Bamboozled By My Book-Based Brain

[Knight of Gondor]

I understand your objections. But I think we could take up a whole forum with being upset at the changes between movie and book. There are numerous small-time beefs that people have with the books (try http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showthread.php?t=9638). Some of them are good, some of them are for dumb audiences, some for more Hollywood-esque elements (having Eowyn follow and rescue her uncle, and then not see him ere he dies would probably be a Hollywood plot no-no, although I'm not well-versed in Hollywood-ology), and some of them for various other reasons. It was a shame it didn't play out in the movie the way it did in the books, but then again, it was nice to see an "alternate" version if you will, to see Eowyn bid Theoden farewell.

[mollecon]

But the mere fact that some of you actually have to go back to the books to 'recall' speaks volumes about how good Jacksons adaption really is!

And quite frankly, I can't understand all the complaints. A movie & a book doesn't operate in the same manner, and given the limitations that Peter Jackson, after all, had to deal with, I think he did a very good job.

If you wanted the movies to follow the books closely, story wise - you wouldn't have had a movie, you would have gotten a TV-series (with corresponding cheap & cheesy special effects!) in 30 one hour parts...

[The Only Real Estel]

And quite frankly, I can't understand all the complaints. A movie & a book doesn't operate in the same manner, and given the limitations that Peter Jackson, after all, had to deal with, I think he did a very good job.

I don't think anybody really wants a word for word adaption or anything like that. He did do a great job, in some ways, but just because, 'A movie & a book don't operate in the same manner' doesn't mean that he has some sort of imagined invincibility while making the movies. Especially since he said himself that he wanted them to be Tolkien's movies, not his own.

On another note, I won't complain about Thoeden's death scene, but I really liked the part in the books when he & Merry talk, & Theoden tells him that he will never sit with him in Meduseld nor listen to Merry talk of herb lore. I think that would've worked fine in the movie, but it's not a major issue or anything .

[Essex]

Jackson would have had to have spent a fair bit of movie time showing the relationship between Merry and Theoden for the book version farewell to have worked. He could not afford time wise to do this, (or perhaps he wanted more screen time for a female) so he subsituted the scenes building up Merry and Theoden's relationship, and built up Theoden's and Eowyn's instead.

Dininziliel, don't beat yourself up on forgetting certain parts of the story. LOTR is over a thousand pages long, and a human brain cannot possible store all of this information verbatim. You might think that forgetting merry's farewell with theoden is a major part, but there are dozens of others included or removed that might warrant another read of the book to remind our brains of the 'correct' version of events.

Every time I re read lotr I pick up at least a couple of things I haven't noticed before. eg as I recently stated on another post, I have just noticed the real animosity between aragorn and boromir in fotr. And for some reason I always struggle with frodo and sam's journey in Mordor and seem to be 'reminded' of this part of the book every time I read it. (not sure why this is).

[The Only Real Estel]

Jackson would have had to have spent a fair bit of movie time showing the relationship between Merry and Theoden for the book version farewell to have worked. He could not afford time wise to do this, (or perhaps he wanted more screen time for a female) so he subsituted the scenes building up Merry and Theoden's relationship, and built up Theoden's and Eowyn's instead.

Although if pictures don't lie, it appears that Merry offers his service to Theoden at Edoras:


surely Jackson has incorperated some of their relationship in as this is happening (although it'd have to be in the EE, of course). So I think we'll see more of the Merry/King Theoden relationship in the RotK EE, but unfortunatly, I don't think that we'll see the Merry/King Theoden farewell scene because of the Theatrical release of RotK. From what I remember the shots aren't set up correctly to introduce the farewell scene in the EE .

[mollecon]

Yeah - you managed to mention things I didn't even had begun to think about! As I've stated many times, I love the novel - but that doesn't prevent me from loving the movie equally