The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings (LOTR), the trilogy is listed everywhere among the all-time top 20 movies. However I never had a 'real' chance to watch them. I have watched the 1st and 3rd one, however at that time I was not familiar with American Accent, and ended up with little understanding of the movie, that there was an evil ring and Frodo (Elijah Wood) was supposed to carry it to the evil city and destroy it. And others Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), & Legolas (Orlando Bloom) were the ones who were the good guys and supported him. Other than that I enjoyed the extravagant war sequences and special effects.

However I always thought that there must be something special about these series and that is the reason so many people actually love it, and now that my understanding of foreign accented English has improved, I wanted to see all of them again, but never got a chance. In fact I got all three movies on DVD (Extended Editions), however was not able to watch them.

Yesterday being Sunday, and nothing major to do, I thought "today was the day". So I sat through entire day and watched the entire series again, yes the entire 12 hours of it. And was I glued to it !! even though I found them a tad lengthy (but maybe that is the reason they are "Extended Editions" and were not released in theaters) but I loved them. Specially the story, as it was something very new for me, I am sure that 95 % or above Indians, have never heard about LOTR or J.R.R. Tolkien, and that is the reason we are not familiar with elves, orcs, hobbits and all.

There might be another reason, because our history is full with huge epics and mythologies, two of the most important ones being Ramayana & Mahabharata. So LOTR might be the work that gets closest to Mahabharata in terms of scale and proportions, however latter was written thousands of years back and is still among the lengthiest piece of writings. Other then scale there are other similarities like good versus evil theme, however there is a major difference, and I believe this difference is due to religion and cultures. LOTR is work of west, which is being dominated by Christianity, and Mahabharata is an Indian tale, in fact it would be more appropriate to say that its a Hindu tale. Even though I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on this, but I still feel that Christianity is Black & white religion, either you have good OR evil, however Hinduism is bit different in this regard. We have a lot of Grey. That is why Mahabharata is so different, there is always a conflict in minds of characters, more from the point of Dharma VS Karma. The story of Mahabharata is far more complicated, huge in scale & humane in nature.

But lets not get drawn from LOTR for the time being, I immensely enjoyed the movies, specially the fact that special effects and great artwork, never took over the actors. They were brilliant in there roles. Peter Jackson despite the scale, always had a grip on the story and didn't let it all fall apart, which was a major possibility in a work of such proportions. In fact they excelled in almost all the departments like screenplay, make-up, background score etc.

I really hope that I again get a good Sunday to myself and I can watch the trilogy again ;-) !!