Best Games of 2014

I own all three current generation video game consoles, and the one that had the best slate of games in 2014 was... the Wii U. Most people probably didn't expect that, but that's how things turned out. The PC was also a great place to play games, but if the only thing you have is a PS4 or an Xbox One, I honestly feel bad for you. Most of the games on this list were not exclusive to one platform, though, so everyone had plenty to play.

Best of 2014

10. Sunset Overdrive (XBO)

It's great to have the old Insomniac back. By my reckoning, this is their first good full length game with a real sense of fun since 2009. Overdrive's punk rock attitude doesn't always work, with some of the humor falling flat and feeling a bit out of date. On the other hand, we got a AAA game that involved such plot points as forging a magic sword in a nuclear reactor and throwing a concert to make some sick kids happy, so there's something to be said for just trying weird ideas out. The combat and weapon system doesn't work as well as the great Ratchet and Clank games, but the game looks and plays great, especially when you're usually the extremely fun traversal mechanics to make the whole city your playground. I liked this game a lot, and if they get to make a sequel, it could be truly great.

9. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker (Wii U)


This spin-off of Super Mario 3D World takes the look and basic building blocks from last year's game and turns them from a party platformer into an adorable, often genius little puzzle game. Captain Toad can't jump or throw fireballs, but he uses his wits, some throwable items, and the ability to look at the world from any angle to solve dozens of small, inventive levels. I pursued the extra items more than I usually do in Nintendo games, because the fun of it is truly in exploring every nook and cranny to see what the designers managed to cook up. It's a bit light compared to some of the meatier experiences this year, but almost every moment is a pleasure.

8. Jazzpunk (PC)


If you played and enjoyed Blendo Games' oddball retro espionage adventures like Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving, you have an idea of whether you might like Jazzpunk. It doesn't have the narrative deftness of those games, but it does expand on the general idea while also stuffing every corner of every level with some truly bizarre and usually hilarious bit of comedy. Some of it's clever, some of it's referential, all of it is stranger than what you're used to seeing in video games. It's no surprise that this was published by Adult Swim. It doesn't have deep, satisfying gameplay, but the few hours it lasts are a comedic blast.

7. The Fall (Multi)


I usually don't include unfinished games on these lists, but I made an exception for The Fall. This is partly just because I'm not sure that subsequent episodes won't be released as separate titles, but also because despite it ending on a cliffhanger, it feels like a complete experience. You play as an AI controlling a space suit with a disabled pilot inside, your goal to get him medical assistance before time runs out. It has some simple yet effective combat and puzzle mechanics, but what makes The Fall really work is its dark (but not humorless) atmosphere and its story, where you have to subvert expected AI behavior in order to meet your goals, leading to some great cerebral questions about your priorities and some well executed twists. It's a few hours that will be hard to forget.

6. Wolfenstein: The New Order (Multi)


The New Order begins poorly with a boring opening sequence, but once you get past the scripted part and start the real game, you start to realize how much there actually is here. Lots of situations let you take a stealthy or guns-blazin' approach, and both are a ton of fun. Sneaking past guards, throwing knives, taking out commanders before they can radio for reinforcements is a blast. So is pulling out two of almost any gun in the game, from assault rifles to shotguns to even sniper rifles, and destroying everything that passes in front of your eyeballs. The story is also surprisingly good, with a fun alternate history setting, lots of well-executed moments, and human relationships you can actually believe in. MachineGames was founded by former Starbreeze developers, and they seem to have maintained their ability to create engaging, unique first person shooters.

5. South Park: The Stick of Truth (Multi)


The Stick of Truth is the most I have enjoyed South Park since... let's say season 9, back in 2005. I still watch the show, but the video game captures its spirit perfectly, and provides more laughs, shocking moments, and flat-out charm than the show actually has in a long time. It expands on the show's idea of the town as an ersatz Middle-earth, and drops references to tons of great moments from the entire run of the series, without ever feeling like it's only dropping references to something you already like. It's also a light but mostly fun RPG, with an enjoyable battle system that holds up through the game's 15 hours, and tons of fun side missions and collectible items (which also always reference the show). The actual show this year didn't knock my socks off, but The Stick of Truth reminds me that Trey and Matt still have a ton of ideas left in them.

