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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3489326" data-attributes="member: 4937">Its not so much the cuts that Jackson made which are problimatic, but his many additions which slowed the story down (the interlude in PJ's TT were Aragorn falls off some high place and is lost, for example) and his persistant changing of key moments in the story/characterization so as to alter the meaning and intent of the original author (Faramir's kidnapping of the Hobbits is guilty on both counts).  Cuts would be necessary to achieve the running time of a movie series, whether or not they actually flatter the work. In fact, most of the cuts don't actually flatter the work, they simply reduce its depth while vastly reducing the attention span required to follow the work.  This is not the same as making the work better, unless your attention span is to short of follow a major work of fiction that doesn't have alot of naked bodies and violence in it - which would cover a good many people that don't read books for that reason.  PJ's editorial work emphasises the violent conflict in the story, which pays dividends at the box office, but can't possibly be said to flatter the story.  That is, unless you think something like 'Mission Impossible II' is an example of deep and compelling literature, and unless you think reducing the story to something along the lines of another action adventure movie is flattery.Frankly, PJ's editorial decisions have nothing to do with world-building or not world building.  If you wish to believe that you like PJ's movie better than the book because it had less world building in it, there is nothing I can do to prevent that.  But that doesn't make it so.I think it would be very easy to demonstrate that the movies do not do a better job of telling the story than the books do.  I think it would be virtually impossible to be able to explain after watching the movies what the story was about.  I think you could recount a number of events, but you'd have a hard time explaining what all these events and narration ammounted to collectively.  Even in specific events, the movie is horribly unclear as to what is actually going on.  For example, I've done casual polls of people who have only seen the movie and not read the book, and the majority of were of the impression that Frodo threw Gollum into the fire.  So it is not at all clear to me that the movie does a better job of telling the story it is supposedly telling.In my opinion, the only reason that PJ's movies were as successful as they were is the fantastic art direction provided by Alan Lee and John Howe, combined with a general couriousity by the general public to see a movie of this book they'd heard so much about.  The movies are beautiful to look at and are filled with interesting things to look at.  It's not at all clear to me that you can claim that the movies are more successful than the books because they are less reliant on Tolkien's world building.  At best I think you can say that a picture is worth a thousand words, and most people tend to be visual rather than verbal and so prefer a picture to a thousand words.</blockquote>

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