I think ROTK approaches masterpiece status as an example of epic filmmaking. I think the trilogy is an accomplished nearly without equal. Not just on a technical level, but on a cinematic, story, again *epic *level. If the project had gone to Michael Bay, I’d imagine most of the OP’s criticism would be valid. With a filmmaker of talent and seriousness like Peter Jackson, the movies achieved grandeur rather than topheavy silliness. It’s the greatest overlap between popularity and “quality” that I can think of at the moment.
There’s your problem right there. There’s a lot going on in LotR, and it’s easy to miss if you’ve decided in advance it’s juvenile fluff. You might not like Tolkein’s style – he’s not as accessable as most popular authors – but *LotR * is as much an adult novel as anything written by Faulkner or Fitzgerald.
The main thing I think that deceives people about *LotR * is that it’s emphatically not a psychological novel. The modern fashion is for “serious fiction” to focus on the internal evolutions of characters rather than their external struggles. Stories of action and event are dismissed as throwaway entertainment. Usually they are.
Tolkein, however, was purposely rejecting the modern fetish for psychological character development. Instead he was attempting to recapture the type of characterization that you find in premodern works like Beowulf or the Iliad. We never learn the subconscious roots of Achilles’ brooding, just as we never learn the subconscious roots of Frodo’s sacrifice.
This odd approach to character is, I think, one of the reasons that the novels have such power. They read as though they were very, very old – as though they were rooted in the very bedrock of English culture. This is what Tolkein intended, to reimagine the lost folklore of England. But if you read them expecting Pride & Prejudice, you’re going to be very disappointed.
I think it was demonstrated to most peoples’ satisfaction that the story was not too complicated to be adapted for film – and moreover, it was done remarkably deftly.
People who have no experience of the books are satisfied and properly oriented in the world, and people who are obsessive about them find very little to complain about. Of course it’s an organic story as presented – there’s no iffy pacing, and you don’t need Cole’s notes to figure out what’s going on.
Naturally it’s condensed – it’s a different medium. Trying to transliterate a book directly to the screen would yield an unwatchable result.
I think, for a lot of people, Jackson’s films were their first exposure to the tale in a compelling way. The books are very obviously the work of an academic with what most people would consider an unhealthy interest in language and oral history. They don’t exactly tick along. “Okay… we’re going to advance the plot a little bit here, and then, children, we’ll have another seventeen pages about what our heroes ate and drank, followed by twelve pages of dirge-like recitations that provide expository extradiegetic analepsis related to the very remote history of our imagined land, with some coy parallels to obscure medieval history of the real world, but which have very little (or more often no) connection to the events in the story, and then perhaps we’ll return to the plot for a little bit…” You have to really want to know what happens to Master Frodo if you’re going to stick with it.
Of course long, complicated works present a challenge for filmakers to adapt. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be tried.
I’m very fond of Joseph Strick’s Ulysses, for example. Of course it’s not a substitute for the novel, which covers a period of nineteen hours or so with several overlapping points of view and would take most people a few days to read through straight. Still, it’s a fine film and conveys much of the spirit of Joyce’s work – even if it necessarily contains a very slim percentage of the book’s actual content. It’s a film. It’s two-and-a-half hours long.
Jackson’s LOTR does a remarkable job of getting nearly everything that’s important to the story up there on the screen, and getting it up there effectively. No easy trick.
It’s not just literary adaptations that are necessarily condensed – that’s the whole art of filmic storytelling. Would you complain that Gandhi is the “Reader’s Digest Condensed” version? I mean, really – at the beginning of the movie he’s a young lawyer experiencing personal adversity, and three hours later he’s an old man that’s mobilized an entire nation to shuck off colonial rule through passive resistance. Obviously, they took a “big and complicated story” and omitted a lot of detail – but the question is, was the story told in a coherent and compelling way?
I don’t understand how you can say:
…and then turn around and say:
How do you propose that this could have been done in an effective way? The only way you could do it would be by adding tons of unwieldy expository dialogue, or perhaps confusing flashbacks. Everyone got that Saruman was an ally that had been corrupted by Sauron after finding and using the Palantir. What extra detail did you want in there, and how do you propose it could have been worked into the script in such a way that the story remained “organic?” Should the characters talk or sing songs about the the past two hundred years and Saruman’s rationale for not going in strong against “The Necromancer” when they realized he was Sauron returned? Should this be presented as a flashback? Should his motivations be explained by showing his decades of research on the rings and where they might be? Does it work better dramatically to show him lure Gandalf blithely into a trap, with the audience sharing Gandalf’s surprise, or would fifteen or twenty minutes of exposition on his corruption beforehand have made for better storytelling?
