But in all seriousness, while I do think the films are alright, they are nothing compared to the books. People should definitely read them before watching the adaptation, it really is an experience.
I read the books as a child and young adult multiple times before the films came out. The films are fantastic and a solid adaptation for a different medium, they got the feeling down even if some parts were left out as part of the change to the other medium.
The Hobbit movies are hot garbage though, and I blame studio meddling for those.
I think the movies are the best adaptation we could have gotten. The books a hard read and most of it wouldn’t translate well to film. All the songs, the long winded dialogs, descriptive parts, the ending, etc. I can understand Christopher Tolkien though, especially since he grew up and old with these stories, and probably nothing would eve do it justice compared to what he imagined his whole life.
Having read the books long ago, and recently listened to them narrated by Andy serkis, holy shit the books do NOT translate into movie form.
Maybe a miniseries like Battlestar Galactica, but the budget for it would have to be insane.
People don’t seem to understand that nobody is going to fimund their dream movie adaptation, because their dream movie adaptation has a larger budget than most countries’ GDP.
I would LOVE to have seen Tom Bombadil and the barrow wights. I’d love to have gotten to see everything in the book, but let’s be realistic here.
Go back in time with a few metric tons of gold, fund it however you see fit. I think if given proper funding, and more strict guidelines to keep the funding, he’d make as perfect an adaptation live-action could get in a miniseries. Make it like 90-100 minutes per “episode” and stretch it out however long it takes.
Do people not realize he was told initially it would have to be shown in ONE movie? And he fought to have at LEAST two, and that the studio we finally got insisted on 3 because this story is too long and complex (and lucrative) to be only two movies?
It could have been much, much worse. But hot damn do I wish it were better, even recognizing how good it was.
The Battle of Helm’s Deep is full of very obvious errors. There is an awesome Dutch historian, Roel Konijnendijk, who trashes movies for fun that talks about it:
My favourite one is when they are shouting orders to eachother. There is no way for the Elven archers to hear Aragorn’s commands, or for Aragorn to hear Theoden’s fallback order.
Minimum word counts are just stupid, if I can explain what I need too, with the correct amount of detail, in 100 less words than necessary, why shouldn't I be able to?
This is why, as an English teacher, I like to just give a ballpark for length, and just say it should be as long as it needs to be to get the point across successfully. If you answer the prompt in full, it should be plenty long enough.
I’ll always miss the scouring of The Shire. I know the movie didn’t need more endings, but it is a big part of Frodo’s end and it’s the big payoff for Merry and Pippin
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