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is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer · 1 year

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Why I dislike the LotR movies

A few weeks months ago @acaseofsilverspoons asked me why I say I hate the Lord of the Rings movies, and I promised I would try to give an explanation. Sorry for the delay, I have a lot of thoughts and it has taken a bit of time to order them in my head and then I forgot about this draft.

Movie people following the newsletter: stop reading now. I am going to spoil the hell out of it. And even if you don’t care about spoilers, if you like the movies you’re probably going to get defensive and enjoy the novels less because of it. I don’t want to be the reason you enjoy Tolkien less. Come back once you’re done reading, I’ll be happy to discuss then!! ^^

Disclaimer: I haven’t watched the movies. I have a very weak visual imagination and I hated the design of the elves on sight, so I decided to avoid getting them as my default elves; and I react very badly to peer pressure, which means the more people tell me I need to watch them the least I want to. I still think I have enough information to base my opinions, but well. There you go. Can't tell me I lied to you.

The first, and main reason, I “hate” the LotR movies is very well summarized by this strip of the webcomic Weregeek.

The movies are good enough, and good enough adaptations, and enough of a cultural milestone, that people talk of them as if the movies and the novels were interchangeable. Tolkien was never exactly obscure, and it’s not like people are at risk of forgetting the novels exist, but a lot of people have seen the movies but will never read the books, and even people who are into the genre will read the novel after seeing the movies. So you have people who have only experienced the movies thinking they know all that there is to know, and people who have experienced both getting to the novel with the preconceptions of the movies (see all the people analyzing Frodo’s actions as effects of the Ring from day 1 in the newsletter, or people immediately assuming book!Denethor is an abusive parent... we’ll come back to that). I’ve heard people say “don’t worry about reading the novels, the movies are enough”. And they are NOT. They are very much NOT. Even if you think every single choice in the movies is justified and good, there were a lot of choices made. They’re not equivalent.

Let me expand on that under a Read More because believe me, this is going to get long.

Let’s start with the themes.

First of all: Lord of the Rings is not an action story. If anything, it is an anti-war novel. Even though most characters admit that violence is sometimes necessary, almost universally it is considered a necessary evil. We have Faramir, the closest to a Moral Compass Man we have, literally spelling that he doesn’t like war for itself, but only for what it defends. And the narration mirrors this: except for the Battle of Helm’s Deep, every battle is either skipped over (the Black Gate), told in retrospect (Isengard) or interspersed with sections about the grief it brings (Pelennor). And in all cases, we end them with lengthy descriptions of the people that died and the grief they caused. It’s hard to finish the novel going “oh, the battle of Pelennor was awesome! I wish there were more!” when the last thing you hear about it is three pages of obituaries. In contrast, the movies fall into the trap of wanting to utilize their shiny new technology and their great visuals for battle scenes, and end up making battles cool. I have lost count of the dudebros whose take on the LotR movies was “weren’t the battles awesome???”. And before you come for me with “but the text says”, to quote Lindsay Ellis, movies are a visual medium. If you make the battles the most visually appealing and fun part of your movie to watch, you can have characters have unending monologues about how bad war is, that’s not the message people are going to get from it. And if you make a LotR adaptation whose message is “war is cool and fun”, you’ve missed the mark by a mile.

Secondly, another big theme about Lord of the Rings is that in the end, it’s the small people that make the difference, and that noone wins alone. To quote Elrond, “you may find friends upon your way when you least look for it”. But the movies, in their (reasonable) quest to streamline the story to fit a movie runtime, choose to prioritize the more classically heroic characters and arcs, sacrificing the small people for the big flashy kings and warriors. Pippin and Merry’s contributions get pushed to the side, while Aragorn not only retains all his original plotpoints, but even gets a shiny new subplot that was only in the appendixes in the novel. And also everyone who isn’t a member of the Fellowship (and not even that.. we’ll get back to Gimli) gets their role changed to make the actions of our heroes more necessary. Théoden is under a literal spell that needs to be lifted by Gandalf, and has to be told how to do war by Aragorn; the Ents decide not to attack Isengard and have to be reminded of the stakes by the hobbits; Denethor is such an incompetent nutjob that Gandalf can hit him in front of his guards and nobody cares. I understand the urge to make the main characters more important,, but LotR has a very strong feel of people in the same danger uniting to fight together instead of fending for themselves; this way, the secondary characters feel less like allies and more like sidequests.

