Dwarven armor must be more buoyant than I estimated.
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Reminds me of the sort of humor “I’m sure Jerry will have tea on for us” made in the trenches before going over the top.
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Yes, that was my problem with what Jackson did with Tolkien’s ‘art’.
[Not criticising the Hobbit films as I haven’t seen them - I gave up on Jackson’s Middle Earth after ‘The Two Towers’.]
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I’m always amused by people complaining about movies they refused to watch.
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Inoffensive art is also called ad copy.
Your review sounds more like a ringing endorsement of the work than I suspect you intended it to?
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arguing is much more fun without knowledge about the topic discussed
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I have to give you a like for your opinion of The Two Towers.
(I did end up watching RotK and the Hobbit films but the last two were only borrowed from the library).
The firs LOTR movie was dead on, some minor changes i could live with and made sense. 2nd one in the trilogy was about 50/50 on changes but Helm’s Deep was offensive to me and a bafflingly dumb change. Last movie… well… i’ve only seen it once. The less i dwell on it the better.
The Two Towers wasn’t all I’d hoped it would be (and, like all of the LotR films, focused too much on battle rather than the story). And, you know, in retrospect, I can see that Tom Bombadil wasn’t strictly necessary (though giving his lines to Treebeard was just not cool). I am much more upset about The Return of the King.
The biggest problem I have with the LotR movies is that they cut out the Scouring of the Shire. If you think of the book as telling a story about Tolkien himself going to war, then that chapter is essential. The Hobbits set out wanting to keep the Ring from destroying their peaceful, idyllic homeland, and they failed in that. They came home and their home had changed, and they had to fight to get it back. And even when they did win their homeland back, it had changed irrevocably, and so had they, and, nothing quite fit the way it had before.
In one of Tolkien’s essays, he calls this idea eucatastrophe. That you can win the war, the evil can be driven away, and peace can be restored, perhaps even better than before… but even though it’s a happy catastrophe, it’s still a catastrophe. The world you knew has been destroyed, and you have to learn how to fit into the new one.
That part of the story makes the whole story feel more real. No, the quiet Shire can’t just have Nazgul and wizards and rings of power tromping all over it, and then weather the war untouched. You can’t truly go home again after such after saving the world, because the place you grew up doesn’t exist anymore, and the person you were doesn’t either.
And any Lord of the Rings that doesn’t take that message, learned by Tolkien at great personal cost in the Great War, is missing a big chunk of the heart of the story.
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For the record, I adored the LotR movies and think the Two Towers was my favorite of the three. And that’s as someone who’s a Tolkien fan who art directed stage adaptations of the books and recorded a Tolkien-approved soundtrack to one of them. I do wish they’d had the Scouring, but with the movies the length they already were, I understand why they’d choose (relative) brevity. The Scouring/aftermath would’ve been very hard to tell briefly. (that said, impaling Saruman on a pike was lame)
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I was willing to give RotK a pass if it did the Scouring of The Shire justice and it fully omitted it from the movie. I was insulted. There’s also the nonsense of having an army of ghosts win the day for the good guys at the last second that is just lazy screenwriting. Every time i think about the last movie it makes my blood boil.
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It’s okay! By cutting out the Scouring, they made room for Oliphaunt surfing! Which is surely much more thematically important!
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If you want a good laugh when re-watching the movies remember that they did not initially expect Legolas to be a popular character. But once they did they put him everywhere. You’ll notice through out the movies how they will constantly cut to Legolas reaction shots to moments that have nothing to do with him. If you made it into a drinking game you’d be dead.
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I wholeheartedly agree. However, I also agree with the decision from a film-making perspective – there was already too much story for one film and I don’t think making a fourth would have been successful. The Scouring itself could fill a full-length film. For me, taking advantage of a medium’s storytelling strengths (and avoiding its weaknesses) is more important than fully adhering to the source material.
That’s what I’m saying; I’m OK with 5 seconds (literally) of lighthearted goofiness during a very heavy moment. Very brief, not a big deal. But there’s a lot that goes on in the Scouring and epilogue; it would’ve added another 15-20 minutes to the movie, easily. So I understand why they trimmed things here and there.
Hey! I have a soft spot in my heart for Sylvester McCoy who I liked as the Doctor. Still, though, I have to admit sitting through all the scenes with Radagast and thinking, “I’d probably enjoy this more if it were in a completely different movie.”
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That pretty much sums up all of my conflicting feelings about the Hobbit movies. I totally loved Sylvester McCoy as Radagast – he was perfectly cast – and he and Ian McKellen played off of each other really well. But I felt like every time he appeared, the movies veered into cartoony silliness. And it was really hard to stop staring at the bird poop running down the side of his head.
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The last movie severely changes the story and how things happen though. More so than the previous two, and in the trilogy it’s by far the weakest of them and it’s the one that strays the farthest from the source. I understand that the story has to be changed for film but how it was done was lazy, and often times was done in such a poor way that did nothing for the plot/story.
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The Hobbit should’ve played more like an adventure/kid’s movie. More lighthearted accentuated by some intense moments, however movies like that are rarely made these days and i think that died in the 80/90’s.
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And what I’m saying is that they could have easily found those 15-20 minutes by cutting some of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.
But, let’s say you’re right, and there was no good way to fit the Scouring in. There still should have been some payoff of their fears that the Shire wouldn’t make it through the War of the Ring intact. Five minutes, maybe, for tearful reunions. To have Frodo look around and flash back to the visions he got in Galadriel’s mirror, to see what they averted. To try and tell the story to the others, only to run headlong into traumatic memories. To see the old tree uprooted and have Sam plant the gift he got from Galadriel to replace it. To throw the Sackville-Bagginses out of Bag End and have Frodo ceremoniously give it over to Sam, acknowledging this isn’t his home anymore.
Five minutes, for any sort of acknowledgement that life can’t simply continue as normal, beyond an old Hobbit sneering at Pippin and Merry in their armour (who probably would have gotten sneered at in Hobbiton even before their adventures, being adventurous Tooks and Brandybucks and not at all the right sort of Hobbit).
As it is, those themes are left dangling, and you sort of get the impression that the vision that Galadriel gave Frodo was false. That the Shire had nothing to fear from the War. That, no matter how bad things would have gotten, the Hobbits, with their insular attitude, couldn’t be touched by the evil that otherwise pervaded the world. All of which does a serious disservice to the original work.
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