9 ms·

Interesting to see the low opinion in which he held the movies, considering the revered place in American cinema the trilogy holds. Considering the astounding l

• ur-whale 7y ago
  They took out bombadil.
  • wufufufu 7y ago
    Thank god
• aerovistae 7y ago
  I for one would have liked to see Frodo & Sam's journey to mordor in the second and third movies abbreviated a bit. It was incredibly drawn out. Otherwise I love the movies and see no room for improvement.
  • ngold 7y ago
    Tom Bombadil, I would have loved to have seen super god and his girlfriend.
    • low_common 7y ago
      Yeah but unless you've read the books, his character is a bit esoteric for the movies.
      • krapp 7y ago
        Tom Bombadil is "a bit esoteric" in the same way that a hurricane is "a bit moist."
    • elric 7y ago
      IIRC I once read a letter from JRRT where he stated that Bombadil was a "deliberate enigma". He had no explanation for the character's apparent powers or origin. Considering the incredible amount of details and origin stories for just about every other character and race in the epos, that struck me as particularly whimsical. Sort of like an easter egg that ended up in a place that was slightly too prominent. An inordinate amount of time has been spent on the internet in debates whether Bombadil was an Elf, one of the Maiar, a human with some other item of power, one of the Valar or even even Eru Iluvatar incarnate.
      • mcguire 7y ago
        That's the beautiful part about him, that I didn't get when I was younger and trying to fit him in to the model. You have living elves that remember them originally going into the west. You have the history after they came back, including several who where there. Some know the Valar personally. You can be reasonably confident of the history. Heck, you have Maiar wandering around. And then you have Bombadil. Who is he? Nobody knows! Not the elves, not the Maiar. What does he want? To sing goofy songs. It's beautiful!
      • n0rbwah 7y ago
        In his afterlife, JRR Tolkien lives in middle earth as Tom.
    • thrower123 7y ago
      The loss of the Barrow-wights was unfortunate, and took something away from the death of the Witch-King as well.
  • petepete 7y ago
    Generally agree, loved the movies (especially the extended editions) but: * Helm's Deep went on way too long, it was like 45 minutes of battle * Legolas's action scenes were a little too over the top for my taste (Oliphaunt tail slide, surfing on a shield). I'm not sure the iffy CGI helped. * Poor Faramir
    • gizmo385 7y ago
      I personally think Helm's Deep was just as long as it needed to be. It's just not 45 minutes of blind, pointless battle. There is storytelling, character growth, and evolution in those 45 minutes. It's one of the most efficient and well created battle scenes in modern cinema. As far as Legolas's action scenes, are you referring to the elephant? That one was CGI, but the scene of him sliding down the stairs on a shield was actually a practical effect done with wire work. The only CGI in that scene was the removal of the wires I believe. Yes, Faramir's story is tragic but I think that's kind of the point of his story; isn't it?
      • jacobush 7y ago
        Legolas' shield stunt was over the top.
        • m4r35n357 7y ago
          especially considering there were no elves there at all!
          • jacobush 7y ago
            ?
            • petepete 7y ago
              In the books the elves didn't come to support the men at Helm's Deep. The battle played a much smaller part in the books than it did the movies - probably because the middle one needed a climax.
• bovermyer 7y ago
  The original works were as much a careful exploration of a world not our own as they were an epic tale. Large sections of the text were devoted to describing that world. The movies gloss over all of that to focus purely on the story.
  • kaesar14 7y ago
    And even with that focus on the story, we get 12 hours in the extended editions, much of it expanding on the characters and their backstories as they relate to the world in which the story takes place. It's hard to have pages and pages of explanation of a world in a movie. The movies do that by exploring that history in the set pieces and characters, and I think most people would agree they do a magnificent job of it.
  • gizmo385 7y ago
    Describing the world visually? I mean that kind of text is naturally going to disappear when you're creating a movie because all of that is just going to be represented in the cinematography.
    • mumblemumble 7y ago
      John Scalzi shared a reasonably thoughtful perspective on this on his blog a few days ago: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/01/10/why-yes-in-fact-old-mans-war-could-make-a-very-fine-movie/ https://whatever.scalzi.com/2020/01/10/why-yes-in-fact-old-m... "... although I will note ... that a two-hour movie will not cram the entire complexity of the novel I wrote into its 120-minute running time." "And that’s fine, and as it turns out, necessary. Movies are not books. Movies are adaptations of books, for another medium entirely. When filmmakers try to make their movies simply a “faithful” version of the book that runs at 24 frames a second, the results (speaking as a former full-time professional film critic) tend to be dreadful more often than not. I don’t want a movie of Old Man’s War that’s a retread of what I’ve already done in the book. What I want is an adaptation and interpretation of what I’ve written that’s interesting and exciting, and is faithful to the idea and feel of the universe I created." It's been a long time since I saw the LOTR films (and never bothered to see The Hobbit, so I can't comment on those), but, as I recall, that's more or less what Peter Jackson did.
