In a sort of related area:
Why haven’t any Game of Thrones movies been made while the series films? There’s a crap-load of history to draw from.
A ScyFy miniseries is the only way to go!
just kidding…
How would the Sil even be filmed? It’s so much, so varied, different styles from story to story even.
Well, the first few episodes would involve a boatload of begetting, if you know what I mean. They could get George RR Martin to adapt it…
The next Tolkien film I want to see is a good fan edit of all three Hobbit films cut down to match the book. No more than three hours.
I was just reading an interview in which Jackson expressed interest in doing a film version of the Iliad. So he may be done with Tolkien.
If you want to set a new movie in the LOTR universe using just the material that rights are available for, there’s plenty of material in Appendices A and B in the third book. It’s mostly just outlines of historical events, so you would have to flesh it out a lot. However, considering the degree of invention especially in The Hobbit that’s nothing new.
D’oh!
Well, what is not part of the story? I mean the White Council bit is part of the story and critical, even tho not in the actual book. Taurial is new, but there were many un-named elves, why not name one, so it’s not such a sausage-party?
And I think Jackson’s LotR is the greatest trilogy in film history.
What can he do next?
Hobbits and Tom Bombadil.
Scouring of the Shire.
Last Alliance of Elves and Men , with taking Sauron’s finger off at the end.
There’s no one format that could work for the entire Silmarillion. The problem isn’t that it’s broken up into Tales; the problem is that the Tales vary so much in length. You could make a full movie out of Turin Turambar or Beren and Luthien, but you couldn’t even make a 30 minute TV episode out of Thingol and Melian (which basically consists of “they meet, they stare at each other for about a week straight, and then they’re in love”).
Seinfeld could do 11 seasons of that if was a prime time comedy series.
I think we’re done. Even if Christopher drops dead tomorrow and someone signs away the rights to the Silmarillion the day after, I don’t think the moviegoing public is interested. They won’t have anything that ties the story to the story they’ve already seen. I think there’s a ton of Middle Earth fatigue too - I don’t see The Hobbit movies making the waves that LotR did.
We’re done. And good riddance after these Hobbit movies. =/
Maybe in 25 years, some ambitious director will try a remake.
Are you actually serious?
- Everything involving Azog, beginning with his not having been dead more than a hundred years previously
- Everything involving Radagast beyond the bare mention of his name when Gandalf was introducing himself to Beorn
- Everything involving Legolas, who as a character simply did not exist when The Hobbit was written and who makes no mention in canon (nor is mentioned in third person) of ever having been involved in the business of Thorin’s Company
- Everything involving Tauriel
- How the business with the trolls went down - most especially, Bilbo being the one to keep them talking until sunrise
- The many, many chase scenes - there should have been one underground and one above in the entire story, involving the Goblins of the Misty Mountains and only them
- Gandalf being caught in Dol Guldur and having to be rescued
- Thorin having a giant chip on his shoulder over Thranduil’s refusal to help against Smaug. (It doesn’t even make sense in the context of the movie - what in the world was the Elvenking supposed to do against a monster that had effortlessly trashed the entire army of Thror?)
- Thranduil’s greed for the white jewels in Thorin’s treasure (which peters out to an unsatisfactory and unresolved end)
- Thranduil shutting the doors to his kingdom and announcing banishment for anyone outside
- Smaug having any awareness of what the Ring even was, let alone a disturbingly accurate knowledge of its effect on the wearer
- Lake-town being a police state on the point of collapse, and the dwarves trying to buy weapons and equipment on the black market
- The Master of Lake-town having Bard imprisoned
- The peculiar anti-dragon artillery and the “black arrow” being a ballista round which, however, Bard manages to fire with pinpoint accuracy on his first attempt with an improvised weapon cobbled together from a broken bow
- The lengthy and increasingly implausible battle between Thorin’s Company and Smaug, not to mention the ridiculous and unworkable attempt to submerge him in molten gold (somewhere a physicist is crying…)
- Thorin, Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Legolas and Tauriel’s lengthy and increasingly implausible combat sequence against Azog and the rest
- The ridiculous, made-from-whole-cloth tunnel worms
I could probably think of more, but this is just off the top of my head - and I’ve seen the films only once each.
I don’t see a problem with it, you just have to think of the Silmarilion as a collection of smaller stories, not as one single coherent story.
Some examples that would work nicely:
- Feanor vs Morgoth: creation of silmarils, their theft, eventual defeat of Morgoth.
- Beren and Luthien: a romance, including their imprisonment, escape and theft of a Silmaril
- The First Ring War: Isildur gets the ring, beats Sauron, refuses to destroy it. (Partially told already in the LOTR movies).
