Anyways, bottled-up calvary isn’t too good. However, the fact of the matter is that the Men of Rohan didn’t have all that many with their main force, IIRC. The few they had pretty much got wiped by the Warg Riders.
So, they were left with old men and boys defending Helm’s Deep.
However, the grand strategy might have been for Theoden to take his calvary and meet up with the Riders scattered all over the country - and I always got the impression that by going to Helm’s Deep Theoden was moving people away from Eomer rather than toward them (and potential safety).
Well, I actively dislike most of the second and third movies. After the first movie, I had such high hopes for the rest. But noooooo… Peter Jackson has to retell the story, and he screws most of it up. Not all of it, just most of it.
These movies actually worsened my opinion of him as a director, alas.
I would have to say that FOTR and TTT tie for my favorite. TTT is just so dark and despairing, the victories at the end are all the sweeter, though still plenty bitter. ROTK is OK, but the end is just maudlin beyond all sense. “I wuv wu Fwodo.” “I wuv wu too Sam.” “No, Fwodo, I wuv wu more.” For like 16 hours. GAH!
As for awkward lines, my cringeworthy one was “Let’s go.” In Moria, Gandalf speaks about the air smelling less fowl. “Alway follow your nose.” While not Shakespearean, it is a very Tolkien bit of dialog. Very charming. And it’s ruined by a very pedestrian telling of a pedestrian line.
“Alas, hither and yon doth air smellest sweet. O unfowl wind upon mine brow. Let’s lock and load!”
There was the Fruit Loops Toucan in the mines of Moria! :eek:
I never noticed!
I really like (I’m being serious here) the bit when Elrond is foretelling Arwen’s future with Aragorn–the bit about the end of the age and all (not about to go find the quote). I love that.
I agree; it’s one of my favorites, too. It’s from the LOTR Appendices, about Aragorn and Arwen’s last meeting as the king is on his deathbed. In one of the special features, either Fran Walsh or Philippa Boyens says they added that at the suggestion of a fan, well after the first draft of the screenplay had been completed. The fan said it was some of Tolkien’s finest writing - she agreed, and they used it almost verbatim.
Are you serious? I don’t remember them in the books, but I stand corrected. Thanks!
Reason I don’t like them - well, they just didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the dialogue onscreen. Jarring to me anyway, I know a few others have commented about them in other threads as well, but perhaps I’m in the minority here…
You like Sean Bean? I can understand he’s a handsome man, but saying you like Sean Bean is like saying “I have a taste for EVIL!” Seriously, the man is just plain sinister, and his acting career’s gotta have something like a 4 to 1 ratio of bad guys (or treacherous good guys like Boromir) to decent people.
As for the rest of this thread; I really liked the whole trilogy; I was inclined to think they would really butcher things, and the fact they dropped Bombadil (far and away my least favorite thing Tolkien ever wrote) pleased me greatly. Some of the lines and scenes are cheesy, but I always felt that JRRT could be pretty hoky once in a while. It all comes down to my opinion that you either choose to enjoy things, or critique them; You really can’t have both.
Every work of entertainment, no matter how “fantabulous” (in the words of our lord Eddie Izzard) they might be, can be picked apart and ridiculed until neither you nor anyone you talk to about it enjoys it, and I for one like to avoid this mentality. For example; not just the prequels, but the old Star Wars movies seem pretty lame when you dissect and analyze them. The “Unofficial Star Wars Compendium,” released just after the Special Editions had a section arguing why RotJ wasn’t near as good as the other two, and to this day I can’t enjoy it the way I did as a kid. In short, ya’ll need to lighten up and enjoy the ride!
Oops, gotta make sure to read the whole thread first. This, this would be my one complaint. WTF was that scene all about?! :eek:
You hit the nail right on the head Verminary, and it freaks me out just as much as that scene from PeeWee’s Big Adventure always did. Hilarious comparison!
To quote another favorite, “I like my evil like I like my men. Evil. Straight-up, black hat, tie you to the train tracks, soon my electro-ray will destroy Metropolis bad.”
The movies added far more bad dialogue than good.
But, to be fair, one very good added bit hasn’t been mentioned:
Aragorns fire-em-up speech in front of the Black Gate "the day may come when the courage of men will fail. But This is Not That Day! "
By that point, I almost fell out of my seat when I realized that something added actually improved the story and movie (as opposed to all the other changes), but it did.
Btw, I agree with the others who have said that they like the first movie the best. It seemed to cut a lot of the dead weight (Tom B. for example), keep what was needed, and not add too much that was unnecessary. The second and third both seemed to add things that didn’t seem necessary (Aragorn falls off a cliff, the ghost army at Minus Tirith).
I don’t know if it was Sean Bean or the writing or what, but I thought the first movie really brought out the Boromir character. The character was very flat and unsympathetic in the book. In the movie he was a hero, flawed, but a hero all the same.
