[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:<HR>The film-makers just wanted a happy Hollywood-style ending.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE><P>This my main objection to the film adaptations. They're good films, taken as films without any connection with J.R.R. Tolkien or <I>The Lord of the Rings</I>, but as adaptations they're terrible. The film-makers consistently show their contempt for Tolkien's dialogue, characterisation and dramatic flair by changing the plot; the personalities and motivations of characters and the emphasis of scenes. It's the sheer arrogance implicit in doing this that annoys me. Not only have these people assumed that the public is too stupid to understand Tolkien's plot but they've also assumed that their stock scenes and characters are more engaging than the originals. Well, let's face it, Tolkien did only spend more than a decade writing them: they're bound to lack some polish.<P>Now I'm not blind to the difficulties of telling the story of <I>The Lord of the Rings</I> visually. Some aspects of the books must be cut if your aim is to make three three-hour films. What I object to are the changes that are not motivated by time constraints or the demands of a visual medium, but solely by an opinion that the films should be typical, clichéd, formulaic Hollywood drama. Of course the king will be unsure about taking on the great burden; of course Faramir will be tempted by the Ring. We can't have people being too perfect, because that doesn't suit our mission statement or our demographic. Strip out all the dialogue and replace it, because no-one likes all that old-fashioned rubbish. Oh, and we'd better jazz up some of those scenes. Important scenes have to be full of loud noises and people shouting each other's names in slow motion so that even Billy the pigswill delivery boy can understand what's happening.<P>Now this is not the director's fault alone. All of these changes have the look and feel of having been dreamed up in a board room somewhere by a group of fat businessmen, whose reading for the past ten years had consisted entirely of corporate motivational literature; the sort of people, in fact, who would have been financing the whole enterprise. That's the problem, you see: those who paid for the project are a bunch of money-grubbing cretins, so the film had to be one that a money-grubbing cretin would imagine to be obscenely profitable. Unfortunately the original material was articulate, thought-provoking and intelligent, which are three things that the average executive will immediately write off as too risky for investment.<P>As for claiming that the revised version of a scene was better, that's simply irrelevant. The fact is that in an adaptation, where the object is to reproduce as closely as possible the experience of the original story, changing elements of the plot around to make scenes more interesting is detrimental to the overall aim. If Tolkien wrote a scene in a certain way we can be sure that he did so for a reason: he wasn't some bumbling amateur writing for a pulp magazine. Each scene has its own tone, which contributes to the fulfillment of its purpose within the narrative as a whole. If that scene is altered then the author's intended message is lost or distorted, which is a failure on the part of those doing the adapting. If they did this through arrogance that's bad enough, but if they did it just because the backers demanded it their integrity is as much in question as their humility. Fair enough, Peter Jackson might deserve more credit in a general sense, but in the particular case of his Tolkien films he's already had a lot more than he really deserves for his very average effort. I know that a lot of people are saying that we wouldn't have a film at all if certain sacrifices hadn't been made, but did we really need a film? Since the books are there for me to pick up and read whenever I like, I don't really think so. Certainly it would be nice to have some sort of visual version, but I'd rather have nothing at all than something that fails to live up to the books.<P>[ January 23, 2003: Message edited by: Squatter of Amon Rudh ]<p>[ January 23, 2003: Message edited by: Squatter of Amon Rudh ]