The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (Extended Edition) [Blu-ray] [2001]

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On the bright side, there is one new extra thrown in, and it's even one that might appeal to the IGN audience, a preview of the upcoming video game The Lord of the Rings: The War in the North. The darker scenes are still the highlight – including the standout Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence – with no black crush and solid shadow delineation. It’s a must-have collection, it’s just a shame that the odd colour timing issues have left me unable to completely rave about the release without qualifying my statement first.

If this presentation is, indeed, struck from new HD-masters, then the increase in quality is far from significant. These are visionary works by a master director, a painstaking decade-long cinematic journey that may never be equaled. Here Frodo and Sam finally get to Mount Doom, while Aragorn and company go to Denethor (John Noble) in Gondor, where they are not welcomed with enthusiasm. Though none of the films are small, there are literally thousands of people in the final battle (many, to be fair, done with CGI), but when there are swooping dragons, and all the orcs and Uruk-hai and humans and the great palace of Gondor, it’s truly epic. It seems that if a rating for this edition only was calculated, it would be much closer to 5-stars than the current 3.offers an in-depth look at the New Zealand's team's work on the special effects, and on the design of the main villains, including the added Mouth of Sauron. As with the extended DVD editions, the films have been split over two discs, so no information has been lost in compression. Well, I’d really like to say that it is, but the cynic in me nags away with the nightmarish threat of a further Blu-ray release – timed to coincide with Christmas 2012’s release of the first Hobbit prequel.

Here, it appears that none of that object-specific detailing has been done, with a blanket filter applied to the entire movie. Where the previous release boasted intermittent scenes of excellence, but frequent lacklustre moments, this new transfer maintains a much higher overall standard throughout the runtime. covers all the Kiwi locations of the third film, while Middle Earth Atlas allows the user to track the paths followed through Middle Earth in the course of the movie. It's a fairly straightforward box set, rising above others only by sake of its attractive design and individual cases, and there are few frills to speak of.

where everyone talks about the relief of having finished, the premieres, and (briefly) what's to come.