Why everybody should watch The Lord of the Rings

The first part of the trilogy was released 16 years ago. I was two years old when this happened. Now I’m 19-years-old and re-watched all the parts. I did watch them before, but only parts of it and I was younger than 12 I guess. I never wanted to watch them again, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m glad I did. And I really think that everyone should watch all three parts once in their life. Even if you don’t like fantasy, even if you don’t like long movies. The movies are beautiful, unique and the story’s great. I really want to persuade everybody to watch them. And you really don’t have to watch one after another, just take breaks, that’s fine! I watch part 1 in July, part 2 in August and part 3 in October. You may need some refreshment on what happened in the previous one though,  but a quick search will give you all the answers you’re looking for.

The trilogy is about the ring, the ring to rule them all. This ring has magical powers and has a bad influence on anyone who carries it. When Bilbo Baggins is going away, his nephew Frodo gets it. The wizard Gandalf sees it and tells Frodo to take the ring to the elves in Rivendell. They tell them to destroy it in the volcano of Mount Doom. The movies takes us on one hell of a journey, through the mountains of Middle Earth, we’ll meet elves, hobbits, dwarfs, ents and orcs. We’ll be accompanied by Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Gandalf, Gimli, Legolas and Boromir – The Fellowship of the Ring.

There’s a reason I said we in the last paragraph. The movie will absorb you, you will feel like you’re in Middle Earth, in the middle of all the fights and all the conversations. You will feel empathy for the characters, you will love them like they’re your own friends.

Let me start with the uniqueness of the story. Fantasy is not the most-watched genre, although this movie made fantasy more mainstream. Before the trilogy, you had fantasy movies like The Wizard of Oz (a classic), but 2001 turned the genre of fantasy around. Not only because of The Lord of the Rings, the first Harry Potter also came out that year. From then on, fantasy movie got fandoms. The Harry Potter fandom is HUGE amongst the youngsters like me while I get the feeling that The Lord of the Rings is more for the grown-ups. Both movies were important for the fantasy genre, but in my opinion, Harry Potter was fun for entertainment with a rather basic story (sorry), while The Lord of the Rings brought us something really new.

Remember that it’s the beginning of the 21st century when these movies were released. Now look at it again. The effects in particular. Gandalf falling, the beautiful ending, all the fights and all the views. It looked really, really real. Movies from this year may have effects worse than this. If you aren’t going to watch it for the story, please watch it for the effects. They are really, really astonishing.

If you look at movies like the Marvel superhero movies, most of it was filmed in front of green screens in studios with characters upgraded with CGI. Most of this trilogy wasn’t. Most of the time, real actors were used, real make-up was used, real clothing was used. Gollum was one of the few CGI characters. All the orcs, all the riders on horses were real people, not just copy + paste work. It’s no wonder that twoof the three have won Oscars for Best make-up, they really deserved these!

TL;DR: You should watch the LOTR trilogy because it will absorb you into Middle Earth, the story is unique and did well for the fantasy genre. The effects are astonishing and the character visualization is really well done.

A little known fact about me is that I’m such a nerd about movies, that I read the trivia on IMDb of every movie I watch afterwards. I came across some really interesting facts about these movies that I wanted to share with you.

• The trilogy was filmed in a consecutive period of 18 months. All 18 months were used to film the three movies, which means that scenes of The return of the king were films before scenes of The Fellowship of the Rings. There were days where they would shoot scenes from every part of the trilogy.
• Viggo Mortensen was so attached to his horse in the trilogy, that he kept it afterwards.
• After filming, the cast of the Fellowship got matching tattoos that all said ‘nine’ in Elvish. The fellowship consisted of nine people. Elijah Wood, Sir Ian McKellen, Sean Astin, Sean Bean, Bill Boyd, Orlando Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic Monaghan, and sorry, the stunt double of John Rhys Davies all got one.
• Most of the riders of Rohan were women with fake beards. This was done because there were a lot of great female riders in New Zealand, where the movie was filmed. 

If you haven’t watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy: PLEASE DO. IMMEDIATELY! I really hope that I’ve persuaded you. And I don’t even like fantasy movies that much. But I loved these movies. What did you think of them?