My Journey to Mordor

First things first. Here at The Film Encomium, when we are discussing the Lord of the Rings live-action cinematic trilogy, unless it is EXPLICITLY stated otherwise, we are talking about the extended editions. We support Eowyn, Faramir, songs sung in Elvish and Entish, Longbottom Leaf, conversations with horses, and Bruce Spence’s turn as the Mouth of Sauron. If you cannot empathize with that, you really needn’t waste any time reading our reflections on Tolkien—they are not meant for you. 

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I can tell you about my quest. One of the groups that luckily aligns with the above viewpoint on the appropriate editions of Lord of the Rings to show? Theater chains. Regal, AMC, and other locations have presented these movies as special events for a year or two now, and with the 25th anniversary of Fellowship of the Ring they have decided to step up their game and move them into 4DX format (and out of Fathom Events’ special event pricing, but that is a whole different ramble). If you aren’t quite sure what 4DX is, don’t worry, I will go into that momentarily. 

To start, I would like to outline the adventure I set out on here. Then, we can get a little bit more into the 4DX format and how it translated to Middle Earth. After that, I’ll briefly elaborate on each individual film in this format, before reflecting on the entire experience and sailing off to the Undying Lands. Best to get started, I suppose, because we all know it’s dangerous business going out your door.

The Mission…Quest…Thing…

Let’s start it off by just breaking down the numbers a little bit. The three films I saw in theaters—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—add up to a daunting 12 hours and 6 minutes of screen time. One aspect of this binge that doesn’t get talked about enough, however, is the fact that these sizable productions come with equally sizable credits sequences—in a time when there wasn’t the propensity towards post-credits scenes that there is today. That means you as a viewer are able to cut a full hour and fifteen minutes off of that total runtime if you leave/start the next movie after each film’s final scene, taking the full binge down under 11 hours. Still quite an undertaking, but this provides some notable breathing room.

Yet, I did not only binge through these films in one breezy eleven-hour span. From Monday around 1:30 P.M. through Wednesday around 7:30 P.M., I kept myself regularly immersed. I started off with the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit, which is still the preeminent cinematic version of that story and added a manageable 78 minutes to the front end of the process. From there I went straight to the 4DX showing of Fellowship, and came home to read some Tolkien before bed. The next day it was clear that I shouldn’t go into Two Towers without reestablishing momentum, so I popped Fellowship back on a little bit before noon so I would be going full steam ahead for the second film. I repeated this process the next day by waking up around seven to cruise back through the first two films before my wife joined me for the climactic Return of the King experience. Throw in six 15-minute walks back-and-forth from my local theater, and the grand total comes up to just shy of 24 hours of Gondorian goodness with a 78-hour timeframe. 

Overall, it’s an absolutely insane decision to make, and I recommend that you Ringers out there do exactly the same the next time it pops up in your area. The greatest adventure in the history of fantasy filmmaking deserves your most ambitious attempt. This format allows an unprecedented opportunity to feel like a member of the Fellowship. Speaking of which, let’s dive into the format.

Fly, You Fools!

A fair amount of people out there still don’t really even know what the 4DX theater format is, so let’s help add some context. 4DX films are essentially a ride. If you’ve been to Disneyworld or Universal Studios in the past several decades, you may have seen attractions such as Back to the Future: The Ride, which were early iterations of this technology. You basically sit in a seat that looks like a massaging computer chair, linked in sets of four seats. These will jostle and toss you around to an extent that occasionally makes you say “I can’t believe they don’t have seatbelts on these things.” 

On top of just the movement, they also have gear set up in front of you and around you that simulate wind, rain, snow, fog/smoke, lightning/strobes, and even bubbles when the occasion calls for it. They pump in scents—a personal favorite of mine, because you don’t really notice how much smelling your surroundings can increase your feelings of immersion. The seats themselves have mechanisms and blowholes to simulate kicks and punches, guns and bullets flying by you, and other variations of close physical contact. 

