Agreed! I like the subsequent three books in the Earthsea saga, but I don’t really “admire” them. LeGuin took her world, and kind of broke it. It just didn’t feel right after that. I go back and re-read the original trilogy twice, for every time I press on and read the sequels. (The Farthest Shore is my #1 favorite book ever.)
Grin! Too right! It makes perfect sense, and yet I don’t know of anyone who has taken it and developed it that wonderfully.
I also love the emphasized physical individuality of the Dwarves. Yes, if one is being true to the book they should all look pretty damn much the same, but tht’s kind of dull. The movie’s interpretation makes them seem much more like real people. In the book, they’re just pretty much all background characters stamped from a cookie cutter. In the movie, they’re very strongly individual.
I agree that Jackson has done some wonderful things with the way Middle Earth SHOULD look. The dwarves with individual beard-braiding, yes. I also loved his interpretation of “marked with the white hand” from FotR. If he did an illustrated edition of the books, with a photo on each page, I’d buy it in a minute and love it. But a movie… well, the pictures move and take time and (for me) there needs to be more than just amazing beards.
Just by analogy: I don’t mind the various and weird interpretations of Sherlock Holmes, as long as the movie/TV show is interesting. A beautiful recreation of 1894 London, with lots of different streets and houses all lovingly depicted, won’t do it unless there’s something for Holmes to do.
The funny thing is that you couch this entire argument in terms of visuals instead of in terms of events, and very, VERY, VERY few people have issues with these movies’ visuals. Certainly, I have none, except for a few ill-chosen special effects (Mostly, anytime something glows green).
I don’t think you’ll find many people arguing that Aragorn starting the trilogy as scared of himself and his heritage is true to the ‘feel’ of Middle Earth. That was something that someone decided was “necessary” for a movie. Not an adaptation of LotR, not a movie about Middle Earth, but a “movie” in some generic sense. I disagree.
I feel like there were a lot of things changed for the benefit of having character arcs for as many characters as possible.
For a perfect example, there’s Aragorn. If you look at the actual books, the man has very little, if any, character arc - he’s an archetype. He KNOWS that he’s going to be King, he KNOWS he’s going to have to reclaim his homeland, and he’s already done the gruntwork and worked out the angst for the past 70 years before the book starts. Now he’s the wise elder statesman and bodyguard for this little group, and for the book, that’s ok.
For the movie, everyone has to have a character arc. So they picked up the insecurities and the conflict between him and Elrond over Arwen, and all the other crap that had been hashed out already, and dragged it into the movie. Ok, fine, I get it. It’s not necessary, but it’s expected. There were a few scenes there that I thought were stupid (whoops, fell off a cliff!), but the overall arc wasn’t offputting.
As a second perfect example, there’s poor hatchet-jobbed Faramir. He was ALSO an archetype in the books. He was the thoughtful and mature king’s son that Boromir wasn’t able to be - the contrast to illustrate the point. However, because that would have made him too strong a character in contrast with the newly-character-arced Aragorn, he ALSO had to be given a character arc and a weakness, and for him, they butchered his character in a way that was totally offputting to me. The scenes may have been taken fairly closely from the book, but the interpretation was (in my opinion) WAY the hell off. It literally made my stomach turn to see his character portrayed like that. That said, people who I’ve talked to who don’t know the character - they don’t see anything wrong with him, any more than with Aragorn.
Completely apart from that, I just have trouble understanding how the same team that gives us Pippen’s song can then show up with a skull avalanche. I don’t get that.
Well, I’m willing to bet a few silver pennies that the book’s perspective is filtered through a bit of deep-rooted hobbit xenophobia. I mean, I love darling Bilbo and all, but don’t you just know that if the conversation down at the Green Dragon late in the evening turns to dwarves, somebody always remarks “All those hairy tinkers look alike”? And then everybody bursts out guffawing as though they’d never heard it before.
To be fair, of course, I bet that dwarves tend to think all hobbits look alike, too.
Oh yes. Another bit of instant canon.
