The Hunt for Gollum

I can’t understand why, with all their admirable enthusiasm, the creators didn’t even attempt to create a screenplay. At least just a little hint of one; that would have been enough. Sadly, without a screenplay, the thirty three minutes stop being entertaining much sooner than they should. Also there’s the common problem that the majority of enthusiast movies share. Unnatural dialogs. There’s always a sentence, a minute of silence, a sentence, a minute of silence, and then the same all over again. As a result, the dialogs seem pointlessly staged and too amateur. And the dialogues themselves aren’t even that awful and the non-actors aren’t that bad either (except for Strider’s “Frodo face"). It could serve perfectly as a demo of “what Rita’s gang could get up to", but as a movie by itself it is just insufficient. Not bad though, in the end. (06/05/2009)

The Hunt for Gollum has the great advantage that almost every negative you can find about it can easily be excused with a magic phrase like "But for being made by fans and with only a few bucks...". However, I still can't get over the fact that Aragorn's actor looked like a fool, that the story was futile, and that while some scenes had a real "Tolkien-Jackson" feel and looked like an actual movie, others (Aragorn's duel with the orcs) felt like a home video (or rather a "forest video"). (05/11/2011)