Movie Thoughts: Born of Hope (2009)

• Released: 1 December 2009
• Directed by: Kate Madison
• Running time: 1 h 11 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

The tragic love story of the parents of Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, told from the perspective of his father Arathorn.

My Thoughts

So I don't really watch fan-films a lot. I've watched original indie productions such as Wolf Song (which I likely won't be reviewing), but fan-films is just not something I usually touch. I've considered watching some Harry Potter-fan productions before, but with me wanting to distance myself from said property that isn't exactly happening anymore. But there is still Lord of the Rings fan-material! So let's start with Born of Hope!

This was a pretty dang decent production for a not-so-high-budget fanwork. It wasn't overly long and has good pacing. The characters are pretty standard but they have understandable motivations, so you do root for most of them. The acting was good and the makeup on the Orcs, though obviously of less quality than that in Peter Jackson's trilogy, was still decent! Even the CGI wasn't that jarringly bad, which could easily be expected of a small budget fan-film. 

One gripe I do have with this movie is the awkward editing choices they made sometimes. The wedding scene in and of itself was just edited kind of weirdly, with a lot of slow-mo, then a freeze frame and whiteout fade. There's also some parts where the color gradient of the scene just outright changes in the same shot whenever Orcs attack, rather than having it progress slowly through shots. You can literally see the shot change color, which doesn't really work.

I also didn't think Elgarain added that much to the story other than to be part of a love triangle, but we knew from the start that Arathorn would choose Gilraen because he never showed any interest in Elgarain, so her inclusion was just kind of pointless other than for needless "drama", though I'm using that term loosely since she gets over her envy in her own way. They also sometimes nicknamed her "El", which didn't really work. I get that some races like Hobbits would do this (Merry, Pippin), but it felt a bit too modern for this cool race of Men. 

There was also one scene where Arathorn is about to die where you can literally see that some people have carved their initials into trees, that was also really distracting.

It was also a little bit ham-fisted with its message sometimes. Like, I get that you want to make your moral of the story clear, but the word "hope" is said an ridiculous amount in this movie.

But overall this was a really neat fan-film! I definitely recommend you watch it if you like Peter Jackson's trilogy!