So I watched Lord of the Rings for the first time and....

[Homeless Nutter]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JzACKa4joo

[ignoramus]

If I go to see a movie which I have a connection to, I automatically have a bias to like it from the start.
That can only go so far though. PS, I loved the first Robocop, but the reboot, well, from memory I think I left early.
And let's not even mention Terminator Genesys.

Saw all the LOTR and Hobbit movies on Dec 26th at the movies. Loved them all. I wanted to.
Same with all SW and ST. I enjoy immersing myself in the moment.

[Gawdzilla]

I read LOTR and the Hobbit while waiting to go to S.E.A. back in 1970. I've read them several times since. Jackson made movies about the universe Tolkien created. That will offend some folks. I watch the extended LOTR movies once a year. I got the extended Hobbit movies for Krampus.

[Whateverist]

I liked immersing myself in the LOR books and the movies were great, but at the back of my mind the pure good vs pure evil always grated. Didn't stop me from enjoying the spectacle though. GoT satisfies my appetite for ambiguity and opens up into a world of equal complexity and mystique. Don't think I'll be rereading any Tolkien but if that fat gnome ever wakes up, lives up to his destiny as my bitch and realizes he owes me another book, I might just reread some GoT books.

[Faith No More]

I liked the first two Lord of the Rings movies, but I definitely think they're overrated. I hated Return of the King because it was waaay too long. I actually walked out of the theater before it ended.

But I'm also of the opinion that the books are overrated. I found Tolkien's writing style tedious and much of the details that were used to attempt to create an entire mythology unnecessary. I never got past the first hundred pages of The Two Towers.

Hmm...maybe this should go in the "controversial views" thread...

[Aegon]

Maybe Tolkein was the one who created all the fantasy tropes,

Tolkien also was a philologist and linguist who developed entire languages for his LOTR universe. You, on the other hand, can't even be bothered to spell his name correctly.

That's good for him I guess. Doesn't make the movies any better though. 

[Cyberman]

I suppose this is what happens when you try to get eight hours of film out of a 300 page novel.

That, plus the fact that New Line had already done eighteen months of pre-production under Guillermo del Toro before he left the project. When Peter Jackson came on board, they didn't allow him to start over with his own vision for the films, so he was literally playing catch up and making up a lot of the scenes on the spot.

That they got made at all, to any standard, after all that is a testament to the experience of the cast and crew.

[Aroura]

Gollum is awesome. I loved the casting and the gorgeous New Zealand scenery. I think the LotR trilogy did as well as could be expected adapting those books.
If you don't like fantasy, what the hell possessed you to attempt watching 9+ hours of high fantasy? And if you did not find Gandalf fighting the Balrog to be epic, then again, why the hell are you watching these films anyway? The Balrog was wonderfully rendered! Very much as I had imagined it only freaking scarier.

My father actually read my little brother and me The Hobbit when I was about 8, and I read his copies of lotr (a green leather bound set with gold runes and notes on the languages inside, which made it even more fascinating for me) at about 12 or 13. So exposure early in life combined with fond memories are part of it for me. However, it is one of the top selling books in the history of the world (and the movies are still in the top 10 grossing of all time), so I think it's a pretty wide spread phenomenon,  and people who truly find them boring must be few and far between.

[Aegon]

It's my love for Game of Thrones that convinced me I might enjoy it. I realized afterward that the ASOIAF series is really just a political drama set in a fantasy world. The inclusion of magic ruins the tension for me. Magical birds that can fly them wherever, magical demon things...I have trouble taking it seriously. Not to mention the fight between Gandalf and Dracula toward the beginning of the first film made me laugh quite a bit, because the way it was shot made me think about how the actors were just flinging themselves around. Gandalf coming back from the dead despite wizard resurrection not really being established in the first film brought me out of it too. They spent a lot of time on Boromir's death in the first film, but he was barely in it, seemed like a jerk, and then went mad and tried to kill Frodo for the ring. I'm supposed to be that moved by his death?

I don't doubt the quality of the source material. I appreciate meticulous attention to detail by authors and it sounds like I'd get that from Tolkien. But the (first two) films just weren't anything spectacular to me. If they were recognized as pretty good fantasy films I wouldn't have even made a topic, but they're regarded as some of the best movies ever, and I just don't see it.

[Napoléon]

The cool thing about the Internet is you can post your unpopular opinion there and people still won't give a fuck about it.