The Capturing of Myth

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by davem

I think Jackson made an heroic attempt, but it was ultimately, & inevitably an heroic failure, because it could never have succeeded.

To my mind, the films didn't fail at all because that was not what they were trying to achieve. They might not have been directed at being what you wanted them to be, but that does not make them failures. On any level, in the context of what they were trying to achieve, they were overwhelmingly successful.

I agree that they did not achieve that mythic element. But then again, it is, largely for the reasons which you (and Tolkien) have stated, extremely difficult (if not impossible) for any film to achieve that. As I said, I can't think of any film that has.