Maybe not as strongly, but I pretty much agree.
Mano a mano maybe. But Sauron has the Ringwraiths and a zillion orcs.
And Saruman, like the rest of the Istari, has the limitation that he is not a Maia that looks like a man, he is in fact embodied in flesh with all its weaknesses, limited in powers, and only dimly remembering the West and where he came from.
“The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle’s foot, the spider in a steel web!”
It’s poked into the movie and not into the books, but it kind of summed up the idea nicely, which is what i guess they tried to accomplish, smash a whole bunch of left out things into one phrase.
The exact quote does not exist in whole or even part in any of the books, but its meaning does exist in them, many times
Sorry i should have noted it was not a book quote.
I would not say an abomination per say
They are not the books and no movie no matter who makes it can ever be the books.
There are so many things going on, they simply dont fit into movie sized restrictions or Hollywood budgeting.
What the movies are, is enjoyable action/adventure films based on events from the red book of westmarch.
They work, they do what they were meant to do.
The Silmarillion on the other hand, i don’t think would lend itself well to that?
For what it is worth, i’d imagine a faithfully accurate Hobbit movie to span like 9 movies in length or so, maybe more.
And it’s the short book
I used to play a hexagon game called “War of the Ring”. There was a simpler character game that I played a bunch of times. There was a more complex army type game (but nothing compared to squad leader). It was much like the books in that the good guys could only hope to win a ring victory. Sauron’s armies were vast and numerous, Good Guys were armies were small and dispersed. For the Good guys, the armies could only prolong the game in hopes of achieving a Ring victory.
ONCE, I played the three man version (where I got to play Saruman). Saruman’s job was to play both ends against the middle, and hope to land the Ring to win. I did almost get the ring, but once I tried and failed, I was quickly relegated to irrelevance. Just as happened in the books.
I respect the comments above about Saruman having been deceived, and the thought that anyone attempting to wield the Ring would eventually hand it over to its true owner, BUT …
I guess I have always taken the Wise (Saruman, Gandalf, Galadriel) at their word when they say that they could wield the Ring (albeit, to ultimate corruption). I’ve always seen it as a win for Evil, but not necessarily a win for Sauron.
But who knows, Sauron can be quite the flatterer, and he snatched victory from defeat by surrendering to Numenor. Maybe he would just surrender to Saruman (or Galadriel) and simply bide his time…
I was referring to the trilogy of movies made from the original book The Hobbit. Unlike the Jackson trilogy based upon The Lord of the Rings, about which I won’t get into detailed discussion, since it would be treading old ground (to mix my metaphors), the three movies made very LOOSELY on the basis of The Hobbit were so filled with stuff the book never had, written in a tone the book never adopted, and so generally unfunny and uninteresting as to make most people who see them wonder why anyone ever bothered to read the whole story. And that’s an opinion I’ve heard from a LOT of people who never actually read the book, but watched one or more of the movies.
As for the quote you gave, while there are certainly aspects of that found in Tolkien’s actual writings (I recall for example a specific instance in the LotR where someone talks about the ability of The Shire to resist the Dark Lord), it is most decidedly not the case that Tolkien’s writing support the idea that “everyday deeds of ordinary folk keep darkness at bay.” Indeed, part of the whole point to the trilogy is that such folk eventually have to partake in the great deeds of the day, if anything permanent is to be done. Else, all that happens is that such ordinary folk eventually get run over, and die out. At least so I feel. YMMV.
Adding in some material from other works about just what Gandalf was up to in the middle of the Hobbit and what the Necromancer actually meant was an okay idea. The entire execution of the movies–other unnecessary changes like the whole “white orc” thing, long and tedious CGI-fest fights and running, the way that a character like Radagast was depicted (okay, I gave up watching after the first movie)–is what was terrible. Making a book (even with all the intra-book additions) that could hit all the general highlights in 78 minutes in 1977 to something like nine hours was another terrible idea.