Not my opinion but it’s a common sentiment I’ve seen come up in the past few days. Roger Ebert’s review of the film, for example, and in our local paper there are a large item on the front page of the arts section expressing the same sentiment, and even the New York Times has gotten in on the act.
Where the hell did the idea that Lord of the Rings is about peace and love come from anyway? It’s certainly not from the books: one might point out that the single largest chapter in The Two Towers is the battle of Helm’s Deep and I won’t even get started on The Return of the King where the characters go from an even larger defensive battle to the offensive.
One can raise issues regarding changes that Peter Jackson has made both to content and theme in the movies and argue about how these things would be on the screen. That’s a seperate issue. And from what I’ve seen he did action up The Two Towers a bit. But these complaints that the film’s focus suddenly shifted to war and Tolkien would be shocked to see his anti-war book spoiled by scenes of mass combat just confuses me.
This is the same Ebert that bitched that Jackson had changed it from a story about Hobbits to a story about Men. You may recall the original third book, The Return of the Hobbit, and how at the end of it the Hobbits dance merrily because they will be around for a long long time.
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Ebert is a moron. He declares himself a Tolkien amatur, that he boned up on the story by watching the FOTR DVD, and knows very little about the story. He then goes on to criticize PJ’s telling of that story.
It’s not just Ebert, though. It’s something that I’ve seen several articles on and I don’t understand the sentiment. Ebert’s entitled to his opinion and I think even without his misinterpretation of the book he wouldn’t necessarily rate it any higher, but the whole LotR’s is a happy love-fest thing I find bewildering.
I understand some moviemakers ruined that big hippy love-in they called The First World War, too.
Geez, TT is probably the grimest of the Trilogy, its the Book in which Boromir dies, Helm’s Deep is a battle of desperation against massive odds. Hobbits captured, Hobbits lost, Hobbits struggling. Golum in instense detail.
Anybody who refers to “the Gollum” and (no the) “Balrog” shouldn’t be making judgements about whether or not Jackson is true to the source material. He’s obviously only peripherally familiar with the books to begin with and he’s an ass.
I said in another thread that Ebert clearly doesn’t remember the books and their themes half as well as he thinks he does. I saw the movie this morning, and it’s clear that Jackson et al took pains to include some of Tolkien’s background; in particular, the conflict between industrialism and pastoralism is brought quite clearly into the foreground at one point.
I mentioned in the review thread that I think Ebert is way off-base on this one. But I do think he’s a good reviewer, and I always read his reviews each week. Sometimes he completely misses the boat, but sometimes he catches on to some small thing that was great about the movie and talks about it, and that’s worth it. With the exception of his reviews thus far on Lord of the Rings, he’s usually very upfront about rating the movie based on what sort of movie it is. He has different criteria for rating a big action movie than he does for rating a period drama. That lends him some credibility as a movie reviewer whose opinions can actually matter to the general moviegoing public. He’s not a toadie for the studios like Rex Reed or Gene Shalit, but he’s not some ivory tower intellectual who only breaks out the 4th star for foreign language films. He’s a nice, healthy middle ground.
And anyone who reads his review panning Ya-Ya Sisterhood will be an instant fan of his.
I generally like Ebert’s reviews. He can usually pen a review about a movie he hated, but describe it even-handedly and fairly enough that I can read it and think, “Well, Ebert didn’t like it, but it sounds like something I might like.” He’s pretty much the only movie reviewer I consistently read and whose opinions I give any validity to at all. Even when he makes some really loopy ratings calls, such as giving zero stars to both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Eric the Viking, two of my favorite films.
Plus, he gets major bonus points for his famed review of North. Classic.
The problem is that Ebert just doesn’t know when to clamp shut his enormous flatulating popcorn-hole. He can be excused for not being intimately familiar with the book [note the singular, Roger]. After all, the movies are being presented as standalone works, and Jackson & his colleagues have made a lot of effort to make sure the movies work without any knowledge of the book.
But what can’t be excused is Ebert’s harping on his main criticism of the movie, that it’s “not faithful” to the spirit of the book, when he himself admits that he’s “murky on the details.” Did it never cross his Pulitzer Prize-winning mind that maybe, you know, the filmmakers had read the book more recently? And that they might be just a wee bit more qualified to say what was and wasn’t in the source material? That’s nothing but pure arrogance.
Anyway, that’s not what the OP was asking. The Lord of the Rings definitely was embraced by hippies, or at least the post-hippies of the early-to-mid 70’s. I’m guessing they fixated on the whole theme of industrialism vs. nature and how the Hobbits were simple, peace-loving people, and decided to ignore the fact that much of the 2nd and 3rd volumes are comprised of huge-scale battle scenes. Don’t forget that the climax of the story involves a race of sentient trees taking revenge on the people who destroyed a forest – you don’t get a much more heavy-handed environmental message than that. Of course, the book isn’t an “anti-war” manifesto at all; the Hobbits are frequently reminded of all the fighting that had to occur to protect their peaceful lifestyle, and in fact the book doesn’t end until the Hobbits take a stand to defend their homes.
From reading Ebert’s review, it sounds like he’s confused the book with the Ralph Bakshi version of the movie, and with the hype and renewed interest in the book that surrounded that movie’s release. The Bakshi version was very much centered on Frodo and Samwise as the main characters, whereas Peter Jackson has said that the new movies are centered on the Ring as the main “character”. I could see how that, plus all the post-hippies wearing “Frodo Lives!” buttons and the Hobbiton-modeled communes in England, could convince somebody not familiar with the books that they’re all about peace and love. I just can’t see why somebody with that erroneous assumption would keep harping on it.
I liked his reviews of the films. I didn’t agree with them (course, I haven’t seen the second one yet) but thought he was very even handed in saying that although it wasn’t the film version he’d like to see of the books it was still a good movie.
It’s a bit like his review of Aliens I think. He clearly didn’t like the movie but gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 4 since it accomplished what it set out to do and did it incredibly well.
My favorote quote from Ebert’s review: his description of the Professor as a “gentle medievalist”. Hur hur hur.
I found this biography of Tolkien, which states that he was passionate about the language and culture of the warlike Saxons, and “once . . . he dressed up as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, chasing an astonished neighbor down the road with an axe.”
“The Pros: Transports you to the magical world of Mordor and introduces a wonderful cast of characters that will move into your heart and take up residence there.”
Yes, Gothmog, Snaga, and the Mouth of Sauron will always have a place in my heart.
Last year, a friend mentioned to me, after she took her teenaged sons to the FOTR, that the film was much more violent than she expected. Had she never read the book? It is filled with epic battle scenes.