Tuesday, November 26, 2024

VI: Adaptation

People who had read Lord of the Rings -- and even people who had read it twice -- were mostly okay with what Peter Jackson did to Fellowship of the Ring. They thought he had done a literate job of translating Tolkien's long, difficult book into the language of the Hollywood summer blockbuster, even if some of them thought that turning that kind of book into that kind of film was a pretty weird thing to do in the first place.

But some of the people who had read Lord of the Rings three times were rather discombobulated by what Peter Jackson did with the Two Towers. They felt that he had pretty much abandoned Tolkien's storyline. And they thought that what he had replaced it with was, on the whole, a bit too silly: CGI hyenas, elvish cavalry, skateboarding elves and dwarf-tossing.

Some people didn't think this mattered and enjoyed the film on its own terms. But when some of the people in the first group expressed their disappointment that Jackson's Theoden had only a passing connection with Tolkien's Theoden and that Jackson's Helm's Deep had no connection at all with Tolkien's Helm's Deep, some of the people in second group embarked on a campaign of gate-leaver-openingism. 

"Well, naturally" they cried "If Peter Jackson gets one letter of an elvish inscription wrong, you are going to tell the rest of us that we aren't allowed to enjoy the movie."

Actually, Peter Jackson pretty consistently got his elvish inscriptions right: it was the broader stylistic decisions -- the Moria theme park ride, the fist fight in Theoden's hall, the Indiana Jones cliffhanger on Mount Doom -- that some of us had issues with.

With big, complicated, important books like the Lord of the Rings and the Bible, there is always going to be a certain amount of friction between people who are too pedantic and people who are not nearly pedantic enough. 


Rings of Power

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