The Fellowship Of The Ring was Middle Earth’s original Suicide Squad

By Joe Blevins | February 3, 2016 | 11:44pm

Aux Features Film

The Fellowship Of The Ring was Middle Earth’s original Suicide Squad

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A cadre of disparate and desperate characters join together and embark upon a ridiculously dangerous, almost assuredly fatal mission with the very fate of their world at stake. That’s an extremely vague plot outline for the upcoming and hotly anticipated DC Comics adaptation Suicide Squad, but it also applies to Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, Peter Jackson’s 2001 adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy classic. This is the take home-lesson from “The Lord Of The Rings (Suicide Squad Style),” a deliriously entertaining new trailer mashup from The Unusual Suspect. Apart from being mega-budget blockbusters with broad commercial appeal, thanks to their popular respective source material, Fellowship and Suicide would seem to have very little in common. But with some creative editing, this parody indicates that the two films do share some storytelling DNA.

The mashup apes the structure and tone of the recently released Suicide Squad trailer, right down to the use of “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen, but the clips are all taken directly from Fellowship Of The Ring. What The Unusual Suspect has done here is to emphasize the goofier moments of the Rings saga, such as the wisecracks and the occasional slapstick, as well as the examples of ass-kicking, Orc-slaying violence. The final result is that Lord Of The Rings becomes, like Suicide Squad, a movie about crazy people doing crazy shit on the big screen. The results are as stirring as they are silly. This is a best-of-both-worlds situation, combining the grandeur of Tolkien with the mayhem of modern comics.