Well, it’s a issue where proof would be hard to come by, however, I believe that if you had a group of uninformed viewers, you could show them long sequences of the film without them grasping that the elves weren’t humans. Apart from the pointy ears.
I haven’t seen the extras because the films didn’t interest me very much.
I dislike the comic relief dwarf but I can forgive Jackson that, because the story wasn’t about Gimli.
What I can’t forgive is the Comic Relief Hobbits. The lack of the Scouring means that we can’t see Merry and Pippin [del]level up[/del] really come into their own. Even overlooking the fact that the Scouring changed the meaning of the Shire within the tale (that war touches everyone, and that technology is changing everything,) the lack of a Scouring really stopped the growth arc of Merry and Pippin.
But Bombur’s OK - he was the comic relief in the book after all. Whereas book Gimli was a stone cold orc killing mean mtherfcker.
Pippin & Sam (& occasionally Smeagol) are the comic relief in the LOTR books. Yes, leaving out the Scouring means we don’t see Pippin & Merry come into their own, but it doesn’t change the fact that Pippin was supposed to be an idiot for the first 2/3 of the story.
That would be ideal, but it’s not always possible. I can tell myself that, but I can’t force myself to like something. Funnily enough, this thread encouraged me to give The Two Towers another try, and I was able to enjoy it this time, with some reservations. I might give RofK another go, but I may be wasting my time there. There seems to be a bit of a consensus that ForR is the strongest film and RotK the weakest, which I agree with.
I’m mostly sympathetic to the changes, which have a lot to do with the pacing of the story and compressing it enough to fit into three long films. Even some major changes I dislike, like those to the characters of Faramir and Denethor, simplify the story while adding drama and conflict, so I can’t be entirely critical. I’d preferred to have seen something more faithful and more nuanced, but that would have been very difficult to pull off in the allotted time. I remember a comment I overheard a kid making when leaving the screening of Fellowship. In a slightly peeved and impatient voice, he said “There was a lot of walking and talking.” Even if Jackson had taken the project in a direction more to my liking, there is no guarantee that would have been successful.
As I said above, I have more problems with their style. It’s very much a modern action film, with cartoon violence and generally unfunny comic relief moments, which I think are badly at odds with the more serious sections. Leaping-leaping Legolas is a particular annoyance. There are also some parts where the adaptation of the story and Tolkien’s dialogue are genuinely clumsy, where the original words are used in a different context. Take Gandalf’s regretful “So passes Denethor, son of Ecthelion.”
I think the art direction ranges from fairly good to truly superb, I really should take a look at some of the making of features sometime.
Having read a Tolkien biography, I think it’s fair to say he’d be more than merely annoyed. For example, he was very unhappy with the publishers for splitting the LotR into three books, which was necessary due to post-war economics. He also greatly disliked a 1955 BBC radio adaptation, which was a much more faithful to the books than the Jackson films. I expect he’d have been nothing short of enraged by the casual brutality Faramir and his men treat Gollum.
You missed the point so badly it ended up in Egypt. While technology vs. nature is indeed an underlying theme, note that Sauron doesn’t use technology more than anyone else. The point of the Scouring was that evil doesn’t give up.
I thought they came into their own rather adequately as it was-Merry stabbed one of the baddest Mofo’s in the history of ME, fer Eru’s sake.
Right, you need a comedic relief character. This started with Sam, passed to Merry then Gimli carried it- very well I think. In fact in the books, Merry & Pippin & Sam were the Comedy relief.
The problem here is that, to an extent, it exists in the original.
Late to the thread, oh well. My thoughts, if anyone still reads for content:
A lot of stuff in the books PJ & Co didn’t even attempt to do on film, and it turned the movies progressively worse for me. I watched FOTR four times in the theatre; TT twice, ROTK once. A lot of the things that were transplanted from other contexts didn’t work out, I thought (for example, Merry and Pippin’s adventure with Old Man Willow transplanted into Fangorn forest) just because the context was different. So essentially, that scene just shouted “Look at us being faithful to the source! This is literally in The Books!” And my reaction was, “No, because you’ve ignored context. No way Treebeard would have allowed that to happen in His forest.” (But then, they turned Treebeard into comic relief too, didn’t they? If you can’t tell, I adore Treebeard and the Ents.)
The attempts to make things “click” with a contemporary audience didn’t work out for me either (cf. Theóden’s line “No parent should have to bury their child”* and Aragorn’s cavalier decapitation of the Mouth of Sauron. Allright, he’s despicable so and so, but he’s a so and so with diplomatic immunity.) Not to mention killing off Faramir and Denethor off-screen and substituting a moral coward and a selfish glutton. But that’s probably been covered.
Admittedly, the thing that tugs at my heartstrings about LOTR isn’t that it’s the ultimate fantasy buddy story with liberal appearances of cool monsters (watching King Kong on New Year’s Eve, i found a lot of similarities and made me think that PJ probably read a different edition of LOTR than I did). And most of my dearest parts remain unfilmable. There’s a moment where Sam watches a star rise above Mordor and realises that the Shadow will pass sooner or later, that there’s always going to be beauty and goodness behind the clouds. How would you even begin filming something like that?
So my main beef is that the team scrambled up the narrative into soundbites and pieced them together as they thought best, and then tried, sometimes forcibly, to contemporise a story which was old-fashioned and meant to be so at its conception. Quoting from memory now, without having the source at hand, I remember Tolkien having written to the effect that a lot of people had found LOTR a boring story. Well, he had exactly the same opinion about the stuff they liked. It clicks with me, because sometimes I think the great literary tradition of Western Europe is all about the neuroses and sexual misbehavour of the middle class. Sorry, not particularly interested. A lot of the LOTR themes are about love, duty and loyalty, whatever race your friends and allies may be. Doing what you have to do without even a hope that you’ll going to make it yourself, but doing it anyway because it’s the Right Thing.
