We all should remember that it’s not one big story. It’s a bunch of them appended together in one volume.
I think there’s a lot of potential to do invidivual stories: they’re a good length for conversion, feature some very high profile tragic or dramatic elements, and have enough gristle for some meaty battle/fight scenes.
I agree that most of Silmarillion is fundamentally impossible to film.
However, a friend and I have a project that I can finally take off the back burner. We’re hoping to do for Silmarillion what the D’Aulaires’ did for Greek mythology.
I’m doing the writing; my friend is doing the illustration. Together, we’re selecting which tales to tell. Still challenging, and we’ll have to omit a lot. But I think it can be done. And it’s worth doing because these are some beautiful myths here. And it’s a shame they’re locked up in a book that’s so inaccessible most people won’t take the slog.
It’s not technically Silmarillion (it’s in Unfinished Tales) but the Akallabeth (the Downfall of Numenor) is wonderfully cinematic. Heroes, villains, spectacular special effects.
No composer alive, but if anyone could have done it, it would be Bach.
I agree with this. Consider:
A brave people sacrifices to help the Elves and is rewarded with a beautiful paradisiac land. The settle and thrive, growing in power. But gradually things go a bit off, and the people welcomed as friends down the long coasts of Middle-Earth become feared as conquerors. Then they take on the ultimate bad guy of the age–and win! Or so they think…
I find that the reference to the Music of Creation is currently found on film – the very beginning of Jacksons LOTR Trilogy. It begins in total darkness, with just singing, the very same way the world began. I believe that was deliberate.
The Tale of Beren and Luthien is my favorite part of the Silmarillion. I dunno who you’d do it in film and not make it look cheesy though.
I’d go for a Beren/Luthien miniseries. That could work.
Well, I hope they wait a bit to make a movie of Beren and Luthian, because maybe then the idiots who ruin so many stories when turning them into movies will be dead. The big danger to the stories of the Silmarillion is the Hollywood cliché machine. For example, Luthian just doesn’t fit. She is looked in a treehouse, and then rescues her own damn self. She weaves dark, but not evil enchantments. She and Beren go to get the Silmaril together, and when she follows Beren to his doom, her song wrings pity from Fate himself, and they get a happy ending. It is a great story, but I doubt the movie would even pay lip service to it.
For a long time, everyone said LotR was unfilmable, and anyone who saw the Ralph Bakshi version probably agreed. But they were all wrong.
I don’t think there’s any reason to think The Silmarillion is any more unfilmable than LotR. It just takes a sufficiently gifted storyteller who can spin the yarn into a cinematic format and maintain the same sense of majesty and doom.
I think a really good movie could be made out of Fëanor’s story - start with Melkor being unchained (with maybe some prologue of the Silmarils being created). You’ve got a good set-up for the climax - Melkor destroys the Two Trees and steals the Silmarils, Fëanor swears vengeance, and then you have the big final battle. Possibly it could be stretched into two movies if you want more details of what happens in between, but I think it could make a single one, even if it skipped huge chunks of the story.