Titanic : Pearl Harbor :: Lord of the Rings : ?

Cafe Society
1

This might be the wrong place for this thread, but it’s movie-related, so I took a stab at it. :slight_smile:

When Titanic came out, it was a long movie about a historical disaster with a fictional romance thrown in for some bomb-under-the-table suspense. I only saw it twice in the theater, but it was a film with a wide following and a great many people went to see it. I thought it was good, but it wasn’t the best movie ever made, to me.

Am I alone in having had a bad feeling that Hollywood would inevitably learn the wrong lesson from Titanic? “Oh, great,” I thought. “Now they’re going to make even more long melodramatic romances, set against the backdrop of big explosions and historical disasters. But what they’ll forget is to write a good story. They’ll forget to pay homage to the details of the source material. They’ll forget to make it interesting. But paper-thin romance and explosions, that they’ll remember, because Hollywood is good at those.”

And so we got Pearl Harbor. I never saw it, so making the comparison is going out on an assumptive limb. Am I wrong in drawing this connection?

Whether or not the first comparison is true, now we have The Lord of the Rings. A three-part movie franchise of a well-known series of books. Fantasy. Long movies, all. Made simultaneously to save on production cost. And they’re doing well at the box office, so far.

What lesson do you think Hollywood is going to learn from this example?

My guess: The Chronicles of Narnia.

What do you think?

FISH

2

My hope is that it will be the Ender series from Orson Scott Card. Ender’s Game is in the works as we speak.

3

Nope. Narnia is too intellectual for Hollywood to be interested, plus the books are separate, not one unified work.

More likely: The Shanara Series by Terry Brooks. It’s already a rip-off of LOTR, so is a perfect candidate.

4

You wouldn’t be cruelly teasing us would you?

Because,
[Bruce Banner]
You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…
[/Bruce Banner]

:smiley:

You wouldn’t happen to have any links to any sort of info on it would you? I just finished Ender’s Game again, and I hope they make a good movie out of it…

5

Yecccch. Lame as they were, I would rather see the Dragonlance Chronicles adapted than Brooks’ insipid bubble gum.

6

I’m awaiting for the Smurfs Horror Trilogy:

I know what you smurfed last summer
I still know what you smurfed last summer
I know what you will smurf next summer

::ducks and runs::

:slight_smile:

7

I never saw it either but I believe there is a corollary here. I avoided Pearl Harbor because so many reviews said the attack was made ancillery to the love triangle. In fact, when my SO tried to give me the Pearl Harbor DVD one Christmas, we returned it for Moulin Rouge instead. I think I made a good choice.

8

Im sorry, What example?!!
I could possibly understand this thread, and the example being made if I could see the comparisons, aside from the obvious ones that is…

I get how Titanic and Pearl Harbour can be compared because both were real events that happened, and when turned into a movie, were based around love stories and explosions.

I am however, failing to see how Lord of the Rings falls under this description, first because its fiction (unless Ive missed a big part of the world:p) and secondly because the love stories are so completely different, that main love theme between Aragorn and Arwen, is only barely touched on. Any other love is shown more threw friendship then any other means. As for the explosions, well there in the books so obviously there in the films. Aside from the little changes between the books and the films, I dont think Hollywood has altered LotR to much, I guess that is the point I am trying to make.

Regarding the question of will Hollywood ever stop making the films super long with the same core topics, I hope they do, because I for one hated Pearl Harbour and Titanic.

9

Narnia isn’t nearly as intellectual as LOTR, so I think they may make these.

10

The Narnia idea is interesting. They could make good movies. But how? They wouldn’t make seven of them. And it would be hard to combine any two of them and keep the movie under three hours. I could see them going for The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Heck, most of them would make pretty good movies if shown the same respect that Jackson showed for LOTR.

But I realize your point is that Hollywood won’t see in LOTR the respect for the source material, the attention to detail, the concern for the fans. They’ll see funny dwarves, swordfights, monsters and CGI battles. If that’s all they put into their next effort (and heaven forbid they do it to Narnia), it will not surprise me. (Look at all the clumsy, cheesy sci-fi that came out after Star Wars in the late 70’s/early 80’s).

11

Well, if you want:
-fantasy/ sword & sorcerer, +
-epic length, +
-big following, &
-done really badly, then

I can’t think of anything better (worse?) than the Wheel of Time series.

12
13

Delly I think you’re missing the point of the OP. Fish is not claiming that Lord of the Rings is similar in format to Titanic or Pearl Harbor.