If you think that all sounds like a lot, you aren’t alone. It is not an uncommon opinion that the 20ish minutes that go into the versions of this found in theme parks is far more palatable than the full experience for 90 minutes or more presented here. Still, the ticket sales of 4DX showings are not terrible, and there are plenty of people who really love the experience. 

The truth is, it’s dependent on a variety of factors. More important than any other variable is the amount of effort that the production team of the specific film put into their 4DX presentation. Sometimes, it is very clear that they put a great amount of effort into it, particularly with animated works. Transformers One, The Wild Robot, and Final Destination: Bloodlines are amongst some of the more impressive attempts I have experienced. Luckily, The Lord of the Rings did not phone it in when they were adapting this trilogy, it was meticulously crafted. 

Speaking as a 39-year-old with a bum knee, I can assure you that a 4DX film is at least a borderline athletic activity. Not at the level of a contact sport, but maybe something along the lines of horseback riding, having sex, or surfing. It’s totally reasonable for people with brittle bones or replaced hips to skip the experience entirely, and even physically fit moviegoers would be sore after three straight days of 3-4 hour stints. With that being said, that same legitimate physical toll is the whole point of feigning trekking with the Fellowship in this manner, so let’s dive into the journey itself. 

One Does Not Simply Walk

              The opening couple of scenes of Fellowship of the Ring provided a lot of context for the way the expedition would go. The flashback to the Siege of Barad-dûr saw one couple immediately move away from my row to find another spot in the wheelchair-accessible seating, where the young woman proceeded to sit on the ground for three hours while her date got tossed around like a rag doll. I’ve attended roughly fifty 4DX movies at this point, and this is a regular occurrence. For those prospective attendees who may be concerned that a multi-hour ride might be too much for you, check with theater staff for a regular chair before you go in. It will not be the first time they have heard that request. 

  However, films in this format shake you around a bit during action sequences, even if the production team phones in the programming. When they put serious effort into the minutiae of adapting it, the experience can quickly become a lot more enjoyable, and there were several signs early on that this was the case. When Bilbo was heading out to Rivendell after his 111th birthday, he dropped the One Ring to the floor, and with the impact they just hit you with one quick but heavy vibration all over your body. It was the sort of impactful touch that really helps draw the audience in and helps us buy into the charade. 

When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin were hiding underneath the bridge during their first encounter with the Nazgûl, I was hit with the next promising sign in the form of a deep, earthy smell. I mentioned above that the smells are probably the most appealing aspect of 4DX for me, and in this moment the theater filled with the smell of specifically damp vegetation, and it really accentuated the sensation of being bundled up with those hobbits—getting our first real taste of danger together. Triggering an olfactory reaction is very much the aspect of this technology that most desperately needs to be perfected. There would be a market for screenings of films with only that aspect added to the traditional viewing experience, and I would be a part of it.

The heart of this storyline includes as many of the large, sweeping panoramic shots as the other two thirds of the trilogy combined. As such, there are moments that this feels like an interactive experience at a museum exhibit, and not necessarily in a bad way. There is plenty of action in Fellowship of the Ring, but with the benefit of hindsight, it was more just delightful world-building that warmed up the horses for the long journey ahead—as it should be.

A Red Sun Rises

The pace of this trilogy accelerates almost immediately with the start of The Two Towers, and the 4DX formula matches that pace. The first installment was hardly a one-note experience, but the broader scope presented here gives them a lot more to work with when it comes to motion immersion. In Fellowship the company tends to move through either running, walking, or fighting. This portion of the journey adjusts to include the lumbering march of Ents, sneak-attacks from Gollum, being dragged along by Wargs, and horseback riding—so much horseback riding. (Pro-Tip: If you click your heels against the sides of the footrest, it greatly enhances the feeling of spurring a horse on.)

