Lord of the Rings and Epic Storytelling

Recently, I have taken to rewatching Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings.' I'm on the second of the trilogy, and it actually makes me think of television.

I will defend television as the strongest visual medium of continuous storytelling, but film is the medium of the epic. And I don't mean that in the modern, "that was epic, dude," sense. I mean it in its historic context, that of a long poetic composition. I still get chills watching moments of 'Lord of the Rings,' like the elves arrival, link the moment of Gandalf's return, like the moment Treebeard declares, "The Ents are going to war. It is likely that we go to our doom. The last march of the Ents." These chilling moments are ones I never experience while watching Game of Thrones on HBO.

I attribute the difference in experience to two factors. The first is soundtrack. There is something grandiose about the scores to major motion pictures that the scores of television shows just can't hope to mimic. The second is a difference in scale. Over the course of ten episodes, Game of Thrones amounted to over 400 minutes, almost 7 hours, of air time, yet no single episode had more than 45 minutes to develop and build emotions. Then we were forced to wait a week to watch it again, and start the process over. If you've ever stood on the beach watching the waves build in the distance, only to have them reach the shore with little more force than the ebb and flow of the tide, then you have experienced the emotional arc of epic told in a television show. The emotions rise and build, but never quite have enough time to crest. I would be curious, now that all of Game of Thrones season one has aired, to watch them back to back, like a film, to see if it had any effect. Even without the weekly pause though, I feel like the broken structure of the individual episodes would still be a hindrance. 

As a side note: Talk about moving down in the world. Currently, I am watching the men of Rohan prepare Helm's Deep for the final stand against Saruman's Uruk Hai whilst Merry and Pippin beseech the Ents to join the wars of men. As I watched, I just realized that the actor playing Haldir, the elf captain who brings his archers to the aide of men, later played Darken Rahl in the independent show, Legend of the Seeker, which barely managed to eek out a hilarious two seasons before even its cult fanbase abandoned it as too ridiculous. It was one of my guilty pleasure shows in college, and I used to stay up late on Monday nights with a good friend of mine to watch it on the big screen television in my dorm lounge. I miss those nights sometimes.