I think the problem is the dismissive attitude in the OP, comments like “I guess I gave up kiddie books at an early age.” & “I still don’t understand why these films were so mega-popular. I guess it was the sheer spectacle that did it…”.
Finally, after two years I can start tentatively admitting that I was never that into the LOTR movies. I’ve always hated raining on people’s parades about things they liked, and at the height of the LOTR mania, any disparaging word was seen as a downpour. To make it worse, I was exactly the demographic the movies were supposed to appeal to (I presume): college-aged guy. So I gamely played along as much as was socially expected.
But, frankly, I never really got it. Somehow, I missed reading the books as a kid; I’m not sure why; I read most of the other childhood classics, and I didn’t have anything against the LOTR books – just somehow never got around to it. So I came into the movies not knowing what was going on, and I kept that feeling for most of the length of the trilogy. Maybe I’m a bit thick, but it was just too confusing keeping track of who was doing what and why. And when I would ask friends who had read the books to fill me in they would inevitably get into long, feverish explanations on the history of this group vs that group, the qualities of elves versus dwarves versus hobbits, etc., leading me to belive that you really have to have a grounding in the books to fully appreciate the movies. I suppose a particularly attentive viewer who never read the books could get into it, especially if they were willing to absorb some of the mythology from their friends, but it didn’t work that way for me.
Even if all of the required information is included in the movies, it wasn’t all included in a cinematic way. There may have been lines of dialogue here and there that should have filled in us LOTR-illiterates, but movies are primarily a visual genre. I eventually got bored by all the battles because I couldn’t quite remember who was fighting who and why. (Admittedly, a major part of the reason for this is the way the second and third movies didn’t recap everything that had happened so far; if you hadn’t seen the preceding movies recently the new one naturally be even more inexplicable.)
An admission: I haven’t even seen the complete trilogy. I went to a late night screening of the third movie when it came out; I was bored senseless the whole time and kept praying for it to end. Then, about 2/3 of the way through, the projector broke! I feigned disappointment with the rest of the crowd, but secretly it seemed like my prayer had been answered. I never bothered to see the movie again and find out how the thing turned out, and I actually still don’t know!
I liked Peter Jackson even before LOTR; I thought “Heavenly Creatures” was great, and “The Frighteners” wasn’t too bad either. The guy can tell a story, but I don’t think LOTR was his best work.
I came in here to defend Professor Tolkien’s work, but since you’re referring to Jackson’s World of Wonder I shan’t bother.
As for the movies…
FotR is beautiful, elegaic, fabulous, and a work of art with very few flaws.
TT, though deeply flawed, is exciting and engaging. Plus it introduced me to Miranda Otto, so I must love it.
RotK is a stinking pile of donkey vomit so prutescently repulsive that it reached back in time and ruined the first two movies. It is ideal for DVD in that there are so few scenes worth watching (Pippin’s song to Denethor, Sam vs. Shelob, anything with Eowyn, and that’s about it) that one can simply skip to the worthwhile scenes, expend the half hour on them, and then pretend that the rest of the film was lost in the fire on the set that took Peter Jackson’s life.
Huh. You know, I had thought I liked them in descending order like that just because things naturally had gotten more complex and confusing as the stories wore on. But it’s interesting that a fan thought the movies got progressively worse. Fellowship of the Rings was definitely the best one for me; some of the stuff at the beginning when they first hit the road) is actually quite exciting.
You just have.
I read the Hobbit in, I believe, ninth grade. I was only mildly interested, certainly not enough to spend allowance money on LOTR. The local library only had THE TWO TOWERS, and I didn’t want to read the books out of sequence (this being long before I knew it was a single book anyway). So I never got around to reading LOTR.
Fast forward fifteen years or so. One of my best friends was a serious tolkien fan, and he was insisting that we had to go to the FotR on the first night. Mostly I was just humoring him, but I agreed to. But, because of my “never see a movie adaptation without reading the book first,” and because i came across a cheap copy in a used bookstore, I read a paperback version of FotR hte weekend before the movie opened.
I fell in complete love.
You missed something by skipping the books, then. In Return of the King (the book), the army of the dead only helped Aragorn sweep the forces of Sauron out of the southern coasts of Gondor, liberating Pelargir and seizing the fleet of Umbar. They departed for the nether realms before the battle of Pelennor Fields at Minas Tirith took place. In any case, it was never explicitly stated in the book that the ghosts had actually had the power to cause physical harm in battle; it is probable that their chief weapon was fear. Fear and surprise. Er, their two weapons were… 
As far as my personal opinion goes, I loved all three of Jackson’s films, almost as much as the original Rankin and Bass animated version of The Hobbit. Honest! Return of the King was my favorite, followed closely by Fellowship of the Ring. The Two Towers kinda bugged me on several levels (like Saruman’s rather overt “possession” of Theoden), but I still enjoyed it.
