Grr. Return of the King makes me angry.

[Warrior Poet]

I'm just now getting around to this thread, and haven't even gotten past page 1, so I know I'm late to some of these posts, but I wanted to comment on this:

That last struggle is epic, but not Big Magic, greywindyshadow world epic. It's the epic struggle of two very small, very worn people over a tiny little thing, seen by one other very small person. And the fate of the world hinges on it. I like it that way.

Umbran, I've been reading those books for more than 20 years, and I've thought about so many aspects of the stories over the years, but that's one of the most beautifully elegant distillations of the struggle at the Sammath Naur I've ever heard!

Excellent words!

Thanks,

Warrior Poet

 

[Warrior Poet]

Don't even get me started on what they did to Eowyn's moment of glory. GRRRRRR....

I know, I know. The single most heroic moment in the story, and, as far as I'm concerned, in all of fantasy literature, and it got watered down.

I console myself with the thought that, as movies, I think they did a very good job overall of telling a story that doesn't exactly lend itself well to theatrical presentation, and that I love the movies as a whole, in some ways for different reasons than I do the books.

All of this has probably already been addressed in pages 3 through 8 of this thread, hasn't it?

Thanks,

Warrior Poet

 

[Berandor]

If somebody's willing to pony up the cash, I sure am. But that seems pretty unlikely to me.

I can paypal you a dollar to begin with. Then, you should surf all tolkien sites and fantasy sites and start fund raising. Who knows? Maybe in thirty years, you've got the money together.

 

[Ranger REG]

If somebody's willing to pony up the cash, I sure am. But that seems pretty unlikely to me.

Well, it's not like they're gonna come knocking at your front door, unless your last name is Spielberg. You have to go out there and pitch just like Peter Jackson. After all, he thought someone else was going to make a live-action LOTR until he decided he should be the one to do it.

 

[Orius]

It's with Two Towers that things start to break down. You talk about natural endings - well, the natural ending of the TT would have been Saruman's defeat. Instead we get a mishmash of different resolutions - Sam's pep talk, Gandalf's charge, the ent tearing up Isengard. PJ says there wasn't enough time, but there would have been if he hadn't added in so many pointless scenes. Aragorn's disappearance. Faramir dragging Frodo to Osiligoth. The elves arriving at Helm's deep (on foot - how'd they know where to go? how'd they get there before everyone else? why didn't they just accompany the Fellowship when they left Lothlorien?).

Oh, I agree. Tolkien ended Books III and IV fairly well. At the end of Book III, Pippin has foolishly looked into the palantir and drawn the attention of Sauron. At the end of Book IV, Frodo has been poisoned by Shelob, Sam leaves him for dead but then hears the orcs say he's still alive. Ending the second movie there would have still given the audience plenty to look forward too. The problem is the way PJ and the team built up the battle of Helm's Deep, making it far more grim and dire than it was in the book. They also seem to have been influenced by Bakshi's miserable failure and ended it there because the horrid cartoon ended there.

The elves at Helm's Deep doesn't bother me too much because it reflects one of the themes Tolkien states not only in the story, but in much of the background. That theme is the importance of the different peoples of Middle-Earth working together.

 

[Warrior Poet]

They also seem to have been influenced by Bakshi's miserable failure and ended it there because the horrid cartoon ended there.

To be fair to Bakshi, I believe he intended his cartoon to go on through the end of the story, but there was a lack of funding (which, if I'm not mistaken, is also part of why he relied on rotoscoping for some of the animation, although some of that may have been a style choice). Ralph seems to have gotten a raw deal on alot of his work, and he seems to struggle to get the cash for his projects. I always end up feeling like Bakshi could make one helluva an interesting animated picture (o.k., confession time, I really like Fire and Ice, and yes, I know the acting is bad) given a Pixar/Disney/Dreamworks budget. How much Jackson was influenced by that work, I don't know.

Warrior Poet

 

[WizarDru]

As I understand it, Bakshi has always had a long standing reputation of underpricing his projects and promising to deliver them on a budget he can't actually make, and then ends up running out of funding and cutting corners. Rotoscoping is (or was) actually fairly expensive process, and has always been a Bakshi stylistic choice, afaik.

Jackson clearly cribbed a few visuals from the Bakshi version (or they drew from a common source). And to be fair to Bakshi, some sequences from his version are pretty good (and some are obviously more strictly faithful to the book).

 

[mojo1701]

I remember watching an interview with Peter Jackson, and he said that his reason for not including Shelob at the end of TTT was:

1. He didn't want the non-Tolkien-acquainted audience to think "OH, GOD! Another cliffhanger" or something like that. I remember he didn't want to end it on a cliffhanger because of the audience.

2. There wasn't much after Shelob left to Sam and Frodo besides the destruction of the Ring.

 

[barsoomcore]

There wasn't much after Shelob left to Sam and Frodo besides the destruction of the Ring.

Especially if you're leaving out the Scouring...

Oh wait, this is where I came in...

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Especially if you're leaving out the Scouring...

Oh wait, this is where I came in...

Hehehe. Should just put the boards on rewind instead of typing everything again.