*I admit, this is an improvisation that Bernard Hill made and PJ approved of. But it’s a jarring anachronism if you consider the fact that until about a hundred years ago, parents buried around 80 % of their children. So, yeah.
(And can I just gripe about the wimpy, translucent little rag that Arwen was hiding behind after the coronation scene? That’s supposed to be the great standard of Isildur? Showing up about three months after it’s supposed to have been put to use? Maybe just as well. Wouldsn’t have been much use on a battlefield, and the people of Gondor would have wet themselves laughing. To paraphrase the aforementioned Mouth, it takes more to be a King than a lace hanky on a stick.)
I posted some stuff upthread about movie-Faramir; do you feel like the Extended scenes redeem him in any way? And he did let the Ringbearers go (and this in the TE), which demonstrates a lot more character than his brother had. I think PJ realized that a complete Pollyanna would be jarring, esp. in the middle of a warzone. Faramir has a lot of valid reasons to have behaved like he did (my only quibble is that he didn’t tell his men to knock off their abuse of Gollum).
I do think that PJ missed a lot of these moments-I only read the book a year before the 1st film, and I was dearly looking forward to a scene in Fangorn where Treebeard took a drink from his draught while backdropped against a starlit sky, and Tolkien describes the drops falling like shooting stars. [Rummages for copy of book]
[QUOTE=Tolkien]
…but outside under the arch they could see old Treebeard standing, motionless, with his arms raised above his head. The bright stars peered out of the sky, and lit the falling water as it spilled on to his silver fingers and head, and dripped, dripped, in hundreds of silver drops on to his feet. Listening to the tinkling of the drops the hobbits fell asleep.
[/QUOTE]
FOTR has quite a few more of these moments than the last 2 films do, to their detriment, as PJ rushes headlong from one plot point to the next (with a few notable exceptions such as the Beacons scene). I honestly think that a 4th film would have allowed the material to have more justice done to it, tho it would have broken the symmetry of the original 3 part narrative.
Never fear, eventually there will be a musical LOTR.
I’ll answer. Yes, the extended editions really made me feel better about “movie Faramir”.
The first Narnia movie was as good a translation of a book to screen as I have ever seen - only one misstep and even that one not so bad (the thrill ride when the ice broke). The second, not so much. The third, less said the better.
And seeing as no one else has given the whole formula:
Tim, Tim, Tim Benzedrine!
Boo, hash, and Valvolene!
First, second, neutral, park!
Hie the hence, thou leafy nark!
And what total garbage they made of Susan Coopers “Dark Is Rising” . By and large, few film adaptations of fantasy films have been that good. Sure, some things had to be changed for LotR, but book>film does that. Overall, Jackson’s work is a masterpiece.
Doesn’t mean it’s not there (arguably in spades). It’s just a matter of how much somebody is paying attention to those sorts of details (and might indeed be in proportion to how much any given viewer cares to notice, at that). Also, a trained eye for such things would help; basically, to a layman, I’m sure most Renaissance art looks very similar, however there are vast differences upon further inspection.
I can certainly remove myself from the familiarity of the rustic and equine themed culture of Rohan, and the stark black and white royal marble of Minas Tirith and say it just looks all “Middle Earthy”: swords, helmets, shields, long hair and braids…
Same thing can be said about Star Wars: Lasers; huge, white, greebled ships; everyone wearing robes; etc.
Take a closer look. The extras are incredibly interesting and very well done in documenting the pre-production, production, post-production and everything in between. They took tremendous pains in creating a very real and distinctive look for each culture and race. It’s an inside look and a behind the scenes like no one has ever documented before. You almost feel like you were a part of the filming after watching all the appendices. It’s quite amazing, IMHO.
Of course Sauron (or rather, Team Evil) uses technology. The orcs keep hacking forests away to fuel their huge forges and make ever more weapons. It’s even what prompts the Ents to move their leafy asses. They divert rivers, their allies tame mammoths for war… Hell, even the Ring itself could be said to be a technological item. The Scouring shows that very well - Saruman doesn’t just tear up the landscape for funsies, he does so to power his smoke-spewing factories.
Whereas Team Good only seems to use ancient relics and hand-me-downs. Barrow swords, axe of my grandfather, armor and swords from ages past rusting in some armoury… Presumably the elves needed some sort of forge to rebuild Anduril at least, but it’s never shown. Probably was magically eco-friendly, too. Fuckin’ elves.
I agree it’s not the only theme of the book, but it’s a big 'un IMHO.
Legolas leaves no footprints in the snow. 
Elves are filled with helium… so they’re lighter.
Ahh, I wasn’t aware of that. I haven’t read much about the author himself. But some of his forewords seemed to indicate he wrote these for his own pleasure and to entertain as a storyteller. I think I read he felt a movie adaptation was inevitable, but I can’t remember what he said he thought about that.
Honestly, I think the book(s) is of such classic status as some of Shakespeare’s works. And we’ve seen plenty of adaptations to film of the Bard’s (not to mention theater, it’s first medium) that are both horrible and fantastic.
These movies will be made again in the future. And they’ll feel completely different. But any adaptation will never completely capture the the detail, scope or emotion the book brings about while reading it.
And to also answer the question, yes, I felt the EEs did soften Faramir’s character a bit. But Jackson made Denethor such a douchebag, it intrinsically made Faramir a bitter and jealous character in the film (albeit, still virtuous and noble in his heart). Still, he’s an interesting character, but I personally liked his softer and kind personality in the books better.
Well, they’re filled with some kind of hot air, at least.