I saw it. It opened on Thursday and has been playing in pretty much every cinema in town, pretty much around the clock, and I only managed to get a ticket for the stupid o'clock session tonight (Saturday). Before I found a cinema with a ticket left, I called around several others. Just as for "Fellowship", even the freakin' 4 a.m. sessions were sold out two weeks ago. I am serious when I say it is playing around the clock, seven days a week. There are about four million people in New Zealand and every damn one of them wants to see it at least twice.

With "Fellowship", I waited several weeks and then went to a 2 a.m. screening, to avoid the first crowds. I decided not to wait this time, because I was psyched up enough that I figured I could deal with packed theatres.

I decided to make it a proper evening out, and had a wonderful time. I walked to the theatre about an hour and a half early, paid for the ticket, then went and bought a pizza and took it across the road to the beach. I got double mushrooms on the pizza in honour of hobbits. It was such a lovely evening; the sun doesn't go down until about 9pm these days, and it was all warm and summery. The sunset across the water was magnificent. I sat under a pohutukawa tree on the grass and had dinner, and was about halfway through it before remembering I don't really like mushrooms all that much. The seagulls appreciated them, though.

Then I hung around watching people playing in the fountain and tossing frisbees around until it was time for the movie.

The movie:

1) Elves. Elves elves elves elves!!!! Whoooooo elves! Yeah!
2) Gimli is hilarious.
3) Did anybody else come out of that movie feeling a strange compulsion, on behalf of almost every single character in it, to get a haircut?
4) WARGS!
5) Once again Jackson managed to film, not Tolkein's book, but Tolkein's book the way it should have been. Some of the reassignments of dialogue, in both timing and even the character who speaks them, were made to brilliant effect. The scene in Helm's Deep where a Lear-like Theoden uses the "Where is the horse and the rider" poem, which in the book was no more than filler (Aragorn told it to Legolas and Gimli when telling them about Rohan on their arrival there), almost had me in tears. I thought it was one of the most moving and powerful scenes in either film. Then again, it wasn't quite moving and powerful enough to stop me from also thinking "Hehee. Theoden has a Magnesium Butt Flare." This forum sucks sometimes.
6) ELVES ELVES ELVES YES YAY.
7) I think the thing this movie did best was capture that deep sadness which runs all through Tolkien. Sam mentioned this in his post.

So anyway. It left me both totally kick-butt psyched, and moved and sad at the same time. What a movie. Then I walked home and it just made it better, having time to think about it all, with the quiet and the dark and the lovely warm summer-night air smelling like all the flowers and trees in the world. I want to see it again, maybe in a week or two, after I've absorbed enough of it from the first viewing.

Oh yeah, and that part early on, where Frodo and Sam climb up on a ridge of rock and Sam says something about how it looks familiar? Wintermute and I were standing RIGHT THERE AT THAT VERY SPOT a few weeks ago. That's *exactly* where we stood to take photos looking up the gully towards the summit. And all I can say is that I hope for the actors' sake that those prosthetic hobbit feet had good thick soles on them, because, d00d, those rocks were POINTY.

Brunnen-"ELVES"G