Dumbing it down

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man

Now that’s the kind of discussion I would like to see more of on this Forum. It would certainly make a change to discuss the films as films, rather than simply by reference to the text upon which they are based.

What if, however, the filmic problems are one and the same as those pertaining to the differences between the books and movies? How if the filmic difficulties in the movies could have been resolved by remaining more faithful to the books?

For example, in my opinion, the Aragorn/Arwen kiss at the end of the RotK was an extremely corny, Hollywood-esque, sequence, put in for dubious reasons. Indeed, the whole sequence of the calm, tame, subdued Arwen arriving in Gondor does not jive with the Arwen seen rescuing Frodo. Her relationship with Aragorn is off kilter. This is, in my mind, a filmic difficulty, above and beyond any canonicity-related issues concerning Arwen. Quite frankly, Arwen isn't consistent within the movies.

But had they depicted Arwen as she was in the book, this need not have happened. We need not have had a conflict between a warrior princess and a more domesticated princess. And we certainly wouldn't have had to contend with a corny Hollywood kiss.

Now, you can't make a filmically perfect movie by following a book, but you could have improved on the film that they DID make by staying closer to the book in various places. The effect would not have been just a more ACCURATE movie, but a BETTER movie.