Maybe the immense hype surrounding the trilogy's release and all the attendant marketing burned itself out. Maybe the slow-burning backlash among a certain segment of Tolkien purists has gradually taken its toll. Maybe the context in which the films were launched -- the early Bush era, just after 9/11, when the "War on Terror" hadn't yet become a dreary mixture of Orwellian gag-line and grinding reality -- is now so deep in the cultural past that the movies have lost the invisible penumbra of meaning that seemed so strong at the time.I've noticed this falling out as well. In the series At The Movies, no film from that trilogy made the two reviewers' top ten lists for the decade (Return of the King was the number one pick as the decade's best as far as viewer voting was concerned).
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that it was a trilogy, so some critics had a hard time separating out a single LotR film to include in the decade's top ten (although Rolling Stone did name the entire trilogy as the 10th best film of the decade).
The Return of the King might be an obvious pick for best of decade accolades -- given that it did win 11 Oscars -- but I've long been under the impression that those 11 Oscars were more of an acknowledgment by Academy voters of Jackson's overall achievement with regard to the entire trilogy (i.e., they waited to see if he could pull the whole thing off before awarding any major Oscars).
As far as the movie critic in me is concerned, I enjoyed Return of the King and thought it was a fine film, but I thought The Two Towers was better. Return of the King had some great scenes, but it was a lot longer than it needed to be and it did drag in parts, whereas The Two Towers seemed to be a better-paced, more-focused movie. In fact, Return is arguably the weakest of the three films.
Anyway, it is an interesting development.
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