Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1882446" data-attributes="member: 812">Umbran: I guess I'm not being clear. OF COURSE in the movies that PJ made, you couldn't just tack on another hour of The Scouring and expect it to work. I'm trying to say that I believe there's a way to create films in which the Scouring IS the climax. The existing films are not those films, I grant you, and so the setup they provide is not going to give us what we want.Obviously you PUT the hobbits under stress and tension. I'm not talking about "Being True To Tolkien's Vision" or anything like that. I'm saying I LIKE the Scouring and to me it's the climactic moment, the most exciting part of the whole story. In order to translate that to a movie you'd have to make a lot of choices, and some of those choices would involve changing what Tolkien wrote, because, as pretty much everyone has pointed out already, what works in a book doesn't necessarily work onscreen.I would need to spend some more thinking time to determine exactly WHY I find it so thrilling, so rewarding, and then more thinking time to figure out how to bring it to the screen. But I think I would start such a project with exactly that end in mind, to have the hobbits leave the Shire with the intent of protecting it, and return to find that all their efforts, while not exactly in vain, still were unable to prevent the slow onset of change. That's the movie I would want to make, and so I would make choices about what to beat over my audience's head and so on keeping that in mind.Is that clear? Arguments like, "Well but they spent the whole first two and a half movies making this impossible" aren't relevant to the point I'm trying to make, nor are arguments like, "I think the books behave in such and such a fashion." I'm talking about completely redoing the movies and I'm talking about making choices as regards to representing the source material in a cinematically powerful way that might involve changing the text of the books.Obviously nobody's ever going to give me the money to do this, so I'm just making stuff up in my head for fun. I don't think the existing movies would have been IMPROVED by adding the Scouring -- I'm just saying I don't think it's true that it's "impossible" to make a movie that includes it. Given all the other choices PJ had made, it was a good idea to leave it out.</blockquote>

Verification