The Hunt for Gollum

"We’ll gouge out his eyes, twist his filthy neck…” Gollum from the bottom of the sack and Strider as the main characters in a story that could fill in the gaps from the beginning of Jackson's trilogy. The fight with the orcs, despite the poorer choreography, does evoke memories of the battle at the Falls of Rauros, but even as an ultra-low-budget fan film that deeply bows to the original, it didn’t have to abandon coherence or at least hints of its own creativity. Arwen has a nose as big as half of Rivendell, and Aragorn looks like Drogo Baggins and Mrs. Gilraen got lost at a wild party, but I understand that the casting wasn’t going to please everyone... (04/17/2023)

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. (05/06/2009)

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"). (11/05/2011)