And that gives me a nice segue into another, less important but more annoying issue: the characters.

Noone who follows my tumblr will be surprised to discover that Pippin and Merry, especially Pippin, are my favourite characters. If you asked me to tell you what are my favourite scenes in the book, which parts I’ve re-read the most often, they would be A Conspiracy Unmasked, P&M’s meeting with Treebeard, Éowyn’s monologue, the passage with Pippin and Bergil, and The Scouring of the Shire. Do I need to explain more? Except for Treebeard and Éowyn, none of these scenes made it into the movie. Which is a crime against me, personally. But apart from being annoying to me because I like them, it also means that their entire character arcs (again, especially Pippin’s) completely disappear. Pippin has the most traditional coming-of-age story in the novel: he’s a teenager dragged in an adventure bigger than he expected who has to grow up and learn that the world is bigger than he ever imagined and some things are important, and who then comes back home all grown up and ready to fend for himself. By cutting both A Conspiracy Unmasked and The Scouring of the Shire, you cut both the setup and the payoff of his arc, and by aging up the actor playing the character, you turn him from a learning teenager to a bumbling adult. Is it important in the grand scheme of things? Not really; but every time I see a meme about how Pippin is an idiot I feel like punching a wall.

Denethor. I didn’t know it was possible to be this offended on behalf of a character I don’t even particularly like. When I first looked up Denethor meta I thought I had slipped into a parallel dimension for a while, until I discovered it was just that Peter Jackson had performed a little character assassination of his own. Book!Denethor is not a nice or an endearing character, but he’s not an easily hateable one either. He’s the leader of a country in perpetual war against an enemy way stronger than they are (he has probably been born already under the Shadow of Mordor, knowing he would have to lead his people against it since he was a kid). He is cold, and calculating, and shrewd, and he has sacrificed his humanity (and his family) in order to make the decisions he thinks need to be made. To put it bluntly, he’s a character type who would be a good (and successful!) guy in Game of Thrones. But because he is in a story whose core themes are empathy and friendship and compassion, he’s a tragic figure: when the grief of the sacrifices he was willing to make hits him, he has nothing and noone to lean on, and he breaks. From everything I’ve seen, Peter Jackson has decided to take his character in a more “abusive father” direction. And look, I’m not going to say book!Denethor was a good parent. He was not. But he didn’t just “love Boromir and hate Faramir”. It’s more complicated than that. He was sure of Boromir’s loyalty, while he feared that in a conflict situation, Faramir would side with Gandalf and not him. And as a general, that is a big concern. Also, from everything I’ve read, movie!Denethor’s military tactics are whack from day one, which kind of diminishes his characterization as a cold but effective general. But that might just be a question of filmmakers not understanding medieval military methods, which... fair, I guess. On a related note, what’s that about a scene of him eating a tomato?? Did they really give him a scene explicitly designed to be disgusting and unrelatable?? The quest to make Denethor more hateable, though, is not only a problem because of his character. His character choices bleed onto others. In particular, Boromir, Faramir and Pippin. If Denethor is an abusive nutjob, why is Pippin drawn to swear loyalty to him? Is he an idiot?? Boromir comes off as the favoured child in an abusive household. But the worst is Faramir. A few weeks ago someone who is movie-only described him to me as “Faramir is the brother of Boromir that is hated by his dad, right?”. And I don’t think I can explain my reaction to Faramir, fucking Faramir, being reduced to a wet blanket who looks very sad and does nothing while his dad walks all over him. Just give me that gif of a guy screaming into a pillow.

And lastly on the “character assassination” column, Gimli. I think I’ll leave @carlandrea take the mic on this one, they can say more than I could possibly, and better. All I’m going to say is that, from everything I’ve seen, the movies take one of the more well-spoken, dignified characters, and made him into a bumbling, crass comic relief who fits closer to a D&D parody dwarf than anything Tolkien ever wrote.

And now, let me end with some quick-fire complaints that wouldn’t be important if the ones above hadn’t happened.

What happened with the male elves’ design?? I understand holding a casting for “otherworldly beautiful men” is not doable, but why do they look like that?? And it’s not that they can’t do elves, Galadriel and Arwen look good! Were they scared to make them “look gay” if they were too pretty?? If that’s the case, why didn’t they lean into the “otherwordly” part of it and made them alien-looking? WoW elves look more interesting than that!!

