The Lord Of The Rings Is A Christmas Movie
Why are The Lord of the Rings movies so good? Why are they such good stories? What makes them perfect to watch during the Christmas season?
All happy families are alike. Each happy family celebrates Christmas in its own way. There’s mass, of course, on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. Before then or after, some families bake and decorate gingerbread houses, others will decorate their tree (though usually, as kids grow older, moms are stuck with the tedious task of stringing the lights and hanging a majority of the ornaments while dads suffer crash outs as they attempt to lock the trunk into the stand or trim the top so it doesn’t scrape the ceiling). Other families enjoy driving through the neighborhoods to see the big houses draped with white and colored lights and the front yards dotted with Santa and Frosty blow-ups, maybe entire Nativity scenes. Perhaps they read Christmas stories together. Older families like to throw back an ungodly amount of adult beverages and make a feeble attempt at organizing a board game. Of course, what is Christmas without a few classic Christmas movies playing in the background, like A Christmas Story, A Christmas Carol, It’s a Wonderful Life, Elf, and Home Alone, to name but a few. For years now, almost as long as I can remember, my family has stuck with one Christmas movie tradition: rewatching the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, even the extended director’s cut, for the umpteenth time.
To say we are LOTR nerds is a drastic understatement; our decades-long obsession with the movies is borderline autistic. Since the first in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, was released in 2001, we have been diehard fans, re-watching each movie at least once a year, occasionally multiple times, sometimes all three back to back to back, in one sitting.
I still have memories of watching the first and second, The Twin Towers, at our neighbor’s house when they first were released on DVD (so that would have made me 4 … 5?). In fact, I still have a memory of going to see the three-hour Return of the King in theaters, sitting in the back row and inhaling a greasy tub of popcorn while Théoden led the coolest cavalry charge ever put on the big screen.
Why are The Lord of the Rings movies so good? Why are they such good stories? What makes them perfect to watch during the Christmas season? For one, the movies were made at the best possible time in the early 2000s. Any earlier, director Peter Jackson would not have had the special effects at his disposal to make the epic set-piece scenes look and feel as intense or immersive as they were, whether it was the fellowship’s journey through the dark Mines of Moria and Gandalf’s standoff with the Balrog at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the Siege of Gondor, or Théoden’s Ride of the Rohirrim. There was a balance of CGI and practical visual effects that made the filmmaking feel cutting-edge yet familiar and more believable. If the movies were made any later, however, Jackson would have relied too heavily on CGI, which he did in his next trilogy and adaptation of The Hobbit.
And then you could rattle off a bunch of other reasons. The casting was faultless, so too the acting. The writing was impeccable, satisfying even the encyclopedic J.R.R. Tolkien heads. But the movies don’t just scratch our itch for good filmmaking and thrilling battle scenes. They speak to our shared humanity, our souls, and fulfill our longing for myths – deep myths that have been told and re-told, time and again, across civilizations, stretching as far back as Homer.