4. Shovel Knight (Multi)


As someone who doesn't actually have a lot of reverence for the action games of the 8-bit era (just a bit before my time), Shovel Knight had to earn my admiration by itself, but it did that handily. The closest analogue is definitely Mega Man, but the influences are obviously from all over the place in that period. You play as Shovel Knight, who must travel through dangerous lands, avoiding traps and monsters, in order to defeat the Enchantress, save the world, and get a ton of treasure in the meantime. The level design is smart and devious, the art and sound direction know when to shirk the strict limitations of the hardware they're paying homage to, and the many boss fights are always fun. I also have to mention that the story is surprisingly effective, conveying a grand sense of adventure and smaller human moments with some pretty basic text boxes and animations. The year's best new old game.

3. Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (Multi)


And this year's best adaptation of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien is not the latest (and probably last) big budget epic film by Peter Jackson, but an action game by a revitalized Monolith that combines what works from the recent Batman: Arkham and Assassin's Creed games and tosses out what doesn't. It takes place between the two Middle-earth stories we all know about, and has you playing a fallen ranger who is forcibly joined with an ancient elf spirit and let loose on the hordes of orcs roaming around Mordor. The story is pretty poor and best when ignored, but the game is pretty great. Sneaking around, group-based combat, and open world structure are all familiar, but also executed very well, and the nemesis system that everyone talks about is terrific. Any orc who manages to defeat you in battle is promoted into the command structure, which can be investigated, exploited, infiltrated, and ultimately defeated in your quest for revenge. It's a cool system that buoys an enjoyable game, and will hopefully be stolen and improved for years to come.

2. Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Multi)


What's amazing about Valiant Hearts is that it presents a cute adventure story and depicts the horrors of one of history's most devastating wars without either really contradicting each other. The animated art style looks tremendous, and provides the basis for the gameplay, where you navigate battlefields and occupied villages, solving entertaining puzzles and doing what it takes to stay alive and see your family again. The game is packed with historical details that make it educational as well as entertaining, and the game also knows how to handle the weight of its setting, especially when you get to its brilliantly handled ending. There's also a cute, helpful dog in most of the levels that you can pet.

1. Bayonetta 2 (Wii U)


I liked the first Bayonetta, but I didn't love it. It was tough to find a good balance of challenge and agency in the combat. Bayonetta 2 nailed this for me though, and the result is one of my favorite pure action games in years. The core fighting mechanics feel great, the weapons are diverse and well balanced, and there's enough variety to easily carry you through the whole game and leave you wishing there was more. When it tried to explain the convoluted story I got bored, but the more immediate moments in the plot are more enjoyable and provide some incredible set-pieces, and I actually found myself emotionally affected by a specific point near the end. It's fantastic Nintendo was willing to do what it took to make sure this game saw release.

Delayed Entry

This is the best game that wasn't released in 2014 but I didn't play until then.

The Swapper (Multi)

I liked The Fall a lot, but it was actually only the second best existential sci fi side scrolling puzzle game I played in 2014. In The Swapper you are marooned on a mysterious space station, where you have to create clones of yourself and jump consciousness between them to solve puzzles, try to figure out what the hell is going on, and hopefully escape. So basically you win by killing yourself over and over. The very premise of the game is deeply unnerving to me. It's smart, moody, difficult in that great puzzle game way, and unforgettable.

Best Movies of 2012

I didn't manage to see a few movies I know I really should have, most notably Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty. Still, I managed to do a better job of getting out of the house and seeing good stuff than I usually do. Here was the best.

Best of 2012

8. The Dark Knight Rises


It was always unlikely that people were going to love this as much as they did The Dark Knight, and when the movie finally came out it seemed practically predestined to have a mixed reaction. I liked it a lot though; Tom Hardy's Bane is a wonderfully scary villain, Anne Hathaway is a pitch-perfect Catwoman, and it's just fun watching the elaborate schemes and action scenes Christopher Nolan puts together, even if it's easy to poke holes in their logic later. I kind of wish it was a bit more grounded, but it still manages to be the third part of the first ever superhero film trilogy that's good the whole way through.