Also, I need to have a serious talk with the wig department. Why do the elves’ wigs have no volume?? Why do they look limp and dead? Why is Elrond balding? What’s going on here??

While we’re on the topic of character designs, it’s a pet peeve of mine that the hobbits only have hair on the top of their feet. It looks more decorative than anything and I don’t like it.

Last complaint about the character designs, I promise: this is not a criticism of Elijah Wood’s acting. I have never seen him act, I couldn’t say. But Frodo is supposed to be a middle-aged gentlehobbit. Why is he played by a 20 year old skinny guy who looked like a teenager?? Why is Frodo not fat?? On that note, why is Sam the only fat hobbit? They are hobbits! They are defined by ruddy cheeks and round bellies!! Did the producers think a middle-aged fat protagonist would be too much for an audience to swallow??

I’m not sure if I got this right, but I think in the movies Arwen’s life is tied to Aragorn taking his throne?? Because if that’s true, wow, way to make her into a more active character in the beginning only to tie her entire existence to a male character’s story arc!

And while we’re on the subject of stuff I suspect but I’m not sure of, I’ve seen enough Éowyn takes with the same uncanny valley feel as Denethor’s to suspect they did something to her character. And if they turned her into a Hollywood Strong Female Character Who Don’t Need No Man (TM) I will bite someone.

Lastly on this category, I am very confused about the elves from Lórien who apparently appear randomly at Helm’s Deep. Is Lórien not being attacked in this version of events (again, reinforcing the idea that everything revolves around the main characters)? Where do they go after the battle? Did they come for two days and then go back to Lórien? That sounds like a stupid plan... And also, you are aware the Rohirrim are super fucking distrustful of elves, right, PJ? How the hell did Aragorn convince Théoden and Éomer to let a battalion of elves into the Helm??

If you’ve gotten all the way here, thank you so much! It got longer than I expected, which was already very long, so thank you for bearing with me! I am willing to discuss and debate all of these, as long as it is civil.

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is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer · 1 year

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“I think the script written for the Peter Jackson film was in many ways quite marvelous. And I think a filmmaker must absolutely be allowed all kinds of liberties in turning a novel into a film. They are such different forms!

What I found unsatisfactory in the film was its increasing obsession with scenes of war and battle; and most of all, its failure to catch any hint of what I think may be the secret of Tolkien’s narrative magic: the constant and powerful alternation of tension and relaxation, war and peace, the public and the domestic, fear and reassurance, light and dark... His book has the pace of a heartbeat; of a person walking; of day and night succeeding each other... That is why people reading it “live in the book” - it has the rhythm of life. - Film, of course, is a kind of drama, and must be more concentrated, faster in its pacing; but the film goes too far in that direction. It is all action, little thought; all noise, no stillness; all Yang no Yin. And therefore, though beautiful and entertaining, it is profoundly untrue to Tolkien’s story.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, interview with Paola Castagno, 2006.

#lord of the rings movies #text posts #quotes #Ursula K. Le Guin #is-it-mungojerry hates on the LotR movies

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is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer · 1 year

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The realization that other people took things from the LOTR films that i didn't was quite surprising! Here's some of my Gimli thoughts.

I have seen a couple of people criticize the fact that Gimli is used as comic relief and . . . i never got that? To me Film Gimli is loud and boisterous and has a strong sense of humor and very little filter. He's a powerful warrior and a loyal friend. One of the things i love about the LOTR films is not just showing Legolas and Gimli come to respect each other as warriors but to enjoy each other's different senses of humor. Legolas in the film has a rather understated and dry sense of humor that is delightfully scathing at times. Gimli is a very funny character in the films and has a lot of comedic moments but, at least in the Extended Editions, he's a very well rounded character overall in my opinion. Tho i can understand why people would be critical of how he's portrayed. If need be i will proudly declare myself a Film Gimli Stan, tbh.

The thing about Arwen being connected to the ring . . . i never picked up on that? Is it some symbolism i didn't pick up on or interpreted differently? @roxycake I would love if you could expand on this a bit more! I am very curious!

