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The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going
by eredengrin 3y ago
The treatment of Sam (and the Sam/Frodo friendship) in Return of the King movie, and the treatment of Faramir as a character. I kind of get what they were going for, it just went way too far overboard imo and probably shouldn't have even been attempted. I'm assuming a bit of knowledge in the unpacking of these below for brevity but hopefully it is not too unclear for those who may have only watched the movies.
In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards. Yes, the ring may be tempting, but I think that was already sufficiently shown throughout earlier moments in the movies and there was no need to throw Faramir under the bus. He was already a relatively minor character in the books, why do him dirty like that? Everyone, both the characters in the book and the readers outside the book, looked up to him. One of his men broke a rule (punishable by death) to save him in the books and from the context you can imagine most of his reports would have done the same, but if all you knew of him was what you saw in the movies, it gives a very different impression. He came around in the end but at the very least he should have done the right thing sooner than he did in the movies.
As far as the Sam (and Frodo) thing goes, admittedly it's been a year or two since the last time I read the trilogy and it's easy to confuse the books/movie in my memory, but I don't remember seeing any signs of contention between them the way it was shown in the movie, and certainly if there was, it was not even close to the same degree. Among other things, I think the movie was trying to show the darker side of the ring's effects, but again, it's already been shown multiple times throughout the movies and they just went overboard with it. Frodo pretty much had the highest trust for Sam (even in the movies this is basically true outside this incident), and would Sam really give up and abandon Frodo that easily because of a few crumbs? Tangentially, I don't remember Sam being particularly cruel to gollum in the books, and that's really the root of this breach of trust in the movies. That entire aspect of Sam shouldn't have been there to begin with, and if it wasn't, the staircase scene would also make no sense to show that way.
The reason I find these two particularly inexcusable is that I simply don't see how they added much to the movies in terms of story or character development. There's an argument for it but it's just weak imo, Tolkien had it figured out just fine thank you very much. I also don't see how it would have helped in terms of budget, reducing film length, etc. I can excuse other omissions or slightly weird things if there are budget/time constraints, you can't reasonably ask for the impossible, I just don't see it in those two cases.
- zabzonk 3y ago> In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards Boromir redeems himself - Gandalf and Aragorn say so.
- antonyt 3y agoFaramir never needed to.
- zabzonk 3y agoi have never found that believable - if the ring is represented as capable of corrupting anyone, why not faramir? why not send faramir to mordor with it, rather than frodo?
- eredengrin 3y agoI mean there's degrees of temptation. I don't think that simply being in the ring's presence was generally portrayed to be an insurmountable temptation. Some situations were specifically mentioned as causing the ring's power over a person to increase (eg length of time someone used the ring would put them more under its temptation) so I don't see why it's so hard to believe that someone could send off the ring bearer. In any case if that's an issue for you, how do you get around other more fundamental issues, such as how eg Aragorn manages to escape the temptation?
- eredengrin 3y agoFair enough, I exaggerated a bit there, I was mainly getting at the fact that in the book Faramir's compassionate/gentler/selfless nature was kind of a direct contrast with the power-seeking nature of his older brother and father. To have him try and take the ring by force seems to remove the entire purpose of his character. He's practically just another Boromir but with a chip on his shoulder.