Ten, and twenty and thirty years on.....

[Thinlómien]

3D version of the movies? Huh.

As for the original question, I would definitely love to see a different version of LotR on screen, just for the sake of it. Now Mith's suggestion of starting with Faramir's dream really made my imagination race... *almost runs away to start writing a script*

[davem]

Don't know how many of you have seen this article via the link on ToRn http://www.salon.com/entertainment/m...otr/index.html but there are some interesting comments on what PJ got wrong - this analysis in particular (I'll quote it in full here as some of the other points in the piece include some 'adult' language):

In Tolkien's storytelling, every character lives in relation to the background myths. It is in relation to those -- the tales contained in the almost immemorially ancient Silmarillion, and the many others that Tolkien had already spent a lifetime defining by the time he started working on LOTR -- that every character in LOTR -- elf, dwarf, wizard, human, defines himself.

But Jackson's script destroys this. The destruction isn't all that apparent in "Fellowship of the Ring," but with each of the next two films it encroaches further and further on the story as originally told. Characters such as Elrond, Gimli, Denethor, and Treebeard, as the film defines them, are pathetic travesties of those Tolkien gave us in his three volumes.

One way of seeing Tolkien's achievement is that he gave us real, presumably complex persons, with extensive interior lives, acting in a moral universe defined by the huge expanse of their cultural myths. Every significant choice that Aragorn makes, he makes against a historical background: he knows the history of the Rangers, the Dunedain, stretching back to Gondor and the Numenoreans. He knows his heritage.

The same is true of the other participants in the attempt to destroy the One Ring. None of them has any private motive apart from those provided by their cultures.

Except for the hobbits. They, common little people, have no such history. In their folktales, the memorable items are the blizzard of '78, or somebody's great-grandfather who was big enough to ride a horse. They did not participate in any of the world-defining and world-transforming events that constrain the other members of the Fellowship. They have no prior cultural commitments regarding any of the large issues that are involved for anyone else. So Sam and Frodo, and even Merry and Pippin, as Tolkien tells the story, have plenty of reason to wonder to each other why they are doing this. None of the other members of the Fellowship ever talk about their motives.

Jackson's script wipes out this distinction. Completely. Everybody in the Fellowship, it turns out, has some personal axe to grind.

That may have been innocent enough at first. It's not unreasonable, perhaps, to say to oneself, "Well, viewers need something to identify with, some little idiosyncrasy or weakness in their heroes. One can't expect them to watch abstract principles in action." But then, by the last film, we have Denethor presented as a pathetic, self-centered fool rather than as the tragically misguided figure, heroically sacrificing himself to an empty model of quasi-roman heroism. We have Gollum, free of his mindless obsession with the precious, enacting a preposterous plot to turn Frodo and Sam against each other. We have Gimli become one of the three stooges. We have Elrond and Arwen acting out petulant parent/child arguments.

And the biggest howler of all, Frodo, at Mount Doom, announcing his inability to free himself from the Ring in words and gestures that might be lifted straight from an old Fu Manchu movie. Yuk and double-yuk.

Oh, and the Ents. Don't get me started on what Jackson did to them. In the film, they are comic figures and they are stupid. They are dumbed down to where, in just two sentences, Merry can persuade Treebeard to completely reverse his course and take them near Isengard.

In order to provide this endearing touch, Jackson had to rewrite the Entmoot so that it turns out exactly the opposite of Tolkien's Entmoot: the ents decide to have nothing to do with the coming battle. Jackson's cinematic requirement for the endearing weakness has conquered all: myths, legends, and finally even Middle-Earth common-sense. None of these characters has any heroic resonance at all. If Jackson wanted viewers to feel as though his characters could have come off the street, as though we could sit down and have a beer with Boromir -- well, unhappily, he succeeded all too well. (my bolding)

Now, this isn't (honestly) intended to start the whole 'let's slag off the movies' debate again, but to point out that the real challenge in bringing Tolkien's story to the screen is not about technology, but about insight into the meaning of the story. Jackson just didn't get the point of the story - & his desire to turn it into 3D confirms for me that he has always been incapable of understanding what Tolkien was doing (China Mieville's comment on Jackson's omission of the Scouring is worth quoting again http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/press/...on_Tolkien.php

Unlike so many of those he begat, Tolkien's vision, never mind any Hail-fellow-well-met-ery, no matter the coziness of the shire, despite even the remorseless sylvan bonheur of Tom Bombadil, is tragic. The final tears in characters' and readers' eyes are not uncomplicatedly of happiness. On the one hand, yay, the goodies win: on the other, shame that the entire epoch is slipping from Glory. The magic goes west, of course, but there's also the peculiar abjuring of narrative form, in the strange echo after the final battle, the Lord of the Rings's post-end end, the Harrowing of the Shire--so criminally neglected by Jackson. In an alternate reality, this piece of scripting would have earned talented young tattooed hipster video-game designer Johnno Tolkien a slapped wrist from his studio: since when do you put a lesser villain straight after the final Boss Battle? But that's the point. The episode concludes 'well', of course, so far as it goes, but in its very pettiness relative to what's just been, it is brilliantly unsatisfying, ushering in an era of degraded parodies of epics, where it's not just the elves that are going: you can't even get a proper Dark Lord any more. Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming.

Its not about 'mocap' or 3D, or even holographic technology - all that's needed is a director who understands the story & has the ability to put that understanding on screen (or whatever medium).

[alatar]

Originally Posted by davem

Its not about 'mocap' or 3D, or even holographic technology - all that's needed is a director who understands the story & has the ability to put that understanding on screen (or whatever medium).

Excellent articles, davem. I couldn't agree more regarding Jackson's hatchet job. My point, as this is a thread about the advances in technology over time (don't think that in 30 years, Tolkien's works will be any different ) is that, with the example of "Avatar," no longer can a filmmaker hide behind the excuse of "Well, we couldn't film that, so we decided to completely diverge from the source material."

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by davem

Its not about 'mocap' or 3D, or even holographic technology - all that's needed is a director who understands the story & has the ability to put that understanding on screen (or whatever medium).

Or more specifically, a writer who understands the story and has the ability to adapt it with respect, combined with a director and producers who also have respect for the original work and not merely the almighty dollar. I have long been amazed that some of the very things Tolkien himself thought were done wrong back in the days when Forrest Ackerman held the screenrights and tried to present the Professor with a script were things that Jackson apparently embraced. If he truly had been as determined to remain faithful to the books as he promised the fans in the years before the first film was released, he would've come across that particular letter and paid attention to it.

At any rate, to go back to the original question, I would love to see another film adaptation done of LotR, one that stayed true to the substance of the book and not merely to the appearance of the settings and costumes and props. As for the matter of a "definitive version," that can only been determined after there is more than one version to contrast and compare (Bakshi hardly counts, as he never finished the job). There are myriad adaptations of other classic works -- my sister has made a hobby of collecting different film and TV versions of the works of Jane Austen, for instance, and I have several friends who collect every film and audio version of A Christmas Carol that they can find. Which, if any, is "definitive"? That, like so much of art, is in the eye and tastes of the beholder. As Jackson's version is the only complete film adaptation of LotR, I would not call it definitive, and would hope that other people will try to outdo him -- in accuracy, if nothing else. But I hold little hope that this will happen in my lifetime. I'm now closer to 60 than I am to 50, and so long as the rights remain with a studio that is continuing to milk the franchise for all it's worth, there's no chance that someone else will even be given the opportunity to attempt another adaptation. More's the pity, IMHO.

[Galadriel]

Originally Posted by Thinlómien

3D version of the movies?

Oh no. I think that would kill the magic and make it too technically constipated.