The OP (Titanic : Pearl Harbor :: Lord of the Rings : ?) could be rephrased as Titanic is to Pearl Harbor as Lord of the Rings is to WHAT?

14

Delly, I’m assuming that it hasn’t escaped moviegoers that Hollywood tends to repeat itself. When one film is successful, you will see one or two un-asked-for sequels. When one volcano movie comes out (such as Dante’s Peak) we’ll get another one hot on its heels (Volcano). When a director has success with a small-budget action film, Hollywood hires him for a big-budget action film (Joel Schumacher). Put a comedian in an action role, such as Brendan Fraser, and suddenly he’s an action star suitable for other action projects.

Hollywood, in short, learns the lesson that if something works once, it’ll work again the next time; but they don’t always learn the lesson well. They as filmmakers, and we as an audience, don’t always agree on which elements make the film worth seeing. Thus, in my view, Titanic spawned Pearl Harbor.

Given Hollywood’s track record of misunderstanding what makes a movie good, and given the industry’s tendency to badly repeat an obvious success, I was wondering what people thought Hollywood would learn from a film that is groundbreaking in many ways, difficult to make in many ways, and goes against the grain in many ways.

Lord of the Rings is high fantasy, it’s composed of very long movies, it’s based on books that not everyone has read, it’s got mostly unknown names in it, it’s directed by the man who gave us Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles, and the story arc takes place over three films. All of these are no-nos in Hollywood.

To execs:
Long movie = arthouse stuff that doesn’t make money.
High fantasy = big budget, low ticket sales.
Relatively unknown actors = no audience draw.
Questionable director not working within the Hollywood system: bad bet.
Long story, no handy wrap-up at the end of each film: can’t be done.
Based on a book = too intellectual.

And so, not to over-explain my premise here, I was wondering what the Dopers thought Hollywood was going to learn from this series of films that each break a lot of new ground and yet still do well at the box office. I hope this clears things up for you.

FISH

15

Well, let’s face it- long before Peter Jackson’s LOTR adaptation came out, there were a host of bad fantasy / sword and sorcery / dwarf & troll movies that were inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien. There was Krull, Willow, The Dark Crystal… you can probably think of many more.

So, there will surely be lots more bad movies made with Tolkien-esque themes and characters. But you can’t blame Peter Jackson for that! Such dreck was being made long before he got into the game.

16

Hey, who thinks the Dark Crystal and Willow were bad?

I loved both those movies! Dark Crystal was amazing… you should read about the art and development that went into it… You tell that to my face next time in Austin so you can see how crushed I am!

And I, for one, would like some Dragonlance movies. I loved those books.

As long as they don’t turn into that horrible Dungeons and Dragons thing they made. What about those books that one lady wrote about all the dragons/flying lizards? Anne McCaffey? Is that her name? I never read them but I had a large book about the artist that did all the covers.

17

Narnia is already into preproduction- CSL stepson Douglas Gresham is in a majorly overseeing capacity

A few years back, BBC & PBS did the first four- combinging Prince Caspian & the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but didn’t go on with The Horse and His Boy, The Magician’s Nephew & The Last Battle (the latter would be a heck of a movie!)

18

How about a movie of Heinlein’s “Glory Road”? That would be a worthy successor to LOTR, in a post-modern sort of way. Starring, oh, let’s say, Hugh Jackman and Famke Janssen (as Oscar and Astar) and Danny DeVito as the other geezer (forget his handle), and directed by Rene Harlan. Hey, you could do worse…Timmy

19

Yes there is a Narnia movie in the making. I started a thread on it a while back:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=152453&highlight=narnia

The Time cover story on LOTR before the release of TTT mentioned a number of possible films based on fantasy. In addition to Narnia, IIRC the Artemis Fowl books (which I haven’t read) were mentioned.

Of course the success of Harry Potter is probably about as big as a factor as LOTR.

20

I think Titanic (which I did suffer through) and Pearl Harbor (which I didn’t) were cut from the same cloth. Both were historical disaster movies that asked you to ignore major events and hundreds of deaths in favor of - obviously this is just my take - cliched love stories, hackneyed situations, cliched, one-note characters, and wooden dialogue. Blech is to BLECH. :wink:

I’m tempted to answer Harry Potter, actually (in the spirit of the question that is, pretending that I think Titanic was a really good film and Pearl Harbor a bad one). Of course, it owes a debt to LotR anyway. Jackson’s movies have the same kind of feel as the books, in my opinion, and retell a classic story. They live up to the material. The Potter movies have none of the humor or sense of fun that the books do, they’re just slavish retellings that drag on and on. Here’s betting they don’t finish the series of films.