I’m a geek and say so pretty proudly, yet I am no big fan of fantasy stories, role-playing and stuff. I know geekdom is deeply rooted in games like “Dungeon & Dragons”, generations of nerds have sat around tables and diced out whether their sword would defeat the orc or simply break in two. I’ve always loved “The Neverending Story” but it’s not even near to the fantasy stereotype.
I’ve never been part of that movement and probably never will be.
Therefore I purposefully ignored the hype around Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”-trilogy, as I had never heard of this before and wasn’t exspecting anything I would like to see. After the first movie and when it started to become part of pop culture I wondered indeed but never made an effort to watch the movie. And it was not very hard with two different trilogies keeping me busy at that time namely the Star Wars Prequels and The Matrix tripple. I saw Jackson winning Oscars(TM) and wondered why they were not given to the Wachowskis or George Lucas instead. I bought the DVDs seeing LOTR in store with annoucements of extended edition that made the movies well over three hours long wondering what in the world could be so fascinating about orcs and elves to fill ten to twelve hours of celluloid.
I was really puzzled. Then it was on television where I saw parts of it but not the whole thing. Naturally I ignore films on tv since ads and non-entertaining cutting have largely destroyed any fun whatsoever in watching movie on tv (unless its pay tv which I can’t afford).
just a few weeks ago, years after this thing has passed pop culture and the hype is mostly dead, I decided to rent the DVDs.
I sat down in front of my home cinema and watched the first movie. And after 3 hours (not extended version) when the credits were rolling I decided that I really enjoyed the movie!
It’s still not my particular setting but HOW the movie tells the story actually appealed to me very much. It has great effects, although they’re not always perfect but it uses them in a smart way and gives the characters, who all are played by brilliant actors and actresses, room to actually evolve (unlike the Star Wars Prequels I must say). Well, I have seen them all and I’m definetely going to buy into the hype and get the extended ed. dvds asap. .

What do we learn from that? Sometimes it’s sensible to look outside one’s own fence of interest, you might miss a big thing. But I wonder if I would have loved the movie so much if I had seen it back when the hype was around.