Your Great Darsh Face, I’d quibble that Legolas’ presence in The Hobbit was at least implicit in the books: We know that he’s the son of the Elf-King in Mirkwood, so if we’re seeing the royalty of Mirkwood, it makes sense that he’d be among them.
Other than that, though, I agree strongly with your list. None of that was necessary, and very little of it contributed positively to the movies.
Radagast was a Member of the White Council and Beorn knew him well. Now yes, he never met the dwarves in the book. But the business with the White Council is why there is a Hobbit, Gandalf deciding to have Thorin go off on a quest due to stirrings in Dol Gundur.
Legolas was Thranduil’s son, and a adult that the time. He’s not named, sure. Having him being at the Battle or during the captivity is not a stretch by any means.
There were thousands of elves- why *not *one named Tauriel? And the elves had no issues with powerful females. Do you have a issue with the film naming Bards kids?
Nope that one is there: In the Hobbit mention is made that Thranduil loved those white gems and there was friction between him and the dwarves of Erebor over payment in crafting them. He reused to pay thus they kept them. Yes, the scene is unresolved, but I will bet it’s there in the extended version.
The worms* are* mentioned. "Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert." Bilbo.
I have already vowed that is the only way I will ever watch Jackson’s Hobbit.
Well, there’s always re-edits of the original filmed series. How many different versions of SW has Lucas released?
I’ll agree with your list, so that my post is at least nominally on topic. But I really just wanted to compliment you on an awesome user name!
And in order:
Everything to do with Radagast, and everything to do with the White Council, was made up by Jackson - it was not in The Hobbit, and next to nothing was explicitly said about it anywhere else either.
Legolas was indeed Thranduil’s son and heir. The point still stands that neither he nor anyone else said anything about what he did during the time of The Hobbit.
If we’re to insist on allowing the existence of a named character and a whole story arc simply on the grounds that nothing in the book says they didn’t exist, then I think we’re leaving the path of wisdom further behind than Thorin & Co left the path through Mirkwood, and with as little chance of ever finding it again. There are a few instances of powerful female elves - Galadriel and Luthien, one the daughter of a Maia and the other personally tutored by her, are the first that spring to mind - but none I can recollect who were renowned as warriors, and dragging one in merely in order to make the movie less of a “sausage-fest” :rolleyes: is yet another example of PJ making shit up.
You got so close with the business of Thranduil and the white gems, and if only you’d dug a little deeper you would know that the business about the elf-king’s treasure was an extremely old one, and “…All this was well known to every dwarf, although Thorin’s family had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of”. Again, Jackson took the reference to the elf-king’s fondness for silver and white gems and dreamed up a plot-line around it, making Thranduil greedy for some of Thorin’s own treasure when the book said nothing of the sort.
As for the lack of resolution and “I bet it’s there in the extended version”, if Jackson could stop dragging out the stupid fight scenes much longer than necessary (all of them his own imagining) he might be able to get on with actually telling the story in the lousy 7 1/2 hours of screen time he had between the three movies.
The were-worms - again, they’re mentioned, once, like Radagast and a few other things, and Jackson decides he’s going to drag them in too. There is nothing to suggest that the were-worms are anything other than a hobbit myth, located at the very far end of the world beyond the bit labelled “Here Be Dragons”, but if we’re to take them as anything other than a hobbit myth then firstly they have no business being anywhere near Erebor at all when they belong in the Last Desert in the uttermost East, and secondly the “Were-” part of the name, if it means anything at all, doesn’t suggest the kind of critter that burrows vast tunnels through the earth for hundreds of miles (and yet don’t do it often enough to make any difference to any of the stories that we know about), but a creature that is sometimes a man and sometime a “worm”, whether that means a snake or a dragonet. So again, Jackson made it up.
But you asked: “What is not part of the story?”, and I told you. Now you want to shift the debate to “What is there that can’t be shown to have existed, at least in name, somewhere in Middle-Earth, and if there’s nothing to say explicitly that it wasn’t there at the time of The Hobbit then we can say it was?”. All fine and dandy, but a completely different question from the one you first asked - and doesn’t address the major stumbling block: Whether you like the movies or not, the one thing Jackson hasn’t done is tell the story that Tolkien wrote. Hubristic of him, I’d say; no wonder if Christopher is hopping mad.
The Lord of the Rings, Appendix B: The Tale of Years (Chronology of the Westlands), “The Third Age”
So?
Note there’s like a half-dozen named elves in LotR outside the appendices and I think only one in the Hobbit. Do you want everyone to be “nameless elf #3?”