61–70 of 193 posts
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No man is an island. You can’t ignore what happens in the world.
Sure you can. I never saw the hobbit movies because I heard they had a lot of fighting. It’s a lighthearted book.
Also, there is quite bit of fighting in the book.
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Honestly I think any LOTR fan should be so grateful for those movies. It could have gone wrong in so many ways. At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. Remember, the books didn't have a big pop culture presence at the time. Fortunately, Jackson and others involved were really passionate about doing it right, and convin…
> At one point it was supposed to be a single movie. It could have deviated completely from the books, it could have been super cheaply made. The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success. If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that…
Much kinder than the interjection from his fellow literary club member Prof Hugo Dyson to a reading by Tolkien of a draft of LOR: "Oh no. Not another fucking elf."
I thought that was CS Lewis
For a contrary view, Google for Edmund Wilson's essay, "Oh, Those Awful Orcs".
When I was a teenager, my mum suggested I read Lord of the Rings. Or perhaps it was The Hobbit. Whatever. There were some guys on horses, and maybe a spider. That's all I remember. It was boring as fuck, and I gave up at about page 70,000 - or so it felt like. I was still young enough that I hadn't realised that you could just give up at page 2 if you wanted. Anyway, dear reader, I guess my point is: if you hate this…
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The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going for, it just went way too far overboard imo and probably shouldn't have even been attempted. I'm assuming a bit of knowledge in the unpacking of these below for brevity but hopefully it is not too unclear for those who may have only watched the movies. In the…
> In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards Boromir redeems himself - Gandalf and Aragorn say so.
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> In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards Boromir redeems himself - Gandalf and Aragorn say so.
Faramir never needed to.
It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world. It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it h…
I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra m…
It saddens me that the Lord of The Rings was commercialised. It was one of the happiest parts of life - to be able to read the books and venture into that world. It's been spoiled for me by the ridiculous movies like The Hobbit (holy god, Peter Jackson turned Dwarves into ridiculous comedy clowns, covered Radagast with birdshit) , the endless licensed garbage and whilst The Lord of The Rings movie was quite good it h…
I feel fortunate that I read those books as a kid before seeing so much as a fan-art drawing. Nothing can compare to the visuals drawn in your imagination from reading Tolkien. Jackson's aesthetic take on the places was largely as wonderful as his take on the characters was abominable, but either way it would be a tragedy for someone to see the movies before reading the books. And you're right that there was no excus…
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I too love the books, I've read the trilogy at least 16 times and the Silmarillion at least 3 or 4 at this point (haven't gotten into the others yet but hope to one day). Yes, the tv series can be entirely forgotten. So can the hobbit trilogy - I personally don't mind if the tone is a bit more lighthearted, the book was as well, it was meant to be more of a children's book after all. But certainly much of the extra m…
Well what are the two major gripes?
Let's put the ring into context. Imagine you were walking along and you came across an ordinary looking smartphone. Amazingly it works and you can make calls on it. Anywhere in the world. For free!
That's not bad. But it turns out this phone has a dangerous superpower. For, you see, Stalin developed missile guidance before the Americans and leaked the details. But there's a back door and this phone you hold in your hand is the key to it all. With the right knowledge, this phone could launch any missile from any country at any time. The phone has a primitive AI which attempts to phone home every now and then but no-one has answered it for years.
And here's the kicker: Stalin is still alive! Barely. Now just a disembodied brain in a vat hidden somewhere deep in Russia. And he wants his device back now that there's a massive arsenal for him to command.
Every agency in the world wants to get their hands on this thing. But you've got to somehow get it into the Kremlin so it can be plugged in to some ancient terminal and deactivated. But you’re not alone. Oh yes, you’ll have some help from a few random individuals who represent various interests, have a few fighting moves and are pretty good at keeping you hidden but without having any authority to make stuff happen for you on your journey.
So that's the position the Fellowship find themselves in. Does the film manage to convey any of this? No.
Moving on, the way the information is surrendered to the reader in the books is much more gradual than the film. In the books, Gandalf is the reader's and the hobbits' touchstone. When he's away the reader has no clue what's happening and it's not until the hobbits get to Rivendell -- after many close shaves -- that the full details are finally revealed.
Not so in the film: Galadriel narrates the whole thing before the opening credits!
This ruins the film twice over: Gandalf becomes redundant, reduced to opening the door to Moria and taking on the balrog. Thanks to the magic of cinema, the director teleports us everywhere so that we can witness Gandalf battling Saruman. Gandalf battling the necromancer. Gandalf battling the balrog. Instead of us learning all this from Gandalf himself after he reappears suddenly later on.
And Galadriel, the mightiest elf in middle earth, has had her grand entrance already: right at the start, as a voice over.
For me, the hobbit who undergoes the biggest Hero's Journey is Pippin. He starts out as a carefree young hobbit and comes back to lead the Shire in the uprising against Saruman. Again, the film chose to ignore this pretty decent character arc in favour of a bunch of CGI effects.
Visually, the films are great. It's a shame the screenplay is utter drivel.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going for, it just went way too far overboard imo and probably shouldn't have even been attempted. I'm assuming a bit of knowledge in the unpacking of these below for brevity but hopefully it is not too unclear for those who may have only watched the movies. In the…
> In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards Boromir redeems himself - Gandalf and Aragorn say so.