• Apocryphon 7y ago
  Perhaps purists aren't so easily won over by lavish production values and jaw-dropping visuals.
  • krapp 7y ago
    As if the film trilogy were nothing but eye candy? The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy was as transformative for fantasy as Star Wars was for science fiction - people didn't even think the trilogy could be filmed, much less be successful, as fantasy (like comic books and, ironically, science fiction before Star Wars) was considered cheesy, juvenile schlock forever doomed to box office failure. Peter Jackson not only filmed the unfilmable, but wound up creating what many people would consider one of the greatest motion picture trilogies ever, on many levels, beyond just spectacle. There are probably millions more Tolkein fans across the world just because the trilogy was as good as it was. Given that the canonical onscreen adaptation of the trilogy until that point was a cartoon by Filmation from the 70s, I would hope purists could maybe see the silver lining around the cloud.
    • Apocryphon 7y ago
      You're not wrong, but I'm just saying even some of most gorgeous and exhaustive work put into a film series isn't enough to satisfy purists. I find it fascinating, and have come to understand it.
    • selimthegrim 7y ago
      I always enjoyed this sendup of Bakshi’s film http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/bakshi/bakshi.htm http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/bakshi/bakshi.htm
      • laurus 7y ago
        The Bakshi movie's Lothlórien was absolutely beautiful though. I also liked all the voice actors in that movie better than the actors in the Jackson trilogy (except I guess Samwise, who was a little silly in the Bakshi film). It also didn't have much comic relief, which I appreciated.
• deleted 7y ago
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• Ralfp 7y ago
  I would assume not being paid for those movies had something to do with it? In February 2008, the Tolkien Trust sued New Line Cinema, the studio behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for £75 million claiming they had not received "even one penny" from the films. A request for punitive damages was denied in September 2008. (In March 2008, New Line Cinema became a unit of Warner Bros. Entertainment.) The case was resolved out of court on 8 September 2009 with the terms not made public. In a press release, Christopher Tolkien stated, "The Trustees regret that legal action was necessary, but are glad that this dispute has been settled on satisfactory terms that will allow the Tolkien Trust properly to pursue its charitable objectives. The Trustees acknowledge that New Line may now proceed with its proposed films of 'The Hobbit.'" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578442/JRR-Tolkiens-estate-to-sue-Lord-of-the-Rings-filmmakers-New-Line-Cinema-over-profits.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1578442/JRR-Tolki...
  • Pigo 7y ago
    That sounds like Hollywood's famous accounting practices. They claim movies that makes 100's of millions have lost money by inflating costs that are paid to production companies and such. I'm sure someone can explain how they get away with it. But it's astounding how they claim these movies lose money, in order to shaft whomever they want.
    • Relys 7y ago
      Honestly, I don't understand how this isn't the same thing as tax fraud.
• nck4222 7y ago
  I think it's hard for many people who are emotionally and/or deeply connected to something, see it changed, modified, and reinterpreted by someone else. Even in the world of software, how many of us have worked on a project for a long time only to hand it off to someone else, and find it hard not to have strong opinions about how they work with it, when it's no longer our responsibility?
• lordleft 7y ago
  He probably felt a degree of ownership and protectiveness over the franchise that few of us could understand. It may have been impossible to match his expectations.
• scop 7y ago
  I have a love/hate relationship with the movies. While the trilogy brought to life Middle-Earth to a degree I never thought imaginable, there were some elements that just fell incredibly flat. If I had to pin it on one thing, it was that Peter Jackson and team were extremely good at portraying evil in all of its ugliness but failed to portray "goodness" with equal skill (which admittedly is not an easy thing to do!). While the honest goodness of the Hobbits was wonderful, the portrayals of "good" characters such as Aragorn and Galadriel fell very flat. This is not to blame on the actors at all as I thought Viggo did an awesome job; but the screenplay needlessly muddled the character. Also, where was the damn poetry?
  • low_common 7y ago
    Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by the portrayal of Aragorn "falling a bit flat"? Perhaps he was a bit too gruff or something, especially in the Fellowship of the Ring? I could possibly see that because in the book he was definitely clear-cut 'rough and ready good-guy'.
