Recently I was sitting on my couch with my roommate discussing the Lord of the Rings movies, and he mentioned that, while being extremely interested in the fantasy genre, he had never seen any of them, or the (less than stellar) Hobbit prequel films, and subsequently didn't know much about them. What followed was a classic Sunday movie marathon in which we watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies back to back to back.
After seeing these films a number of times, I had a pretty solidified opinion on them. I'm a fan of the genre, and knew that they were phenomenal films, but never really connected with them in the overwhelmingly personal way that most people seemed to. It was only when I experienced the story as a continuous whole, while consciously focusing on the three individual parts, that I truly realized the extent to which these movies are masterpieces of visual storytelling.
Peter Jackson is masterful in his approach to every aspect of these stories, as the world he adapted is teeming with life and a grounded sense of emotion in every scene. He has created a world and allowed us to step into it for one "brief" action-packed story filled with emotion and interesting characters. This world and these characters were translated into a visual medium from the previously established masterful written works of J. R. R. Tolkien, however, Jackson undoubtedly knew the burden he would have to bare presented in the task of doing these novels justice.It certainly must have been a daunting uphill battle. The layers of character development ingrained into each main character allow viewers to latch on to many different aspects of the story in order to connect with it in various ways.
I need not mention the breathtaking spectacle that is the setting of each of these films, but I will talk about how Jackson approaches detailing the setting. Upon this most recent rewatch of these films, I noticed something that I had never really seen before: Jackson's extensive use of close-ups. In almost every scene, we are pulled into the action or dialogue of the characters by use of close-ups in order to really feel the emotions our characters are feeling and portraying. Jackson understands how large the world is, and realizes that, to casual viewers, he may be asking a lot of them in terms of their ability to suspend disbelief, and the mental leap into the world Middle Earth as they experience the story of the ring. To counteract this, Jackson uses close-ups on characters and interactions to dial things back for the viewer, and allow things to present themselves as what the heart of the stories are: a very personal story about friendship and growth with extremely relatable themes. This can be most readily seen in the scenes with Sam and Frodo, who, over the course of the 3 films, fall deeper and deeper into the spell of the ring. We can feel the ring's effects ourselves as we journey along with Frodo through the faces he makes, whether it be holding Sting up to Gollum, or the weak lifelessness of his scenes in the Return of the King.
It is not a film technique unique to these films, or even unique to Jackson as a filmmaker, however, I believe that in the instance of these movies, in terms of their grandiose scale and the epic nature of the setting in which the story finds itself, the use of the close up is one of the many keys that allowed these movies to be so successful and touch the hearts of countless viewers, evoking new forms of the same emotions with every subsequent rewatch.
Comments