7. The Cabin in the Woods


Usually when a movie sits on the shelf for a couple years like this, you expect bad things. But based on the people behind it and the seemingly reasonable explanation for its delay, I was pretty sure I'd like The Cabin in the Woods, and I turned out to be right. It's a horror movie that basically applies the reasons people like horror movies to the story itself, and what results is a movie that is at times genuinely frightening, but more often hilarious in the way it plays with and subverts expectations. I imagine you might get more out of it if you spend a lot of time with the genre, but even if you don't there's a lot of great moments and surprises.

6. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey


I was okay with Peter Jackson and company splitting The Hobbit into two parts for their film adaptation, since I knew they were adding material from the countless additional notes and writings of Tolkien, and it's not uncommon for studios to do that these days. Three parts seemed like a stretch, though. Still, I couldn't help but find myself again wrapped up in the world of Middle Earth, and enjoyed all of the time the movie took developing its new characters and really telling the story of the book without many gaps. Who knows if I'll get tired of it before the end, but I thought the first Hobbit movie was very well cast, as faithful to the book as you could hope, and just a pleasant thing to watch.

5. The Raid: Redemption


You hear a lot of people tell you how much an action movie kicks ass. It's hard to tell just from a description how much it actually kicks ass. You kind of have to take it on faith that it kicks ass. Believe me when I tell you that The Raid stands above most other movies when it comes to whether it kicks ass. No one's in it that you've heard of, and they use an Indonesian fighting style with less of a history than kung fu, but the movie still kicks ass. There's not much else to say about The Raid, which takes place entirely within a single apartment complex and doesn't have much of a story, but it doesn't need anything else because it really, really kicks ass.

4. The Master


Paul Thomas Anderson sure has changed a lot over the course of his career. You can definitely trace a line from movie to movie, but while movies like Boogie Nights were certainly different, it was still essentially understandable and often very entertaining. The Master is one of the most challenging movies that I've ever seen. I know basically what it was going for, and I know the three central performances were great, and I can remember specific scenes that were as entrancing and gripping as any that have been filmed. But I still find it difficult to love, and I don't get the feeling the movie really wants to be loved. It wants to be considered, and it deserves to be examined for a long time. It's an important movie, but you should only see it if you know what you're in for.

3. Lincoln


I'm not sure what else there is to say about Daniel Day-Lewis. He's probably going to win his third Oscar as a lead actor soon. He doesn't just say his lines well in this movie, he essentially reinvented the way I'm going to picture Lincoln looking, sounding, and acting for the rest of my life. He leads a truly outstanding cast in a movie that avoids overly lionizing the man, the war, or the time period, as it instead focuses on all of the political dealings and double-dealings that led to the passage of the 13th Amendment. Steven Spielberg doesn't try to do too much, he just lets the actors handle the great script and just seems to know where the camera should be. It's one of the best films in his long and profoundly good career.

2. Looper


Looper is one of those movies that comes along once in a while that you wouldn't expect to get made in the current Hollywood system. It's an R-rated science fiction movie with a budget large enough that it doesn't look cheap. It's also a really, really good one. Joseph Gordon Levitt (this is his third movie on the list, by the way) is more convincing as a young Bruce Willis than you'd guess based on the slightly distracting makeup, and he does a great job of making you care about this honestly pretty unbelievable world, where the mob gets rid of annoyances by sending them back in time to be executed. The story takes turns you don't expect, and in the end it's really not the action movie it looks like it's trying to be. It might be better than that though, with characters you get attached to and a story that can make you think about a lot of different things. Just make sure to take Bruce's advice when it comes to time travel logic.

1. The Avengers


It's not the edgiest or most sophisticated choice, but darn it if this isn't the best time I had in a theater in 2012. Pulling together the heroes from four different movies and making them argue, bounce off each other, and finally come together to achieve a common goal seems like an almost impossible task, but they nailed it as well as I could hope. And it's even more satisfying because it was done by Joss Whedon, someone who went from a beloved but relatively unknown creator of cult television shows to the director of one of the biggest movies ever. The cast is great, the dialogue is smart and funny, and the story is solid enough to hold up a bunch of sci-fi silliness and exciting action scenes. I'm really looking forward to what else they can do with this suddenly gigantic franchise.

