Quote:
Originally Posted by tumhalad2
When people think "Tolkien" they think of what? hobbits, orcs, dragons, middle-earth, good vs. evil etc. I'm interested in how a film version of CoH has the capacity to change such perceptions, given the assumption above, and given that reviews of the book often exhibited surprise and astonishment and the variance in tone imminent in the novel when compared to LoTR.
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As far as your basic premise goes--namely that CoH elicited some very different responses from reviewers than we were used to hearing, and that it would be interesting to see what a faithful adaptation would do along those lines--I think you posit an interesting question... but what I'm trying to say is that it's almost as counterfactual as asking "what if Cecil DeMille had lived long enough to make a LotR movie in the late 1970s--would it have changed people's perceptions of Tolkien?"
Obviously, I think the answer would be yes... but it's entirely too fraught with other things to really be answered at all. I think part of the reason we're so used to thinking of "hobbits, orcs, dragons, middle-earth, good vs. evil" when thinking of Tolkien is
because of the movies we've already seen. Obviously, it goes deeper than that, because Tolkien's works have been around for over half a century now. All the same, it is precisely because the movies ignited such a Tolkien-craze in the past decade that CoH received so much attention--critical and otherwise--when it was released, and I daresay those same movies coloured the same critics' previous views of Tolkien to a large extent.
It's all tangled up. If Hollywood were to decide to have a go at CoH (assuming for a moment that they could pry the rights to make it out of the Estate's hands), they would probably want to replicate as many of the elements they could from the LotR--the elements that they thought made it such a success, which would probably be all the same elements mentioned: "hobbits, orcs, dragons, middle-earth, good vs. evil." For what it's worth, take "hobbits" off that list, and they can all be found in CoH.
What's more, given the huge financial success enjoyed by the previous films insofar as they were "family friendly" (and yes, I use those quotation marks emphatically... violence and all)--aka, marketable to the teenaged market--plus the fact that Hollywood is known for bowdlerizing things--who knows what sort of mess we might end up with! Evil!Faramir and Tomato!Denethor--to say nothing of GlorfindArwen--might be nothing compared with the character treatment we'd see in CoH. And, personally, I'd argue that CoH is more character-driven that LotR. We might see Nienor and Níniel divided into two characters, just to get rid of the whole squeamish incest thing... and if there's no incest, then maybe we just get Glaurung saying "Túrin, I killed your sister!" at the end, with Túrin slaying him mightily, ala Michael Bay action hero, to then live happily ever after thereafter...
Okay, I might be getting carried away slightly (indeed probably), but can you see where I have problems with the question? It's simply too counterfactual--too "what if?". The only way I could see a fairly accurate movie adaptation (again, there's the whole "pry it out of the Estate's hands thing") is if it were an independent production--but, of course, if anyone were to get the rights to make it, why would it be an indie company with a tight budget when Warner Brothers or Disney is waiting greedily in the wings?
I am probably too reality-minded, or something, to be considering this question...