Of course, the crown jewel of this particular production is the climactic scenes during The Battle of Helm’s Deep, and its effects are not dampened in the slightest in the midst of this motorized marathon. Floating back and forth from the Last March of the Ents, to Faramir’s crucial moments of understanding with Frodo, and back around to Gandalf and Aragorn leading charges on two fronts to overcome the odds in the first light of the fifth day. It is the sort of epic sequence that absolutely justifies the sort of spectacle that is a 4DX movie screening.

Like all great middle films in a trilogy, this one just gets your juices boiling. The mission is by no means over, but you walk out of the theater feeling as if you can accomplish anything. The stakes felt higher than ever while walking home already sore all over, but I strode along with a spring in my step all the same. We still had our biggest battles ahead of us, and I’ll be perfectly frank, at no point during this days-long Middle Earth binge did that “we” feel more like a genuine brotherhood than it did that evening. 

For Frodo

Once again, the quest takes a necessary but intense tonal shift at the start of Return of the King. Opening this film is the scene of Sméagol murdering Déagol, and eventually transforming into the creature Gollum. This is an important and emotional inclusion that sets the final installment of this trilogy off on the much more grim and hopeless note that will define large swaths of it. No matter how you watch it, this is a scene that is meant to shake you, but when it is quite literally shaking you as Déagol’s life drains out of his eyes and Sméagol hastily crawls over his dead body to recover the One Ring? It accentuates those emotions in a deeply resonating fashion.

Now, shortly after that, we ran across my most major gripe from all three days worth of active spectating. Throughout the first two films, they had maintained a steady course of motion. Sometimes, the characters on screen aren’t doing much of anything, and it wouldn’t make much sense for the seats to be moving, and this trilogy overall was really great about keeping you in motion whenever there was activity on screen. 

The moment they missed? When Merry and Pippin were singing and dancing on the tables in Edoras whilst celebrating the victory at Helm’s Deep; the seats didn’t wiggle an inch. It stuck out like a sore thumb to me, because as any Tolkien scholar will tell you: if you don’t have time for singing and dancing, you don’t have time for Middle Earth. It was a noticeable misstep, but it was also the only noticeable misstep made over a dozen hours of screen time, so it isn’t too hard to forgive. 

For the vast majority of this iconic flick, the members of the original Fellowship find themselves outmatched at every turn, more than once impossibly so. Much more than the first two entries in the series, Return of the King really goes out of its way to grind home the bleakness of war that is underlying in any decent Tolkien adaptation. This aspect is very much reflected in how much more the audience in a 4DX theater feels like they have been in a physical fight after the lights come on. 

Whether it be Shelob, oliphaunts, Denethor eating tomatoes, the Paths of the Dead, or the motherfucking Witch-king of Angmar himself, this was very much the volume of this tale that felt destined for this particular format. By the time we reached the final struggle and Gollum went cascading down into Mount Doom—therein setting a seismic shock that shoved the audience back into their seat forcefully one last time—we were all ready to cry a little bit and gently sail off to the Undying Lands. This film already has one of the most profoundly emotional last few scenes in cinema, and let me assure you, going to outrageous lengths to trick yourself into feeling like you were part of the gang does nothing to soften that blow. 

It’s Worth Fighting For

So, what is the verdict, you ask? Like any worthwhile quest, you have to find your own reasons to embark on this one. It certainly isn’t for everyone; in fact, there are several individual parts of this overall mission that don’t hold universal appeal. I truly do not think I would want to do this without fully committing—it would feel like a job half done to only make it to one or two of these showings without getting the set. 

However, for those of you who—like me—are absolute lunatics? You may want to keep an eye on the horizon for the next time this trilogy hits the nearest 4DX theater to you. It is quite the endeavor, but as far this Tolkienist is concerned, this is the most fantastically epic way to experience the greatest fantasy epic of all time. 

Cheers,

Jared B. Halstead

Pirate Captain

The Film Encomium