Not-so-minor point. In the movies, it doesn’t look like he’s had the ring long. In the book, he’d had it for roughly 17 years between Bilbo leaving and him leaving Bag End. Plenty of time, even if he barely used it at all (which is the implication).
Granted, all the use of it during the quest, as well as the assorted wounds (physical, emotional, and spiritual) gathered over the course of the journey would have made things worse, but 17 years of steady exposure is not just a few days.
[ back to the sub-discussion on where the movies mislead, though I tend to give them much slack for trying to cut out a lot of moments that slow down the story while keeping it coherent, something that failed horribly in the Hobbit movies ]
Frodo has the Ring from TA 3001 until TA 3018 when Gandalf realizes it is the One Ring. Boromir, who never wore the Ring was corrupted in less than two months.
Well, even Jackson isnt gonna have two hours of Frodo having 17 birthday parties until Gandalf comes back with the news.
Hobbits do have some resistance to the Ring, but Humans very little. And the Eagles? Well, those are not just big birds, they are supernatural, and notice Gandalf refused to even TOUCH the Ring.
Then again, did Frodo have any reason to even think about Uncle Bilbo’s trick ring between Gandalf saying something about how the ring seemed a little skeevy and he might want to look into it and coming back in full panic mode?
The Rebels in Star Wars could have solved both Death Star problems by simply accelerating their starships to light speed and kamikazing into the space station.
Top Gun 2: how to blow up a heavily-defended nuclear reactor and GPS is jammed? Easy: cruise missiles with terrain contour mapping. D’uh. Want a backup to that in case the radar altimeters could be jammed? Ok, DSMAC (Digital Scene Matching Area Correlator).
That’s just the downside though. The song doesn’t give any actual info about the relative benefits of the upside, but I think it’s fair to assume that the singer considers a continuing relationship with his girlfriend to be a) at least twice as good as being alone somewhere else and b) worth quite a lot of trouble. Hence the dilemma.
I forgot where I heard it but an Air Force expert said that if it was actually as critical an operation as they claim it to be they’d just fly a few high altitude B-2s and hit it with bunker busters.
Except that in Bilbo the ring wasn’t the Ring…Watsonian because Sauron was not in position to exert his powers and Doylian because Tolkien had not yet choose to make bilbo’s magic ring The ONE RING.
And it was a short flight, just to get ahead of the goblins, the Eagles didn’t leave the mountains. It’s a longer flight to Mount Doom.
Grumble, grumble, rant. This is what Hollywood gets for monkeying with the script. In the bookGlinda does not appear until the end (albeit, her existence is known to Dorothy); no witch magically gives Dorothy the shoes. They are just left behind; Dorothy notices them; and as Dorothy’s old leather shoes are falling apart, she decides to change into the silver shoes, which seem sturdier for the long walk ahead. Rant, rant…no damn sense grumble, mumble, rant.
Maybe there’s some confusion about who’s being referred to, but the Wicked Witch of the West is indeed the witch melted by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Mombi is the wicth (or maybe not a witch) whom we first meet in the second book.
This is why you should never read the book after seeing the movie, or vice versa. Doesn’t matter which title we’re talking about.
They are always two utterly different stories with some small character overlap. The dramatic demands of the two mediums require they be very different stories in order for one (or both) not to suck.
A memorable college prof I once had spat nothing but sour words for the film. The book was a story telling triumph of early turn of the century American politics, from the idiot farmers who thought there’d be more wealth if you changed from the gold to a silver standard to the industrialists without a soul and one particular cowardly New York politician.
I have always wanted to read it.
But let us agree the film is a work of it’s own and stands and may be criticized as such. If I bitch about Aliens plot holes it will impress no one that an early script someone once saw fixed those.
Probably not a good enough CEP. Those damned thermal exhaust ports are always too small. And the steep-sided conical valley would provide a very difficult terminal maneuver problem that probably exceeds CM capabilities.
In terms of warhead size and warhead count, yeah for sure. But those weapons are also GPS-guided. And absent GPS will have the same CEP problems as would cruise missiles.
IMO / my bottom line:
A nuclear ICBM is always the best solution militarily to a hard target with geometrically difficult and/or well-defended approaches. It might not be the best answer politically, but when you want to be absolutely positively sure “nuke it from CONUS” works every time. We hope.
But that’s all meta - in the Lord of the Rings itself, the Eagles are known to have carried the actual Lord of the Rings version of Bilbo with the actual supposedly all-corrupting LOTR version of the One Ring without being corrupted.
The key, as far as I am concerned, is that the Eagles don’t have to be told what they’re carrying. The whispering instant-corrupting version of the One Ring is an invention of the movies. The book One Ring needs time or at least awareness of it to work, seemingly (there is no dramatic “throw it in the fire!” scene in the book, for example.)
They got there quick enough when they needed to, later It’s not going to take them weeks.