Delayed Entry

This is the best movie that wasn't released in 2012 but I didn't see until then.

Brick

Rian Johnson directed Looper, one of my favorite movies in 2012, but I actually liked his first movie more, the low budget thriller called Brick. Joseph Gordon Levitt stars as a hard boiled 40s detective stuck in a modern teenager's body, holding together a film that inserts Film Noir elements into a high school setting much more effectively than you'd think possible. It's really one of the best neo-Noir films ever made, and I'd even hold it up to the real classics of the genre. The story hits every note perfectly, and it's incredible how Johnson manages to match the cadence and rhythm of Noir dialogue to phrases and topics high schoolers would discuss. Inventive filmmaking from start to finish.

Characters of the Decade: Part 1

I already have lists for my favorite things of the decade in each category archived on the site, but I decided to do something a bit different for a feature. The most important thing to a good story is interesting characters, and sometimes they're better realized than usual. Characters are often what we remember most about something, and I thought I'd recognize that with a list of the best. These aren't exactly my favorites in each case - I tried to stick with ones that stick out in some really important way even if they didn't totally resonate with me. Any number of things could have gotten a character here; being a great villain, a powerhouse lead performance, launching someone's career, or just making something worth watching. I narrowed it down to 60, which was made easier by trying to limit myself to one character per work where possible. The list is a bit TV heavy since they have more time to develop a personality, and it leans towards white males more than I would have liked, but I still think it's a good list of people (and some robots) that were fascinating to watch. It's ordered chronologically by first appearance, with characters that originated before the decade began placed at the first point they became relevant again.

Eric Cartman
Trey Parker - South Park


"Nananananana! I made you eat your parents!"

The moment above will forever live in infamy, but it's just one of many great ones in the life of Cartman, the world's worst child. He's one of those rare characters that's a completely irredeemable asshole that you still love because his schemes and insults are just so entertaining and unforgettable. And he gets his comeuppance often enough that he's allowed to keep being such a bigoted little jerk.

Tony Soprano
James Gandolfini - The Sopranos


"Anybody else would've had their fuckin' intervention right through the back of their head."

The star of one of television's most important shows, Gandolfini is notable for standing out despite the amazingly strong and deep supporting cast around him. He's part imperfect family man, part ruthless mob boss, and part just another troubled guy who isn't totally sure of himself. One of the most evil men to ever be rooted for, and that's mostly because his insecurities are presented just as effectively as his strengths and ill deeds.

Bender
John DiMaggio - Futurama


"Goodbye losers, whom I've always hated!"

I could have easily put Fry or Professor Farnsworth here, but Bender is the character that defines the whole show. He's the robot who drinks because alcohol fuels his system and smokes because it makes him look cool. Once in a while he gets a bit too lowest-common-denominator, but his narcissism is inspiring and he's the robot friend we all wish we had.

Tyrion Lannister
A Song of Ice and Fire series


"Those are brave men. Let's go kill them."

It's almost insane how many characters George R. R. Martin has managed to develop into genuinely fascinating people, but if one sticks out it's the smallest of the bunch, the Lion of Lannister. The whole series thrives off making its central conflict more interesting by not allowing you to want any one side to totally win, and Tyrion was the first time we saw that. Watching the wheels turn in his head as he tries to do his best with the cards he's dealt is endlessly enjoyable, and hopefully Martin finishes up the fifth book first so we can see what he's up to.

Captain Hank Murphy
Harry Goz - Sealab 2021


"But the secret ingredient is love. Damn it."

Voice actor Harry Goz unfortunately passed away while Sealab was still airing, and while I was still able to enjoy it afterward, it was never quite the same, which speaks to how good he was. As the driving force behind most of the plots, his unique brand of insane leadership paved the way for many bizarre Adult Swim shows to come. Every character on the show had their time to shine, but none provided laughs more than Murphy.

Master Shake
Dana Snyder - Aqua Teen Hunger Force


"I mean, is he gonna be able to chase us? Cause if I woke up looking like that, I would just run towards the nearest living thing and kill it."

