Peter Producing Poetic Pictures
 

George Lucas, famous for another set of trilogies, stated, "...it's like poetry, they rhyme...every stanza kinda rhymes with the last one...". Some interpret his words to mean that there are similarities between his first Star Wars trilogy and the second 'original.' There are scenes in the first trilogy that parallel to those in the second. Also, characters and places show up in the prequel and again in the original trilogy.

Rhyming.

Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies are very similar in that the Hobbit prequel was filmed after LotR. This timeline also allowed for scenes, places and characters to appear in both - if not identical, then nearly so.

For example, Legolas appears in both movie trilogies. Both fellowships (the 9 and the 13) do hero catwalks (you know, where they slowly and singly walk past the camera while Shore's score soars). The Ring thing. Solemn Gollum. Galadriel going all Dark mean Queen. Riders ringing walkers.

And so on. Some surely were intentional. Others may be random or just misplaced fandom.

What others did you spot?

Starting off, Gandalf calling Eagles using moths. :rolleyes:

Then there's blank verse, as in, I have not seen all of The Hobbit trilogy and so cannot contribute. ;)

Thorin uses the same quote in lake town that Aragorn uses in the paths of the dead ("What say you?").

I wouldn't say the film had blank verse; it was more a blank plot.

Worst 'rhyme:' Using the word "She-elf" in both trilogies. Having a character speak this word is stupid at both the quantum and cosmological levels. :mad:

Galadriel barefooting across the screen appears in FotR and B5A.

Add melodies to the rhyme: Howard Shore reprises almost all of his musical themes in the Hobbit trilogy - some of them in a different context which doesn't fit the original at all.

Um, the first trilogy was pretty decent and the second one blew chunks?

William Cloud Hicklin, how does chunks rhyme with good? ;)

Dead reprise of the spinning-ring-falling-onto-finger shot from FR.

This more fits on an adaptational level, but one thing which has occurred to me is that both texts were changed in order to shift the general tone and focus. Allow me to explain.

Some (excuse the weasel words) critics, reductively in my opinion, and usually deriving in some respects from the works of Northrop Frye, define a 'novel' and a 'romance' more or less as follows:
A 'novel' is character-driven and its narrative is the story of a character's development.
A 'romance' is plot-driven and its narrative is the story of a series of grand events: a journey, quest, war, etc.

That's over-simplified, but enough to get my point across.

In that sense, The Hobbit is, while in many respects heavily romantic, at a fundamental level a 'novelistic' text, as its primary focus, I would argue, is Bilbo's character development.

The Lord of the Rings, by contrast, is more overtly romantic, as it deals with the efforts of both individuals and whole societies to resist the Shadow. It is, of course, to an extent 'novelistic' according to the above definition as characters do change, but its focus is arguably different.

Turning to the films:
The films of "The Lord of the Rings" make the 'romantic' text more 'novelistic' by focusing more on character development: Aragorn, particularly, has to overcome self-doubt and embrace his responsibilities. (In hindsight, however, in Jackson's films many characters actually develop less than they do in the source material, if I think about it - Merry and Frodo stand out as characters who actually seem to develop less in the film)

The films of "The Hobbit", by contrast, make the 'novelistic' text more 'romantic' by focusing on the grandiose: grand strategies of war drawn up by Sauron, Thorin's desire not just for revenge and gold but a re-established homeland, etc. Bilbo's personal character arc falls seriously by the wayside because this film broadens its focus.

In that way, I would argue, it's possible that as adaptations both sets of films try to hybridise the source material with a different "mode" of text. I admit it's not the most robust argument ever formulated but I think it has something.

Well said
 

Zigûr, this sentence of yours summed up my main dislike of Jackson's Hobbit adaptations: 'Bilbo's personal character arc falls seriously by the wayside because this film broadens its focus'. The Hobbit was supposed to be Tolkien's 'edition' of Bilbo's memoirs, which as memoirs do revolved around himself, the 'author'. What Jackson and others did was to turn it into something completely different...:confused:

Actually, the real "rhyming" is between Lucas' and Jackson's careers. Both start as talked-about directors of low-budget, cult-hit genre pictures (THX-1138, Brain Dead) who then hit the mainstream with a critical and commercial success (American Graffiti, Heavenly Creatures), then really explode with a trilogy which is a gigantic pop-culture capital-E Event that makes bazillions, follow that up with a bloated, high-budget bomb (Howard the Duck, King Kong) and a failed attempt at a high-profile genre picture (Willow, The Lovely Bones), then finally attempt to relive past glories with a really poor "prequel" trilogy which in many ways is just an inferior but overwrought remake.

OTOH, Jackson never co-produced an Indiana Jones...

He is, however, producer of the (in my opinion dreadful) modern Tintin adaptation, apparently to eventually be a series, the first of which was directed by Spielberg, who also directed Indiana Jones, and who was introduced to Tintin when French journalists compared "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to it.

So the parallels are pretty striking.

Speaking of Jackson's King Kong, apparently it received good reviews. I remember thinking as a 16 year old that it was CGI-ridden rubbish.

I remember thinking as a 44 year old that it was CGI-ridden rubbish.