[Sir Kohran]

Originally Posted by davem

All I wanted was to be affected in the same way by the movies as by the books. I wanted to be taken to the same 'mental/emotional' place. That wouldn't require a director to put the book on screen in every particular. To me the movies weren't the LotR I know & love. I watched them, thinking occasionally 'That's clever' or 'That's impressive', but more often 'Why did they do that?', or 'That's wrong'. As movies they're ok, but as an adaptation of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings they're a failure - in my opinion, of course.

Tha's the difficulty. Heck, I love the movies and passionately defend them, and yet I openly admit that they don't affect me in the same way the books do. Nor could they - they are adaptations; not clones. I don't believe I've ever seen a movie adaptation that managed the same power as the book did. The answer is simply that it's a different format - text on paper is very different to moving images and sound. With books you can form your own vision of a story; with movies you're looking at someone else's vision of the story. I would not expect the movies to affect me as the books do, anymore than I would expect them to include a singing man with yellow boots.

As an adaptation of the books I would say they are a success - not a perfect success, but a good enough success - though also in my opinion.

One is tempted to respond, "who cares? The issue is whether it is good, not whether it appeals to the massed millions."

The issue is not whether it is good. Of course, by itself, the Council *is* good - hence why it works in the books. However, we're talking about the movies here, and they aimed to appeal to the massed millions - something that the Council by itself would not have done.

Instead I'll just observe that it would of course stop the narrative drive cold *if* the entire bloody Council were repeated verbatim (as well as using up way too much of the available screentime). Of course it had to be pared to essentials. But concedig that is in no way a justification for abandoning the essential dignity of Tolkien's scene for a boorish shouting match.

I concede that the Council scene could have been done better. But I'm arguing that we could not have had the scene direct from the books, and it seems that to some extent you agree with this.

He disdained stooping to irony: he wrote heroic characters like Faramir and Aragorn along the lines of ancient saga and didn't give a damn about "character arcs" or whether a contemporary audience could "identify" with them. And plainly it worked, given the books' overwhelming success: success *without* compromise.

He was writing for an entirely different generation. Ours is one that expects action and character development and people they can identify with. The movie is meant to appeal to them, therefore it includes these things.

And anyway, just how much did it succeed? Whilst LOTR certainly was a success, both financially and in terms of awards and prestige, I'd say it was a limited one; they did not achieve the same kind of success that Dickens or Shakespeare before or Rowling after managed. Before the movies were released I knew nothing of Tolkien (one of the reasons I like the movies so much is because they introduced me and so many others to his work). How much of this was down to the lack of 'compromise' is debatable - my dad can remember trying to read the books back in the seventies and being utterly confused (fortunately I didn't turn out the same way).

There's a word for compromise of this sort, of altering the artistic vision and mode of expression to please a targeted audience: it's called pandering.

So Peter Jackson changed some things to please his audience. And?