You know a character lives off the actor's performance when it's as hard as it was to find a good quote that stands without context even though he provides laughs constantly. Snyder is probably the best voice actor to work repeatedly with Adult Swim, and this is the role that gave him a chance to shine. There's just so much humor laced in every syllable that comes out of Shake's mouth, and even if that week's gimmick plot is lame it'll probably be worth watching just for his next zinger.

GIR
Rikki Simmons - Invader Zim


"It's me! I was the turkey all along!"

Possibly the only character that can get away with just saying random crap all day, thanks to Simmons' fine voice work and his unending supply of adorableness. GIR is one of those animated characters who's fun just to watch do anything, and he's at that right level of idiocy that you have to wonder if he's actually just messing with Zim and the audience some of the time.

Nate Fisher Jr.
Peter Krause - Six Feet Under


"Everything's bad for something."

Nate's as flawed a person as there will be on this list, and that's part of why he works. He's just a human being worried about his mortality and trying to figure out what he really wants to do with his life. His story is a tragic one, but watching it play out made for some of the decade's best personal drama. Plus, watching him yell at stupid people is funny.

Gareth Keenan
Mackenzie Crook - The Office (UK)


"I told him once that I don't like jelly. I don't trust the way it moves."

It's hard to pin down with is Gareth's most hilarious feature. I love his supposed hardened military background despite his ridiculous, gaunt physique. I love his very unfortunate combination of overconfidence and ineptitude with women. I love the overly serious way he deals with the politics of working at a small branch of a paper company. One of the few characters I prefer to the US version's equivalent, and that's despite that equivalent also being on this list.

Dr. Perry Cox
John C. McGinley - Scrubs


“Jordan…the boy already lip-syncs into your tampons, must we put a final nail in his tiny gay coffin?”

Despite this being the ninth year of Dr. Cox being on the air ranting and raving, I'm still not tired of it. McGinley never broke out beyond a few small film roles, but every week he's good for a few solid put downs and probably at least one epically vicious dissection of why whoever he's yelling at is a bad doctor. But there's enough variety, creativity, and humor there that you never feel he's being too mean. At his heart, he's a good doctor who's trying to make others around him better at their job, and that's why he gets away with it.

Jack Bauer
Kiefer Sutherland - 24


"I don't care how it's interpreted from the outside. I just gave you an order and I'd like you to follow it."

The only character I know of who deserves - nay, requires a website to keep track of all of his kills in the line of duty. However you feel about torture, it's hard to be upset with Jack for doing what he thinks he needs to do to save America because he puts up with so much crap and never asks for anything in return. Also, it's just a TV show. His actions definitely speak louder than his words, but he's had his share of resonant emotional moments too. He's why I keep coming back despite the series' declining quality.

Gandalf
Ian McKellen - The Lord of the Rings series


"A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to."

Maybe the greatest action hero who's also an old man in film history. Gandalf was always the most interesting character in the books, and that held true in the movies as well. It's actually sort of two roles, as the wise and resourceful but fallible Gandalf the Grey at first and later as the powerful but justifiably aloof Gandalf the White. Kind and caring, but terrifying when he needs to be. He's basically what you wish your grandfather was like.

Continued tomorrow.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

This is the one that got all the awards and the highest praise and is my personal favorite, but I'm not sure if it's really deserving of all that. It certainly wasn't head and shoulders above the other two enough to win eleven Oscars when they averaged three. All those awards were probably appreciation for the feat of the trilogy as a whole, which I'm fine with, since the Academy so often seems to pick the better story over the truly deserving winner. I still really love the movie, and it's the biggest and grandest of the trilogy. It also happens to be the only film I saw for the first time after reading the book version first. There's fewer changes than the last time, though still some notable ones. Some bits are cut, like the Riders of Rohan being escorted around a blockade by strange men of the forest and most of the real dramatic thrust of Eowen and the development of her relationship with Faramir. There's one key detail that I feel they lost a lot from by having to cut, and it's removal was sort of necessary after cutting the Barrow-Downs from the first movie. Since the Hobbits just get their swords unceremoniously handed to them by Aragon instead of finding them in a tomb, they would be less justified in explaining why Eowyn was really able to kill the Witch King. It's not because "Hur hur no man can kill you but I can because I'm a woman", it's because Merry's sword had some magical essence and was able to break the spell that made the king invulnerable when he stabbed him with it.