Actually, while I thought that part was way overdone in the movies, I didn’t feel that it was essentially false. I think Aragorn does struggle with a certain amount of “Elendil anxiety”, although it’s much more resolutely confronted and manfully suppressed than the movies would suggest. Aragorn is strong and confident, yes, but he’s no serenely infallible divine Rama, if you’ll pardon my mixing and matching my Indo-European epics. He’s aware that Elendil and Isildur and his other ancestors cast a HELL of a long shadow, and that now the fate of the world more or less rests on (among other things) his ability to live up to them. Aragorn would make no sense as a character if he didn’t have some self-doubt about that, although in the books it’s only very subtly hinted at by comparison to what the movies show.
To your last sentence - think of reading that book when you’re about 10 - there are few scenes that evoke such a thing as a “thunder battle” - that being said, the change to the battle itself (to make it a narrow escape) is a different question - similarly, I hated the change to why the eagles showed up - but am also glad he doesn’t have all the animals talking.
Its a fine line - myself and simwife love the Hobbit and can re-watch it easily - we’re eagerly awaiting the next two parts - while I enjoy the LOTR - actually watching them is a bit of a ‘chore’ at times.
and I completely agree with you re: Faramir - its one of the changes that actually angers me now that I know of it - that and the change to Theoden - his whole “where was gondor, why should we help them” thing in the movie - in the books, there was never a doubt, the only doubt was if they could get there in time - the red arrow was never needed.
(I’ve been familar with the stories my whole life, i’ve only ‘read’ the Hobbit and LOTR once, and both were after the Movie trilogy).
In the books, it’s pretty strongly implied (and stated outright in the appendices) that Aragorn has been planning to become King for decades. Elrond flat out told him “You want to marry my daughter? You’ve got to become King first!” That’s why he masqueraded as Thorongil in Gondor in his youth. And when Gandalf gives the Palantir to Aragorn, and warns him about using it recklessly, Aragorn responds
Whereas movie Aragorn has absolutely no desire to become King, Captain, or anything but an itinerant Hobbit-bodyguard until Elrond essentially forces it upon him.
Well, I think that’s overstating his confidence level. Yes, ever since he was twenty he knew that restoring the Kingship was both his right and his duty. And he always had hope (hence the name) that the dream could come true. But he always knew what he was up against in terms of unfavorable odds. He didn’t get that grim look for nothing.
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Whereas movie Aragorn has absolutely no desire to become King, Captain, or anything but an itinerant Hobbit-bodyguard until Elrond essentially forces it upon him.
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Yes, I already said that I think the movies way overdid this aspect of Aragorn’s character. But I don’t think it was completely nonexistent in the real Aragorn.
I think part of the problem in translating book-Aragorn to movie-Aragorn is his age: In the books, Aragorn is pushing 80 at the time of the quests. People can accept that, after 80 years, he’s got a lot of backstory behind him already. Oh, he’s had a lot of drama and character development, but it’s mostly in the past.
But despite his age, he’s still physically vigorous, and so they had to cast a younger man to portray him on the screen. Put Viggo Mortenson in front of the camera, tell everyone that he’s human, and it becomes a lot harder for the audience to grasp, deep down, just how much history he has. Nor is there really any good way to just flat-out tell the audience how old he really is. So, since he looks young, and the audience is accepting him as young, he needs the character development one would expect from a young man.
This does not make sense. For one, the lone movie we’ve seen had massive amounts of material invented wholesale. Now some of it was pretty well brought out of the books, but almost the entire movie was not an “interpretation” but complete invention.
Well, we should be expecting roughly one-third of each of these films to be material not found at all in The Hobbit. As I said, an appropriate-length adaptation of the one book is probably about two longish movies. It’s the invented/extrapolated stuff that fills it out to three.
That’s pretty drastically exaggerated. Yes, Hobbit I had lots of invented filler details in almost every scene—you kind of have to put in filler when you’re translating a book to a movie. Non-speaking characters in a movie don’t just hang there in suspended animation while other characters are speaking dialogue, as usually happens during a dialogue sequence in a novel, so you have to have additional objects and actions in the scene that the novelist never bothered with. In addition, anything said by the novelist’s narrator has to be brought out for the audience in a different way in the movie, unless you’re going with voice-over narration.
So it’s true that everywhere you looked in the Hobbit movie you saw something that Tolkien hadn’t put in. But the basic story events were still mostly all Tolkien, and much of the dialogue was too. Just because the movie was superficially covered with filmmakers’ inventions doesn’t mean that “almost the entire movie” itself was invention.