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Originally Posted by Morsul the Dark
True I just had a chuckle over it is all.
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Fair dos
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Originally Posted by Legate
That is actually the attitude I'd like - and which it (hopefully!) will be like after a couple of years or decades, when the movies disappear from general knowledge and will be just one of the many adaptations of Tolkien that could be remembered if one tries. The main issue I have with the movies now is that they seem to eclipse the books themselves and, to most of the people, seem to be THE representation of Tolkien (or not even Tolkien, but LotR/Hobbit). But I really like the attitude, if one sees the movies in this perspective: it's a work of art just the same as a painting of Isengard or a music piece representing the Fellowship, and one can judge how good piece of art it is, and that's it, instead of (consciously or subconsciously) putting equation between the movie and the book (which even I did, by default). This other way of thinking sort of puts the distance between oneself and the immediate experience, and it can be evaluated more objectively - or, actually, subjectively.
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I don't think the films will
ever eclipse the books, not for one moment. Now I don't mean to offend anyone, but to me they are rather like the Bible, in that they are such immense, imposing and influential texts that nothing can nor ever will take away from them bar censorship! And think how many times both the Bible and Shakespeare have been adapted, revised and played around with in the visual form. Yet the text remains. Horrible and maybe snobby to say it, but Literature will always triumph over Film when it's literature that's already got a firm foothold in the collective consciousness. I think only the relatively obscure or recently published text is at risk of being obscured by visual adaptation. We should thank our lucky stars that there was such a huge gap betwen publication and the work of Weta
After seeing this film it underlined to me that we should probably not be viewing them as adaptations, but as discrete films. As such, it worked very well indeed. I'm waiting to see what my manager thinks - she is a Film grad, I am a Lit grad - as she maintains that it's not right to critique any film in the light of the source material.
Also, do you really think anyone else will ever attempt to film them? I honestly don't.