Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
Its interesting how both LotR & TH end with an anti-climactic battle - LotR doesn't end (as with the film) with the epic battle & the fall of Sauron, but with the Scouring, which is a nasty, brutal fight between ordinary Hobbits & a bunch of thugs...
...And that is clearly what Jackson misses. Still, I'll be going to see the spectacle, because as with the LotR movies, I reckon something of Tolkien will come through. What is sad is that many people will see the film & not read the book, or if they do go on to read it, they will do so in the light of PJs take on it.
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Very well said, davem.
Additionally, I think that movie-goers didn't get to see the growth and maturation of the hobbits in Jackson's LotR, particularly because the Scouring of the Shire was omitted. The brilliance of Tolkien's original story is that the hobbits must fend for themselves once they return home. They must become the leaders, without the aid of wizards, dwarves, elves, glorified Anglo-Saxon horsemen or legendary kings.
Likewise, the enemy is no longer a Dark Lord with demonic orkish minions, wargs and balrogs; instead, as you said, they must face mercenary thugs, mannish brutes and vagrants, and Sharky, wounded, old and treacherous, bereft of divine power, but still able to commit appallingly petty acts of vengeance. And they must overcome the evil inherent in even unassuming but greedy hobbits. Thus, Tolkien offers a foreshadowing of the wars of the 4th age and onward, where the foe we fight is ourselves and not a supernatural enemy.
Jackson caught the cinematographic spectacle of the story, the huge sweep of vast armies and the marvelous edifices of lost empires, but he failed utterly in capturing the heart of the story and the nobility of the individuals involved. How else can one explain Frodo abandoning Sam, the savaging of the tragic hero Denethor, the befuddlement of Treebeard, and the trivialization of Aragorn's peer, Faramir?
Aragorn commits an ignoble act of treachery by beheading an ambassador under a flag of truce merely for a cheap one-line pun, and simply for the sake of added spectacle and CGI overkill a legion of undead scrubbing bubbles destroys Sauron's army, all but eliminating the need for the valorous and lethal charge of the Rohirrim. Frodo whines throughout the movie, Merry and Pippin never progress past boorish louts, Elrond is cynical and bitter, Gimli is a walking dwarf joke, and the character with the most depth isn't even human but a CGI replication.
I know Tolkien eschewed allegory, but woe to all of us if Jackson decides to make a movie about the Bible: Jonah would be swallowed by a CGI leviathan of Jurassic proportions, Noah's ark would be nuclear-powered, Moses would not inflict ten plagues on Egypt (he'd have at least twenty, including zombies, dragons, spiders and flying monkeys), and a wise-cracking Jesus, ably assisted by his 12 ninjas, would call down the heavenly host to smite the Romans. Because, after all, one must use creative license, and the original scripture needs tweaking to appeal to modern audiences.