Could the films have been better? Certainly. We’ve had a number of threads over the years.
Were the films good? Oh yes indeed.
The whole family loves em. We own all three in both the theatrical release and the extended versions. I just re-watched all three a few weeks ago, one after the other, during a marathon try-to-teach-myself-to-knit-but-continue-to-suck-horribly-at-it session.
In fact, for Xmas my fiance’s son got the Lord of the Rings Movie Trivial Pursuit game. He just turned 8 two weeks ago, so he’s gotten a bit old for “baby games”.
We wanted a game mature enough for the rest of the family to enjoy without being bored out of their skulls, yet one “easy” enough so that he can participate fully in the game and not get frustrated. All four of us have seen the trilogy a bajillion-squintillion times, and we had a blast playing it earlier this very evening, in fact.
(His 12 year old daughter received her very first Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying set for her Xmas game…can you tell we’re a family populated by fantasy geeks? )
I became a Tolkien fan in phases myself.
Way back when I was probably roughly ten years old I read the Hobbit for the first time. I liked the book because I had already started liking fantasy literature and the genre as a whole. However it was a labor to get through some parts of it. I basically just rolled my eyes through some of the songs that Tokien put in the book, as a kid, I just said “this stuff sucks.” I like the fighting, killing the big spiders, the slaying of Smaug, the epic battle of five armies. That stuff was cool, but I felt like I had to wade through waves of boring descriptive texts combined with uninteresting filler to get to the cool parts.
About a year later when I was 11 I got the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I made it through Fellowship and gave up after the first 1/4 of Two Towers. Man, I hated it. Nothing happened. It was talking, and running around. I just did not enjoy it at all. I still don’t remember my specific complaints (it was a long time ago) but I just didn’t like it, was bored by it.
Fast forward to 14 or so and things have changed a lot. I’ve read lots of fantasy authors by that point, and have become a true fan of the genre, so I start to think it’s silly I haven’t read the genre’s seminal work.
I sit down, and read through the Hobbit (I decide to read through the prequel+the 3 books for the full effect.) I found that I enjoyed it a lot more in the rereading, I also recognized the Hobbit was somewhat simpler than some of the stuff I had been reading (Tolkien specificall wrote the Hobbit for children.) But I appreciated some of the deeper meanings behind what the characters were saying and doing. I liked this deep world that Tolkien was showing us, albeit only small bits. You learned very little about the world of Middle Earth, you learned just enough to realize its vastness and just enough to want more.
I tore through the Lord of the Rings after that and loved all three of the books. I came to appreciate some of the more “descriptive” and “developmental” parts of the earlier books. I began to see the trilogy not as just a pleasant romp laden with battles but as a masterpiece, slowly working towards crescendo.
Anyways, compared to the novels I was given as assigned reading at the same age, the LotR was way above the reading level of those books. One of the books I remember from the 9th grade is To Kill a Mockingbird, another is Catcher in the Rye. I understand the importance of both and etc, but honestly both of those books don’t require the same reading comprehension level to “get” as LotR. So I don’t think levying the claim of “kiddie books” against them is appropriate.
As for the movies themselves, I actually appreciate that the battles are what gets the most notice. The battles are highly memorable from the novels, after all. And some of the plot, character, and world development that I loved in the book, I think would make the movie boring and bogged down. Some things just don’t translate well from book to movie, and I think Jackson did an excellent job in extracting three very good movies from three very good books. He did so in a manner that didn’t create visual copies of the books, that is impossible, he strove to make good movies and modified the books somewhat, and I’m fine with that. The only real problems I have are the little things he did that deviate from the book with no purpose that I can discern.
Okay, I’ll bite; what sort of books *were * you reading at age 9?
Sorry
Several comments:
Aeschines: many do not like or get the books. But age 9 was probably too young too read them. I would say 12 or above and preferably reading at a higher grade level.
…These are my favorite books and **QtM ** is the only person I have met on the Internet or IRL that knows more about them then I do. However we disagree on the movies. If I detach my emotion, I recognize that the films were an awesome achievement with sweeping landscapes and have set the standard for all fantasy/Epic films to come. My problem, every time the director deviated from the story it pained me. It honestly drove me out of the movie. Do I think any director today could have done a better job? No, I don’t. But to satisfy me would have taken 27 hours of movie not 10 hours.