    • scop 7y ago
      No problems with his "gruffness" as you term it; that indeed very much captured his Ranger walkings in Fellowship etc. What was a tough pill to swallow was the self-doubt infused into the character. I know I know, character development, relatability, etc etc. But, c'mon, Aragorn is the damned KING and a leader with unflinching will (a contrast to many around him). ... Also, where was the damn standard w/ the White Tree, Elendil when Aragorn arrived at the boat?!
      • Pigo 7y ago
        As someone who had not read the books before seeing the movies (I know, I know) it added a lot of context when I found out why the elves were leaving at the end. I remember wondering why everyone was leaving if they had won. I know it was already long, but I wish they'd explained the ring's connection to magic better. It also would have explained why everyone was so willing to take the rings of power in the first place, and given more weight to the somber tone at the end.
• linksnapzz 7y ago
  The adaptation is always going to suffer in comparison to a book like that. It's not like you can just rotate the story through 360-degrees of the audio-video dimension and have it pop out at you. Lots of more modern fiction, written by people who think of stories first in the cinematic sense even as they are writing them, you can almost derive the film from the book. Say, Jurassic Park, for example. The departures from the novel were incidental, and the film could've been made even more faithful to the text but for the desires of the producers.
  • adrian_b 7y ago
    In my opinion the departures from the Jurassic Park novel were not just incidental. I enjoyed very much the Jurassic Park visual effects, but I despised the script as one of the most disappointing adaptations of novels, because it completely failed to convey the message of the book. The central idea of the book was that there are things so complex, i.e. chaotic systems, that regardless how good you are and how great are your efforts to control them, unpredictable failure is unavoidable. I did not see anything of that in the movie, where the failure of the park was just the consequence of stupid mistakes made by a bunch of morons, not the consequence of objective laws, as in the book.
    • linksnapzz 7y ago
      Perhaps incidental is the wrong word; my point being that Spielberg absolutely could've made the script more faithful to the book without having to invent characters, dialog or settings not in the text.
• mjw1007 7y ago
  I don't think he was at all surprised at how bad the films were, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't complain about them. I think it's easy for many people who are used to a diet of truly terrible adaptations to mistake one which is merely bad for something excellent. (I think pretty much everything about those films was very good, except for the script, which was poor on both a large and small scale.)
• m4r35n357 7y ago
  The films are not bad for visuals and casting/acting, but changed the story and characters and motivations far too much for fans of the books. And left out the actual ending!
• lordnacho 7y ago
  I wonder if Netflix or other streaming services would have produced something vastly different. Tolkien wrote so much it really could do with more exploration. Also if you're selling it in a movie format, you have to be able to bring in the general masses. That means cutting down a lot of the intricacies.
  • cm2012 7y ago
    Amazon is making a lotr universe TV show for prime.
    • corn_dog 7y ago
      I am really hoping they film it with similar production values to The Man in the High Castle. I think the pacing, and the mix of reality and fantasy, in that would suit LOTR really well.
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    These days, LotR would be made as a multi-season epic, like GoT.
• cpr 7y ago
  There's simply no way, no matter how technically wizardly the movies might be, that they could convey the "spirit" of the trilogy. And, further, the movies fall far, far short of the images your own imagination can create from these classics. And they even pollute your imagination with the limitations of the director's choices.
  • oska 7y ago
    > And they even pollute your imagination with the limitations of the director's choices. Exactly why I never watched the films, despite being a huge Tolkien fan from about age 9 to 16. The thought of how Hollywood would depict elves was particularly off-putting for me. I've never regretted not watching them, even when the hype was at its greatest, and any glimpses of screenshots that I've chanced upon have only confirmed that I made the right choice.
    • amatecha 7y ago
      Dang, I'm almost jealous. I couldn't resist the temptation and hope that the movies could maybe possibly vaguely live up to the legacy. Unfortunately I didn't quite anticipate how those images would forever alter my vision of the story/world. Though, I've purposely waited a long time and ignored everything about it, letting the memories fade, so I can re-read the trilogy and hopefully rediscover the greatness. :)
• nfc 7y ago
  Perhaps it's natural to be very critical of the adaptation of something your are very emotionally attached to?. I for one loved reading the books as a kid and I felt that some scenes (Legolas shield surfing and flying between elephants) were a bit too "cheap" and unnecessary. I enjoyed the films by telling myself that there was a lot of good that offset those bads but perhaps that's easier to do when you are young than when you are on your 70s
  • WalterBright 7y ago
    > Legolas shield surfing and flying between elephants The latter was bad but the former was incredibly out of place. It's the one scene I'd cut.
