The Two Towers Special Platinum Extended Edition

Picked up a copy today and watched it after I came home from an exam.

It ... is ... fucking ... awesome.

What about the Delux Ultra Mega Super Special Gold Platnium Diamond Ruby Bill Gate's Bank Account Extended Super-Sized Edition?

got one waiting for me at home.
oh, and I got one of those Two Towers dealies too. :D

Is it less awful compared to the standard edition?

it's great, most of the extra time is taken up by extended dialogue scenes which help tie things together, or provide some comic relief (not in a jarjar way, thankfully) as well as tie things to the first film. the rest is taken up by faramir/boromir/osgiliath. which is good too.

oh, er, and there's more of those talking trees, dohhh

It's silly that they split the movie into two discs. That may actually be a determining factor.

Hah!

What is it coming to.

Yeah it is annoying having to swap the DVDs. But I'm used to it, since I have quite a few movies now (and mini-series) that come on more than 1 disc.

I think the Extended Edition releases suffer from the problem of having something like 8 or 9 audio tracks alongside the one video.

When we re-do our "media center" and get a widescreen TV I'm going to also go ahead and spring for a nice 5-disc DVD changer too, and that'll help.

Going to pick it up later in the week, even though I already have TTT cinematic release.

I didn't like the movie.. this might be better but at the best I'd just have a little bit less missing stuff and inaccuracies to whine about.

I'm waiting for helmsdeep.wad platinum extended edition.

I have the Mega Super Deluxe Edition of Fellowship of the Ring. I'm going to have to get this and ROTK to complete the set. I also heard they had a 'Gollum Edition' too?

I just purchased my copy, and have finished watching the third disc. I've seen the theatrical release enough times that I wanted to delve in to the appendicies, as I thoroughly enjoyed them in the FOTR set. This time around there's a lot more explanation of Tolkien's background and inspiration; anyone who's read the prologue knows that he never meant to infer directly or indirectly that the wars in the book were akin to World War I. But I digress...

I'm going to watch the movie now, and then finish the 4th disc.

the_Danarchist said:

I also heard they had a 'Gollum Edition' too?

Yep. When I went to Borders to buy the 4 disc set ($29.99), they also said they had a "gollum edition". For more than double the price ($71.99 there), you got a ~5" statue of Gollum holding a fish and looking over his shoulder while crouching on a rock. It also included a 5th DVD which is some sort of Gollum story. The statue wasn't all that great, and the DVD didn't seem that interesting (unless you're a HUGE Gollum fan I guess), especially for the price.

I'm going to assume "needed more impsex" is the place where "haven't picked it up" should be because 4 people thus far have chosen the strangely obligatory "bullshit option" in place of a worthwhile opinion.

That's my rant BTW, why offer the silly option when you don't know if people are clicking it to be stupid or if it's where the misc option should be. :)

EDIT: Oh and I'm happy to hear about this cus I didn't get the Two Towers after getting the theatrical release for the first movie, only to have the dvd with all the extras come out sometime later. Luckily with this case you can learn from the mistake before the Trilogy ends.

call me a false fan, but Gollum is the weakest part of the movies, IMHO.
cinematically it would take a lot of work to do what they have done, and his character is extremely vital to the core story. but that doesn't change my feelings.
I can't wait to see the extended version though. It will be the 4th LOTR DVD in my collection. ;)

Yes, more impsex is needed.

Haven't seen it (although I voted "Needed more impsex" cos I just assumed it had none) - what's new?

I think I liked the theatrical version of TTT better than the extended version. It's still a good movie, but, with a few exceptions, none of the added scenes really add anything to the movie and some of them sort of ruin parts of it (namely the lighter joke scenes towards the end, Mery and Pipen finding the food and Legolas and Gimli tallying their kills, which I actually wasn't too fond of in the theatrical version either). In the case of FOTR I really liked the extended version and I thought all the added scenes were really enjoyable and none of them really took away from the movie or disrupted the flow like the ones in TTT.