…Someone called the Lord of the Rings a novel. It really isn’t a novel. It is a modern classic Epic. It is of course a single narrative broken into 6 books and published as 3 for easier publishing. The story is built into a carefully created word with a level and layer of detail never seen before or since. Tolkien intended the story to be the English Language Epic to rival Beowulf, Roland or the Odyssey.
…The Lord of the Rings has largely created the popularity of Fantasy by itself. It is also the inspiration for D&D, which is the inspiration for all other Role Player Games. This means both paper and pencil and computer games.
…The Lord of the Rings is not a children’s book, the Hobbit is. In fact the Hobbit is probably the longest Fairy Story ever written. It is also the difference in point of view between a happy and successful uncle entertaining young Hobbits and a morose and weary Hero who simply prepared a chronicle of a great war. Think of Lord of the Rings as the Guadalcanal Diary of the War of the Ring. It was one Hobbit’s daily struggles in an impossible and horrific situation.
I’ll stop here,
Jim
I attempted to read the Tolkien books as a kid, but they defeated me. I came back to them years later and managed to choke them all down. A few years later, I forced myself through it all again. Last year, I attempted to watch one of the movies (whichever one is first). I only wasted ten minutes on it before giving up. I guess I just don’t get it.
It’s odd, because the books seem to have all the ingredients of a book I would like. Sometimes I will read just the part where Gollum and Frodo are doing riddles. I like ol’ Gollum. The rest…bleh.
Feel compelled to reply - I am a LOTR geek. Read the books around 1965; reread many times since. I was going to skip the films, but saw “Fellowship” at a second run house & was hooked. (Still think it was the best of the 3).
I think the movies were beautiful adaptations, though obviously not without many flaws. (We’ve gone into these in other threads). I also think they are marvelous films in their own right. I’m esp. happy if they bring some folks to the books. I cherish the films, and am not getting tired of them.
That said, everyone obviously has a right to their own opinion - including you, Wendell Wagner. I’m not sure I understand the OP’s purpose - personally I think the Star Wars movies are stupid, pointless, and overhyped childish tripe, but I wouldn’t start a thread to say so (except maybe in the pit).
I thought the first movie was pretty good, but in retrospect that may have been because it was the first time I was exposed to that kind of spectacle on a movie screen.
The second one I didn’t see until it was on video, and I couldn’t get more than about a half-hour in before I literally fell asleep on the couch. I tried a couple times, too.
The third one I saw in the theater, and while the battle scenes were pretty cool, the film as a whole was so unbelievably ponderous and overblown that by the time things started winding up I was checking my watch and deciding which bar I was going to sprint to as soon as it was over. It was like the Dance of the Hippos in Fantasia, except not funny; every time a character blew his nose, I expected an ominous, subsonic rumbling.
To be fair, though, I’m not even remotely a fan of the genre; when I get within earshot of elves-fairies-wizards stuff, my eyes glaze over and I start thinking about football or Buster Keaton. Even when I was in the target age bracket for Dungeons & Dragons, and all my friends were nuts about it, I just couldn’t drum up any enthusiasm.
I really like the books and have read them a few times.
The movies, on the other hand, got progressively worse. I quite enjoyed the first, though I thought it was a little long. The second and third? Ouch. So many pointless changes that just dragged the movie out - added battle scenes, added “everyone thinks x is dead, but he isn’t really” cliches, so many interesting characters made weaker and stupider - the Ents, Denethor, Faramir, Saruman.
There was a high level of gloss on the whole thing - top special effects, good actors etc, but the underlying writing and direction was pretty dire.
Yeah, my comment about kiddie lit was smartass and not very subtle, but there was a point to it. Although Tolkien was a sophisticated linguist and intellect, he was unable to make his characters seem like real adults. Perhaps this is what your finger is searching for.
The characters are asexual. Their motivations are unsophisticated. Evil is ugly and black, goodness is pretty and white. (OK, the “white wizard,” but sheesh.) The LotR books’ take on evil is not only childish, but quite the opposite of what it is IRL.
OTOH, however dumb you think the Star Wars movies are (and the prequels are definitely cow dung), I think Lucas has some very deep insights into the nature of evil that he elucidates quite well. No, he doesn’t really deal with sadistic, wanton evil, but he grasps anger and fear as sources of power in a way I’ve seen few other creators do.
Someone asked what I was reading at age 9 and beyond. I started to read more and more non-fiction, especialy about music, since I played cello at the time (and later oboe, too). I did go on to read some more kiddie lit, such as all Chronicles of Narnia (dumb books, but much easier–in a good way–reading than LotR), the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Madeline L’Engle’s stuff, etc. But I was also reading around that age Animal Farm and later 1984 some sci-fi like Ray Bradbury. Frankly, it’s hard to remember.