• gwd 7y ago
  > Considering the astounding length and detail with which they were adapted, what more could he have possibly hoped for? Not changing complex and interesting characters with boring Hollywood tropes (Denethor, Treebeard, Faramir)? Following Tolkein's carefully thought-out timeline of how and when and why things would have happened, rather than making every action scene a hollywood trope, where the bad guys can't hit anything and the good guys can't miss? The best film adaptation of a book I've ever seen is the Sense and Sensibility adapted by Emma Thompson. You can't make a movie identical to a book; it doesn't work -- they're different art forms. Emma Thompson cut out big scenes, chopped out characters, and made a load of changes to make the situation more accessible to a modern audience -- but the heart of the story, and the character of the people in it, are true to the novel. The movies jumped the shark for me when Faramir said he was going to "arrest" Frodo and bring him to Denethor. I watched the third film, but I'd emotionally checked out at that point.
• jfengel 7y ago
  One of the things that Game of Thrones got right is to realize that a novel corresponds to a dozen hours of screen time, not three. The Lord of the Rings trilogy misses a lot of the epic scope of the book, focusing a lot more heavily on battles and missing out on the sheer weight of time. I don't know if any film could really capture that, especially to Christoper's satisfaction. But the movies are action-adventure blockbusters, and the books really aren't. It's notable that the Battle of the Hornburg was only about a page of text, but close to an hour of screen time. That kind of shift of focus recurs throughout the adaptation. Tolkien was creating an alien world; Jackson gave us a familiar Sort Of Middle Ages Or Something. The films did manage to capture the age of the world better than anybody could possibly have imagined. Jackson hired the best artists, famed for producing images that were better than Tolkien's own, and capturing a lot of what Christopher would treasure in the book. As a series of still images, Christopher should have found a lot to admire in the films. But the dialogue doesn't achieve the same.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 7y ago
    > Tolkien was creating an alien world; Jackson gave us a familiar Sort Of Middle Ages Or Something. This is pretty debatable c.f. endless scholarship on the connections between LOTR and (a) Tolkein's feelings about England post-WWI and (b) Tolkein's deep connections with actual existing mythology and legend. "Different world", perhaps, but "alien world" seems a bit much.
  • krapp 7y ago
    >Tolkien was creating an alien world; Jackson gave us a familiar Sort Of Middle Ages Or Something. As I understand it, Tolkien was trying to create a national mythology for England, so he wouldn't have intended the setting to be completely alien, as he wanted its archetypes to resonate with his own culture. Also the main reason the films seem like a familiar medieval fantasy setting is that Tolkien basically invented the high fantasy genre and its tropes. I think one movie reviewer even panned the Lord of the Rings as being too generic and derivative, when in fact everyone else has been copying Tolkien for decades.
  • microtherion 7y ago
    > One of the things that Game of Thrones got right is to realize that a novel corresponds to a dozen hours of screen time, not three. But if LoTR hadn't accomplished what it did in its three hours, I don't think GoT would have GOTTEN its dozen hours. I think people underestimate how massively speculative fiction movies (especially fantasy and comic book adaptations) have improved in the last 20 years. If you compare Jackson's LoTR to Ralph Bakshi's 1978 adaptation, they simply don't play in the same league at all.
• mikepurvis 7y ago
  There are many, many examples of places where depth of character especially was lost in the translation. Some of this was obviously a matter of limited screentime, but other things were done badly that would have taken very little or no extra time to do right. One big example is Eowyn's showdown with the witch king, see this article: https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/ https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/ But even apart from that, when such huge chunks of screentime were devoted to these epic battle scenes, you do get the sense that the priorities at the top level were not quite aligned to what was in the book. Even compared to the 1981 BBC radio play (13 hours total), you feel like the movies missed a lot of good stuff.
• deleted 7y ago
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• axguscbklp 7y ago
  IMO, to whatever extent the reverence exists, it is unjustified. The films are about as good as one can reasonably expect from big budget blockbusters, but to me they are somewhere between mediocre and merely decent cinema, with bombastic manipulative music, jarringly incongruent moments of lowbrow humor, lots of very fake-looking CGI, over-the-top almost comedically grotesque orcs, cheaply emptionally manipulative scenes like the Gondorian charge against Osgiliath, etc. They also have many good moments and many good filming decisions, but I wouldn't hold them up anywhere near the pinnacle of cinema. Don't get me wrong, I think that the books have many flaws too, although I like them a lot. I wouldn't say the books, good as they are, are at the pinnacle of literature either, although they may certainy be near the pinnacle of worldbuilding and are, I think, much much better than the films.
  • mcguire 7y ago
    Aw, c'mon. New Zealand is beautiful.