[Kalimac]

I can't picture Tolkien out-and-out loving the movie, but you have to remember that there were very few artistic works out there (and in his mind movies probably weren't considered the highest of the arts) which he did express great enthusiasm for. This isn't a knock on him, it was his personality insofar as I can tell from his letters - reserved, honorable, holding himself and others to very high artistic standards. He did sell the film rights, and having done that I sincerely doubt that he would have tried to stop a production post hoc - that's reneging on a contract, among other things.<P>In a way I can see why people might be disappointed - there was quite a bit that was left out, and probably very few of us could point to any one scene in the book and say "Yeah, that should definitely go. Doesn't add a thing." (though personally I think cutting Tom Bombadil was a no-brainer decision, ring-a-ding-dillo). But books and movies are very different things. The subtlety question came up - the thing is, in movies and books subtlety is done in different ways. I think there was a great deal of subtlety in the movies, but it was done a very, well, movie-like style, that is visually. Little things like the runes on the walls of Moria, the elven-brooches, the smoke ship that Gandalf blew in the beginning (possibly shades of the Grey Havens?), the look on Frodo's face when he hears Boromir saying "It might have been mine, it should be mine!" All these things, some of them very fleeting, gave an impression of depth, that there was a real history in this world, not just some halfhearted scenery thrown together to look "fantasy-like." <P>In the book the subtlety is quite different, but to use one example, think about translating the scene where Frodo first sees Aragorn and Arwen into film. In the book, he sees them standing close to each other, sees the way Arwen looks at Aragorn, and sense that there is something there deeper than he had suspected. That's all. It's a wonderful scene to read, and tells us a lot about all three characters involved, but imagine trying to film it! Aragorn and Arwen standing close to each other, Arwen looking at Aragorn. That's it, unless you want to resort to having Arwen wink, or having Frodo do a voice-over. "Hmmm...I sense there's something going on here." Not going to work. Basically what I'm trying to say is that to keep the subtlety and flavor of the books, they had to change some stuff; if they'd done a literal word-for-word, event-for-event translation it would have been very, very hard to understand and probably painfully dull in stetches.