Artist intent versus viewer perception

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I always think that this change was put there as Jackson maybe felt the modern audience would nto be comfortable with the idea of a clear cut hero with masses of honour, a mistake as it happens, when you consider how the audience/readership idolised the honour driven Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones.

Originally Posted by Morthoron

His method of oversimplification, juvenility and underestimating the viewer takes place quite often through the trilogy: in his denuding Faramir of nobility, in making Denethor a pathetically evil nutbag, turning Treebeard into a dottering hobbit's dupe, having the Scrubbing Green Bubbles of Death(TM) overrun Sauron's army at Minas Tirith, of Frodo sending Sam away, of making the Mumakil so impossibly gigantic that the riders of Rohirrim seemed like scurrying mice, making wargs (wolves by all Tolkien's descriptions) look like giant gangrel hyenas, plopping the glowing Eye of Sauron atop the Barad-dur radio beacon, etc.

Hm. This thread makes it appear that PJ's problem was not necessarily that audience members failed to see his "vision" for the movies; rather that many completely understood it, and thought it merely misguided and incongruous with the text of the books it is based upon.

The obvious question I have is whether the "vision" of the movies would be so opaque if it had stuck closer to the source material.