That's just my take on it anyways. FOTR is such a great movie, I loved it from the second I first watched it whereas TTT took a few viewings to grow on me. I think the major problem TTT had was it had such gigantic massive shoes to fill and, while it was still a good movie on all accounts, it fell short of FOTR by quite a bit.

it has to be on two discs because it's so damned long! the cutoff in TTT is really bad, it doesnt even fade to black. on the extended Fellowship they found a really neat spot to put it in. but having to change discs is, frankly, a lame and lazy excuse not to see the edition. surely having a break in the middle of a nearely 4 hour film to go for a piss is a good thing!

on the other hand, if you have an xbox ps2 and a dvd player, or just two of the above, you can have the second disc cued up and ready to go! assuming you have a monster telly with plenty of av inputs. mind you, would anyone really want to watch this on anything smaller than 30"!?!?!?

Cyb said:

Mery and Pipen

You mean Meriadoc 'Merry' Brandybuck and Peregrin 'Pippin' Took? Why are people nowadays too lazy to read the book movies are based off? ... especially since the book is always much much better.

sargebaldy said:

especially since the book is always much much better.

And the topic here is a case in point.

Why must people always compare books with films? How can one be better than the other if they are two totally different forms of media.

The Flange Peddler said:

Why must people always compare books with films? How can one be better than the other if they are two totally different forms of media.

Yes, that is so brain-baffling! The idea that enjoying the sexual company of beautiful women, for instance, could be "better" than, for another instance, eternal encapsulation in boiling feces, when the two are completely different forms of venture.

Whatever. I stand by my point. Both are different forms of media, both with their strengths and weaknesses. Attempting to do a direct comparison between the two is always going to be misleading. Somethings can be better done in one form whilst others in the other. A film of a book is never going to please everybody. The directors vision of the book is not going to be the same as everybody that views it. And things are going to have to be changed in the adaptation.

Personally I think both the books and the films have their merit, and have enjoyed both. I think you'd be hard pressed for someone else to make a better theatrical vision of the books.

But what does get me is the attitude people often have towards people who haven't read the book of a film. As if their opinion is any less valid just for that reason...

cycloid said:

on the other hand, if you have an xbox ps2 and a dvd player, or just two of the above, you can have the second disc cued up and ready to go! assuming you have a monster telly with plenty of av inputs. mind you, would anyone really want to watch this on anything smaller than 30"!?!?!?

Um, you can have a multi-disk DVD player. My dad has one of those. Of course, I'm stuck with watching DVDs on my computer. :P

The only issue I have is with Gimli's usage of the word "nervous system" which is quite an anachronism.

As for the readded scenes, I would argue that for the most part they help the flow of TTT better than the sections that were readded to FOTR for its EE release.

And some of them were just plain fun. Merry and Pippin are mostly really light characters in the book until TTT, and they don't really become serious until ROTK anyway, and even in ROTK they have their moments of levity. The whole story with Glimi and Legolas was that they had a friendly sort of antagonism, stemming from the dislike elves and dwarves historically have for each other but also based firmly in their friendship as it develops throughout LOTR, and in addition to the fact that they're great warriors in their own right--I mean, Legolas himself is a prince of the elves of Mirkwood.

There's a lot of stuff that were cut for the theatrical release that could have provided a better transition. One of them being Frodo's release from Faramir, and another being Faramir's reflection of the day Boromir was sent north by Denethor to seek out Imladris. There's more examples, of course, but those stand out.

And a lot of the background material on the Ents from the book were really quite interesting. They had to be brief, but what made did make it to the TTT:EE release really shine. Treebeard going "I can't remember now" when asked what entwives looked like, was funny, but also really accurately reflects the Ents as depicted in the book.

i was wandering, myself, if they'd have invented the term "nervous system" waaaay back in them days before the race of man took over entierly :-) mind, coming to think of it. it's told in english but obviously that's just artistic liscence replacing the language they would actually have been speaking (aka "the common tounge" as it's referred to by beardy), in which case "nervous system" is merely an apt translation of an ancient term that means something, vaguelly similar. probably. it's far too late (3:45 am) and i need some sleep i think


edit: well, as for gimil, legolas and, indeed, boromir. the entire point of elrond's meeting @ rivendell was, surely, to get all the hardest bastards in middle earth in one place so they could sort the ring situation out between them.

cycloid said:

but having to change discs is, frankly, a lame and lazy excuse not to see the edition.

Sorry, but the customer is always right. Know it.

Lawrence of Arabia was on one disc. It's 3:47.

AndrewB said:

Sorry, but the customer is always right. Know it.

Lawrence of Arabia was on one disc. It's 3:47.

The customer is always wrong.

Did you really think there was only one version of Lawrence of Arabia??
Although AndrewB is wrong, it's 3:48.