Christopher Tolkien, 1924-2020

boing
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I actually prefer The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings (and in fact I wasn’t aware the latter even existed for many years after reading The Hobbit). At first I thought that maybe this was influencing my hatred of the film version, since the story was a little closer to my heart than LOTR, but I’m fairly certain it’s the movie at fault, not me.

Even though I didn’t get to LOTR until later, I still read it and was a fan of it long before those movies came out, and their divergences from the book didn’t bother me because I felt they still captured the general spirit of the books- the emotional impact, the essence of most of the characters, the epic scope of the journey, etc. There were a lot of things one could find fault with, but I don’t feel it was a perversion of the source material the way Christopher Tolkien seems to have.

The Hobbit, on the other hand, seemed to get everything wrong. Serious moments were made cartoonish, pointless padding was added in even while important scenes were truncated, characters didn’t feel right, quiet moments were made loud and bombastic, emotional moments were made shallow and hollow. I understand they had to make changes to convert it into a film, just like LOTR, but this time those changes destroyed the spirit of the story rather than just altering the details of how that story played out.

As for an instance where the book wasn’t as good as the film, The Shining comes to mind. I didn’t particularly like either the movie or the book, but the movie at least held my interest, has some iconic moments, and is well directed. The book was an incoherent bore, and that’s coming from someone who usually likes Stephen King.

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I do sometimes/often prefer the film even when the book is good (Melville’s Billy Budd Sailor wasn’t as good for me as the film Billy Budd). Obviously there is stuff like Stephen King where I find his books barely readable but the film adaptation can still be excellent.

Or you can get things where the book is fantastic and the film is differently so, for example Arrival. I loved the long short story but it didn’t have Johann Johannson’s sountrack or Amy Adams’s acting for example (though the Chinese politics wasn’t so good in the film). Or Tristram Shandy (no more unfilmable than it was unwritable) done as a Cock and a Bull story.

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I listened to the (very good) audiobook version of The Story of Your Life yesterday in fact, and, WOW. I say this as someone who loves the movie Arrival, like, a lot. And I still love it. But the writing in the story, especially the nuances about the language, time and determinism. Just exceptional!

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I have never got into reading horror stories or watching many of the films (I think Hammer films could be responsible), I have never read Steven King and I don’t think I have seen one of the adaptations. But I can imagine that a visual representation would be more powerful.

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