This ask is already very long so I'll leave this here for now. But i have so many other thoughts I'd love to share if you're willing to listen?

Thank you so much for adding to this conversation! I would definitely be willing to listen to more opinions from you. I appreciate you and your taste a lot, and as I said, it's people disagreeing with us that makes us grow. So feel free to add more stuff!

I don't know much about the Arwen situation, so I will let Roxy get this one.

As for Gimli, again it's not one of my strong points, most of the information I have about this character in the movies comes from @carlandrea. So if you want to butt in, carla, (politely and civilly, of course), I will be listening in and learning from your discussion.

As for me, my point was less that Gimli was a bad character, and more that it was a bad adaptation. You say that "Film Gimli is loud and boisterous and has a strong sense of humor and very little filter", and my answer is, that sounds like a great character. But does that remind you of Book Gimli at all? For me, at least, Book Gimli is prideful, dignified, well-spoken, and kind of quiet. He does put his foot in his mouth sometimes, but it's usually when someone offends something he's very fond of, like his friends, or his beloved Galadriel. Apart from Aragorn, he's probably the best in the Company with his words.

In my probably not super based opinion, the treatment of Gimli and Legolas in the LotR movies... kind of reminds me more of D&D than Tolkien? Legolas is understated and dry, and Gimli is loud and has very little filter. Elegant, classy and a little uptight elves and loud, boisterous, Scottish dwarves are a staple of D&D. And they are fun! They give you great character dynamics, and I've played them all. And they look like they did a good job with them in the movies. But... they're not Legolas and Gimli. Not the book versions of them, at least. Can you imagine movie!Legolas going "I will go find the sun/she didn't want to come" or movie!Gimli stunning Celeborn to silence by being more elegant and polite than anyone expected a dwarf to be?

#answer time #lord of the rings #text posts #My Opinions #adaptations #movie adaptations #gimli #legolas #lord of the rings movies #d&d #long posts #is-it-mungojerry hates on the LotR movies #not really but it's the closest tag I have #lotr spoilers

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is-it-mungojerry-or-rumpelteazer · 2 years

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This is kind of rambly, but I have Thoughts on the way Tolkien describes people, and you’re going to have to bear with me for a second.

So, for context, when the movies came out I hated them on sight (still not a fan, but that’s a debate for another post). And one of my earlier criticisms was that the Elves shouldn’t look like that. “That’s not how the elves are supposed to look”. And then, in a clearer state of mind, I re-read Fellowship. And I realized my criticism made no sense.

So this entry has a lot of elves in it. Let’s give a look.

‘And Elves, sir! Elves here, and Elves there! Some like kings, terrible and splendid; and some as merry as children.’

Glorfindel was tall and straight; his hair was of shining gold, his face fair and young and fearless and full of joy; his eyes were bright and keen, and his voice like music; on his brow sat wisdom, and in his hand was strength. The face of Elrond was ageless, neither old nor young, though in it was written the memory of many things both glad and sorrowful. His hair was dark as the shadows of twilight, and upon it was set a circlet of silver; his eyes were grey as a clear evening, and in them was a light like the light of stars. Venerable he seemed as a king crowned with many winters, and yet hale as a tried warrior in the fullness of his strength. He was the Lord of Rivendell and mighty among both Elves and Men.

Young she was and yet not so. The braids of her dark hair were touched by no frost; her white arms and clear face were flawless and smooth, and the light of stars was in her bright eyes, grey as a cloudless night; yet queenly she looked, and thought and knowledge were in her glance, as of one who has known many things that the years bring.

I could fish out the description of Galadriel, or of Gildor, but I’m pretty sure we would get the same effect: the elves are basically never described physically. We have a couple of basic traits -hair colour, eye colour- but the bulk of their descriptions is about how ageless they are. How they are a walking contradiction because of their nature. How their better traits shine through. We get status descriptions, personality descriptions, but almost never physical ones.

Of course Agent Smith couldn’t fill the shoes of the Elrond in my mind. He’s not an immortal being of infinite wisdom who radiates youth and world-weariness at the same time. It was an impossible task I was asking from the filmmakers.

(I still think the wigs could have been better, though)

#lotr newsletter #lord of the rings #text posts #quotes #elves #movie adaptations #is-it-mungojerry hates on the LotR movies #lord of the rings movies #J.R.R. Tolkien

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