I'm also not a huge fan of how Denethor and Gimli are handled. Throughout the movies Gimli is more of a comic relief than he ever was in the book, and it's brought to a head here when his presence in the Paths of the Dead turns them into a joke rather than a spooky setting. Look, he's trying to blow away the ghostly hands and wincing when he steps on any of the absolutely insane number of skulls that litter the place! Seriously, where are the rest of the skeletons? And Denethor is transformed from a depressed, grieving father who has seen doom coming for a long time into a crazy old man who is able to run about half a mile while completely immolated so he can jump off something and look all cool. Wow, I'm really complaining a lot here. I really do like a movie, and moments like Pippin's song as men of Gondor ride to their deaths and the riders charging into the Battle of Pelennor Fields are some of my favorites in any film. They really went all out with the effects for the battle to make up for the main characters not really being there, and it's still an exciting spectacle to watch. The only real change in Frodo and Sam's part of the story is Sam getting sent away for a while, which is another case of adding dramatic tension so there's more of it, but it doesn't have a major effect on the story. When the two stories finally converge at the end is suitably dramatic and epic, and you really feel the love the members of the fellowship have for each other. After the final conflict ends, the movie takes its time ending, and more or less culminated with the departure at the Grey Havens. I was surprised at how much that scene moved me this time, when it hadn't as much before. I can't think of why it would affect me differently now, all I know is that it did. Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's greatest work is far from perfect, and I can't say that most of its departures were that well considered. Still, it was an admirable effort, a labor of love, and definitely worth watching.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Just looking at Amazon, they're taking preorders for the Blu-ray version of the trilogy, which is cool I guess, but it also seems like they've discontinued manufacture of the DVD sets, which is... weird. Oh well. The Two Towers is a frequent pick for the worst of the three films, and mine as well, though I've seen some claim that the extended edition elevates it to the best, which I find a bit odd. It's certainly better, though that's true for all three films. In any case, it probably made the most severe alterations to the plot of any of the three, some aspects of which were justifiable, others less so. The whole structure is rejiggered to make the battle at Helm's Deep the focus, with a lot of time spent building to it when they just sort of went there and fought in the book, and the film ends shortly after, whereas the break was originally after a few other plot points that migrated to the third movie. Things like that are acceptable so the story has a normal dramatic arc to it. What's stranger is pretending to kill off Aragorn during an innocuous warm-up battle and having a legion of Elves show up in time to help instead of Éomer and the Riders of Rohan. It's not that having Elves and changing who Gandalf shows up with really hurts the story, you just wonder why they bothered when previously the only changes were trimming fat that affected the pacing. The battle itself was pretty well executed, and besides a couple dumb moments like Legolas skateboarding down a stairway on a shield, one of the best large scale clashes in recent cinema. I liked how they were able to add small things like the contest between Legolas and Gimli, even if the resolution of it was cut out of the theatrical version.

It was smart to edit that stuff together with Frodo and Sam's journey instead of keeping them separate, not only because it would have been strange that way, but it allowed them to make Helm's Deep the climax instead of the fight with Shelob, which in turn allowed them to shift that into the third movie as well, and keep the timeline straighter. Looking back, I'm not sure I support the decision to make Gollum a computer generated character. Serkis' performance is impressive and shows through the effects, and there are moments where the work they did is still extremely convincing, but for the most part whenever he's on screen I'm noticing that he's not really in the scene, and paying attention to the work that was done and not his presence as a character. It's still going to be a while before that stuff is totally convincing. I just got a feeling of déjà vu like I've written this before. Making Faramir more like his brother initially and unwilling to just let Frodo and Sam walk away with the ring is another choice that I mostly support, because after taking out Shelob there's really not a whole hell of a lot for them to do. I'm not sure they really captured his character as well as they could have, because there's more to him than just being the less favored son. Still, they did what they had to to make the story work, and sacrifices will sometimes have to be made to do that. Movies in the middle are usually a tough situation, and I thought they did well enough here when they were mostly putting things in place for part three.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

