements specific to you as an individual.
One overlooked thing that really sets the Lord of the Rings films apart from other franchises is how earnest they are-
Most movies are so afraid of being “cheesy” that whenever they say something like “friendship is the most powerful force in the world” they quickly undercut it with a joke to show We Don’t Really Believe That! ;) Even Disney films nowadays have the characters mock their own movie’s tropes (”if you start singing, I’m gonna throw up!”) It’s like winking at the camera: “See, audience? We know this is ridiculous! We’re in on the joke!”
But Lord of the Rings is just 12.5 hours of friendship and love being the most powerful forces in the world, played straight. Characters have conversations about how much their home and family and friends mean to them, how hope is eternal, how there is so much in the world that’s worth living for…. and the film doesn’t apologize for that. There’s no winking at the audience about How Cheesy and Silly All This Is; it’s just. Completely in earnest.
And when Lord of the Rings does “lean on the fourth wall” to talk about storytelling within the film, it’s never to make jokes about How Ridiculous These Storytelling Tropes are (the way most films do)…. but instead to talk about how valuable these stories can be. Like Sam’s Speech at the end of the Two Towers: the greatest stories are ones that give you something to believe in, give you hope, that help you see there are things in a bleak violent world that are worth living for
“So much of Doctor Who, and I know it’s always controversial to say, but so much of it is the story of the Doctor’s best friend.
People will say ‘oh, it’s called Doctor Who’. It’s not called ‘The Doctor’. It’s called Doctor Who. Who’s asking that question is as much the story as the person of whom the question is asked.”
This….. is possibly the first time I’ve seen female-on-male abuse excused because the offending party had promise/skills. (Not that that’s remotely a good thing)
If that’s what she does with someone who trusts her when she has a knife, I don’t think I’d want her to be my surgeon.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) dir. Alfonso Cuarón was the most cinematically shot and thematically complex out of all the Harry Potter films, and I’m ready to fight on this.
In my opinion, the most romantic chirrut/baze scene wasn’t the “I don’t need luck I have you” line or the death scene, although those were beautiful. It was when Baze had been shot down and was waiting for the blast to kill him and turned his head so chirrut would be the last thing he saw before he died.
