My Big Beef With the LOTR movies

[KenM]

But why couldn't the same levity be had by making Legolas lose the drinking game? Or even just with Gimli falling over soon after Legolas dropped? The Elf winning has nothing to do with going for comedy, it's just PJ childish way of making sure his favorite character wins.

I just would have liked one scene where Gimli does something better then Legolas, but PJ is such an elf fanboy.

 

[Berandor]

Look: You, me, and the rest of our nerd battalion see this as one big travesty and mockery of the sacred text that PJ has tainted with his Hollywood yadda yadda. But to John Q. Public, who's never read the books, never played D&D, and doesn't know the diff between a Dunedain and a Nazgul, the Legolas/Gimli dynamic played out in the films is simply the sword-n-sorcery equivalent of the classic "straight man" routine. Given that the characters don't have a lot to do dramatically-speaking in the films besides have Aragorn's back, and the whole trilogy can get a little dreary what with all the "The quest shall claim his life" and "Here you will dwell bound to your grief..." doomsaying, I'm sure PJ felt a little levity was in order.

Spoiler

So why not have Legolas topple over, and Gimli state "Game Over"? Isn't that the same scene, only with a better ending for the dwarf?

 

[Klaus]

Hmm.. I always thought that the people that PJ liked the most were the Rohirrim. They get all the cool scenes, from Helm's Deep to the utterly fantastic charge at the Pelennor. Plus, they look a lot like Vikings, which automatically makes them cool. Then, they are mounted archers, which is also cool. Compare them to the other peoples: the elves just sit in their forests and smile knowingly, other than a handful who went to Helm's Deep (who obviously thought the Rohirrim were cool too). Gondor? They get their butts kicked in most of the movie and are a hair away from going down until (who else) the Rohirrim come along. Who took out the Witch king? A Rohirrim-ette (with minor help from a hobbit). Sure, the dead swarmed over the Oliphaunts and took them out in their invincible way, but the Rohirrim had to fight them hand to hand, and took out at least 4 of them that we saw... fighting giant warbeasts hand to hand is also cool. So, when you add up all the cool points, the Rohirrim win easily....

Not to mention that fact that the leader of the Rohirrim takes down TWO FRIGGIN' OLIPHANUTS with a SINGLE BLOW, while it takes the twinky elf pretty-boy a bazillion arrows to take down a single olyphaunt and its riders.

Plus Eomer got to give the best line of TTT:

"Rohirrim! TO THE KING!!!!!"

 

[shilsen]

Hmm.. I always thought that the people that PJ liked the most were the Rohirrim.

I don't know if you were kidding or not, but anyway you're correct. Tolkien's Rohirrim are his slightly idealized recreation of the Anglo-Saxons and their literature (which he studied and wrote about throughout his academic career). The armor, the horses, the alliterative verse/songs, the overriding sense of the ubi sunt motif ("Where is the horse and the rider?") and deep fatalism - put Beowulf on a horse and you've got the Rohirrim.

PJ is such an elf fanboy

Isn't it neat, because that makes him a man after Tolkien's heart?

 

[Radiating Gnome]

In defense of the Gimli as Comic Foil . . .

I ended up the token tolkien geek on a panel about books and film at a CS Lewis convention about a year ago, and the rabid book fans in the audience brought this one up, and I talked through my own observations about the chalenges I see in translating that one character to the screen. Mind you, at the time Return was not out yet, and I'd just seen the EE of Towers, but I think it still holds . . . .

The trick is that Jackson was faced with problems in the case of Gimli. In the very opening of TT, Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli are running as fast as they can to try to catch up with the orcs that have Merry and Pippin. In the book, Tolkien can pass over the description of the pursuit because the reader isn't looking right at the characters, and the readers attention won't be drawn to the same obvious problem that the movie viewer sees in a heartbeat -- there's no way stubby little gimli is going to keep up with the long-legged human, not to mention the light-footed elf who can run on top of the frickin' snow. It's just not going to happen.

So Jackson has to find a way to translate the pursuit to the screen in a way that doesn't cost him much screen time (because his movie is already running long), it doesn't change the story (he can't remove the pursuit, it's too important), it doesn't take anything away from the other characters, and most of all it doesn't appear to be a criticism of the book (the way a dramatic change in the way that part of the story plays out would be).

Given all of that, I can't imagine a better way for Jackson to have handled Gimli's part of the pursuit. We need multiple scenes of the pursuit to demonstrate that the've come a long way, and they're working hard to keep up. And in those scenes we need to have the Gimli problem handled. So we crack a joke -- Gimli gets to crack gruff jokes about being very dangerous over short distances, etc. I can't see a better solution that wouldn't hijack the movie or call direct attention to itself.

But this solution creates something. Gimli has just opened the second movie with a reel of running gags. Now he's a comic character, and it's only natural for a few dribs and drabs of gruff humor to come from him through the rest of the films. Jackson did back it off a bit after the pursuit, but there are still plenty of moments of that humor from Gimli, and most of them are pretty good.

Now, I don't know that any of this is what really happened, but I think it makes sense, and it explains a lot. I personally like the gruff grumpy humor that we get from Gimli in the film, and I think it's a good addition to the character, but even when the jokes fall flat (which they sometimes do) they're still part of a far better solution to a big problem created by the difference between prose and film.

-rg

 

[Allanon]

I agree that Gimli having some comical moments has some good reasons. And I actually think that it fits the movie and story, my gripe is actually in the way that Legolas is displayed throughout the movie. Agreed Tolkien himself portrayed the Elves as immortal angelic beings but even he did not make Legolas look like 'Elvinator: The one Elf army'. Legolas is portrayed like he could single-handedly take on the whole of Saruman's and Sauron's army combined without breaking a sweat. Surely it wouldn't have been asking too much of PJ's self restraint to make his overbearing love-of-all-things-with-pointy-ears somewhat less conspicuous?

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

I tend not to include The Hobbit when I'm talking about something consistent in Tolkien's works, because it's just such a different genre. Consider Gandalf in The Hobbit and elsewhere, for example.

That's a good point. I just couldn't think of another source of info about the wood-Elves.

 

[Dark Jezter]

Look: You, me, and the rest of our nerd battalion see this as one big travesty and mockery of the sacred text that PJ has tainted with his Hollywood yadda yadda.

I hardly consider LotR to be a sacred text (it's a fantasy novel, and a very influential one at that, but nothing more). In fact, I feel that there are many areas where the movies improved over the books, but just once, I'd like to see Legolas be the one who said or did something that made him look silly.

 

[Orius]

Hmm.. I always thought that the people that PJ liked the most were the Rohirrim. They get all the cool scenes, from Helm's Deep to the utterly fantastic charge at the Pelennor. Plus, they look a lot like Vikings, which automatically makes them cool.

I think this is really something that can be attributed to Tolkien. They're even more badass in the book. It comes from Tolkien's love of Anglo-Saxon culture, which was a big influence on the Rohirrim, they're basically like Beowulf on horses. PJ had to leave some of that in so as to avoid completely butchering the story. But the movie Rohirrim come off as wimps compared to their counterparts in the book.

 

[Faraer]

Our society suffers from an infantile fetishization of youth and the particular kind of beauty represented by rail-thin fashion models. PJ's treatment of Gimli is part of an unpleasant cultural trend, as well as being far crueller than anything in the books, and a revival of the 'funny dwarfs' that Tolkien came (between writing The Hobbit and LotR) to revile.