I rewatched the movies in unison with rereading the book. I read The Hobbit years earlier, but seeing The Fellowship of the Ring in theaters was my first experience with The Lord of the Rings, and it totally grabbed me. One of the main complaints I heard about it was the overly long and slow beginning, with the extended version lasting over an hour before they even leave The Shire. I enjoyed that, though. Part of what makes the books interesting is how much detail Tolkien put into the world, to a nearly ridiculous degree. They might not have needed to spend so much time establishing the setting in the movie, but since it was filmed as a trilogy from the beginning they were able to take their time and show whatever they wanted. I think the extended introduction before the adventure really begins helps make the film work as an introduction to the series for new fans while at the same time appeasing long-time devotees who fear any changes at all. Besides chopping out a couple sections and ignoring details that would affect casting (Frodo sets out at about age fifty to destroy the ring, some seventeen years after receiving it initially), it's probably the most faithful of the three films.

I think the book had a slightly different feel than the latter two, and the same is true of the movies. The last two thirds of the story are more intertwined and fuzzy about the break point, plus share a more epic war-movie feel to the battles. The Fellowship of the Ring is more of a smaller-scale cross country trip, almost like a chase movie. Nine dudes travel together and fight small skirmishes against manageable hordes. I actually kind of like the smallness of the fights, you really remember every cool thing that happens, giving them more of a memorable personality than thousands clashing against thousands. The fellowship itself is only whole for about a sixth of the series' running time, but I still mostly identify the story with the image of them all together. Boromir is one of the story's best characters, but he's not around for long, and his death more or less marks the point where the tone changes and things get dark and serious. I still think the third movie is my favorite with this second, but it still gets extra credit for getting me into it. Plus it's a good thing it performed so well at the box office, because if it set the tone by not doing so well, that could have been a ton of money wasted on three huge films, and we certainly wouldn't be getting an extremely exciting pair of Hobbit movies from Jackson and Guillermo del Toro. Also, can you believe this came out seven and a half years ago? Time is a bitch.

The Lord of the Rings

I'm going to discuss this as one work because that's how it was originally intended and I don't want to write three posts about it.

Anyway, The Lord of the Rings is very dense where The Hobbit was a bit more lean, and it can be taxing to read if you rush through it. It's best read at a leisurely pace over a long time if you're willing to spare it, otherwise it's easy to get lost in the endless descriptions of scenery and references to the kingdoms and people of times past. Even taking my time reading it, mostly with a baseball game on in the background, I occasionally found myself stuck on the same page for a while or realizing that I had gone for a while without actually absorbing what had happened. Still, if you're willing to put the time into it, there's a very interesting tale that's as much a history as a story (check out the hundred pages of appendices for proof). It's not the simpler child-friendly storytelling that The Hobbit was, but it still feels like a big expansion on the same world. In some ways the movies are an easier way to experience the plot, and some of the changes they made make more sense in the modern way stories are told, but everything in the books seems to work in the way Tolkien intended.

One example is the drawn out ending. People criticized the third movie for seeming to end multiple times, although I don't blame them for taking a few minutes to wrap up as much as possible for their twelve hour trilogy. However, that doesn't really compare to the book - there are over 80 pages in between the ring's destruction and the final line. The climax isn't even the last violent conflict in the story. The books really ignore good normal story structure a whole heck of a lot. There are multiple times where the power of the ring's seduction is compromised by people who aren't even affected by it. It's hard to say how much was really contrary to standard practice at the time because I'm not sure how long the standard way has been in place.

Another note of interest is that for a lot of the time, the focus doesn't even seem to be on Frodo and the quest. The first "book" is pretty much all hobbits all the time as they have some mysterious adventures that were actually pretty interesting yet mostly cut from the films, although starting with the second part, more pages are dedicated to Aragorn and humanity's last stand against the hordes of evil than the ring's secret journey towards destruction. It's where a lot of the "epic" feel comes from, and definitely had more influence on the future of fantasy literature than a desperate trek in foreign lands with a traitor for a guide. You get the feel that Tolkien really loved all his characters, and had a special affection for the plight of mortal men, cursed with weak wills and short lifespans. The Lord of the Rings is really about men and their kingdoms in the end, with his fascination with elves covered more in The Silmarillion, which I'm going to attempt to read soon. He's not an easy guy to read, but his dedication to his work is pretty admirable.