Are There Any Interesting Films Besides Amateur Videos on Ebay?
Jason Scherer

I've always wondered why the general public thinks sci-fi is a ghetto genre, something kept in shadowy corners of dusty rooms and never admitted to in public. It speaks volumes about American culture that the horror genre - which revolves around deaths nastier than the ones on The Sopranos - sells more copies than Playboy (publishers of some of the best fiction out there besides Yours Truly). Meanwhile, adamant fans of Star Trek - a show about hope, ideals, and possibility that humanity is essentially good - get their lunch money stolen every day. Strangely, this attitude applies only to literature and TV. Movies are a whole different micro-brew.

Consider the highest-grossing films of the past few years - Independence Day, The Lost World, Armageddon, The Matrix, so on and so forth. Some would call them action movies, and to a degree, they are - but without the science element, they'd have no leg to stand on (and they only stand on half a leg as it is). The movie-going public swallows this swill without a second thought. Intelligent sci-fi (let's call it literary sci-fi, if you will) - Existenz, for example - gets ignored like your great aunt's nose wart. Or take A.I. Yes, I had some problems with it (don't get me started on the deus ex machina ending), but it was still the best movie I've seen this summer - an intelligent, non-blow-shit-up sci-fi movie. It did well the first weekend - after all, who wouldn't want to see a Spielberg flick? But after that first weekend, when the word got out that if you saw it, you'd actually have to think - grosses dropped faster than a senator's pants at an intern mixer.

And fantasy? Forget about it. Any of you see Dungeons and Dragons? Sheer curiosity drove me to that movie - I'm a recovering role-playing geek. Thank the gods that I didn't pay six bucks to witness that car wreck in the theater.

Don't misinterpret- pure escapism sci-fi has its merits. Movies like Terminator, Aliens, and Men in Black are pretty kick-ass. Maybe its because they don't suffer from "the music is swelling now, which means there's about to be a dramaitc moment" syndrome. But those are the exceptions. Really good sci-fi flicks are hard to come by, literate sci-fi flicks are a rarity, and fantasy just isn't on the radar.

That's why The Lord of The Rings worries me and excites me.

First off, Peter Jackson sits at the helm of this beast of a project. Ever heard of Peter Jackson? He made Dead Alive, a great little horror flick (you can probably find it in the Cult Classics section at the video store), but he also made The Frighteners, which wasn't exactly a boost to Michael J Fox's career.

Then there's some of the casting. I mean, come on - Liv Tyler as Arwen? Or Hugo Weaving as Elrond? Who came up with that? Of course, some casting decisions were made by someone more sentient than a slug, i.e. Ian McKlelland as Gandalf and Sean Astin as Samwise. The big suprise was Christopher Lee as Saruman - suprising not because he doesn't work in the role, but suprising because I think we all believed him to be dead. And I saw some pictures of him on the official webiste, and I'm still not convinced he's not.

Let's face it - those of us who actually appreciate sci-fi and fantasy have wildly high expectations for our films - and this one will be the highest set of all. The Lord of The Rings isn't going to be great, no matter what they do. By that I mean it may be a great series, one of the best ever done - but it's never going to live up to our expectations. Never. Episode 1 had the same problem - how the hell do you whet the appetite of a group of fans who'd been waiting 16 years for a new Star Wars film? We can multiply that expectation by about a thousand here. The Lord of The Rings is the cornerstone of all modern fantasy. Almost everyone who's written fantasy since Tolkien has done so because they want Frodo to come back from the Grey Havens for one last adventure - they want to go to Harad, or into the wilds of the East beyond the Sea of Rhun, to see things only glimpsed at before.

Jackson and crew have used a lot of neat tricks - filming all three parts at once, using the same writers, actors, crew, etc; using digital technology to create creatures that match the images of our imaginations - but they've set themselves up for complete failure.

Don't get wrong - I don't think the films are going to suck. They'll be good, and there's a decent chance they'll be great. However, they just won't be as good as we, the Discriminating Fan, need them to be. We'll go in, plunk down our 6 bucks (don't forget, I live in the sticks, where you don't have to use your firstborn as collateral to get into a flick), be firmly entertained, and walk out with a smile. But the drive home is what's going to suck, when we start asking ourselves, "Why didn't they include any of the Lay of Beleriand?", or "You know, Elijah Wood was decent, but you know who would have been really great?" It's the post-movie questioning that will ruin the experience for us fans. Or maybe just me - I think sometimes I'm over-analytical. You're talking about the guy who complained that L.A. Confidential was five minutes too long (well, I didn't say it first, but it was a line I was proud to steal from William Goldman).

I guess you could say that I'm sitting here writing about a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't situation. Sci-fi and fantasy filmmakers (especially the latter) suffer from two diseases. The intelligent ones find a great work that us readers hold dear, and realize they have a chance to make a wonderful film, and though they try their hardest, they severly overreach themselves and turn something great into something missing its heart and soul (think Dune - a great book turned into a piece of crap by one of the great modern filmmakers). The alternative, of course, is Earth Girls Are Easy.

But Lord of The Rings has one thing going for it that most sci-fi and fantasy flicks don't - ambition and a sense of purpose. You can tell that they realize they're messing with a sacred cow, and want to feed said cow as litte as possible. In fact, a lack of ambition and purpose is something that seems to infect our genres across the board. So be selective, be picky - and try to avoid that after-session questioning spree on the car-ride home.

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