Middle Earth Ranger Forum

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I actually have gained some respect back for PJ that he came out publicly that he messed up. Good job PJ.

Yyyyyyyep. Too bad.

ineffableone wrote:I actually have gained some respect back for PJ that he came out publicly that he messed up. Good job PJ.

I agree- in an industry driven by ego and fueled by sycophants, it's nice that he was able to admit this.

Also, the more I find out about it, the more I realize that the elements of the films that I really didn't like the most are often those that Peter Jackson inherited from Guillermo del Toro's scripts and pre-production designs.

Given the circumstance he did an amazing job. No one could have done it better. PJ poured so much of himself, his time into these 6 movies. They will be classics, watched over and over for generations. What Tolkien did for literature, Jackson did for cinema.

Straelbora - do you know more details about what PJ inherited from del Toro that couldn't be changed?

Re: The legend -
I think WETA did an OUTSTANDING job, with a glaring exception or two.
(Post-Smaug Laketown as broken-down late medieval Eastern Europe (even Byzantium!) on Venice-Stilts I could buy: but commercial culture or no, the 17th c. Dutch Republic vibe was way too late to mesh well with the rest of Middle Earth. )

For that matter, the biggest "visionary" credit on the production side is John Howe and Alan Lee - calling them in was the single best decision PJ made in the entire franchise

PJ... like Lucas, did a great job as long as there was someone to say "no, that's stupid" or even "no, that would work in another film, but it doesn't match THIS milieu."
The more free rein he got, the worse the movies became. :/


Which isn't to say it wasn't a gargantuan task, and for the most part well executed. I'd rather have imperfect LOTR / Hobbit films than none at all.

I rather suspect though the canonical for-the-ages version is yet to come.

Oh - one last thing.

The Hobbit is a DARN hard thing to adapt - it's totally inconsistent in tone: starts out aimed at 5 year olds by the feel of it, and is Young Adult (at least) by the end.
There's no way it would get published as is today, if it wasn't already a classic.

Adapting that to film is ridiculously hard, and I can't think of a GOOD way to do it that wouldn't throw out either the childlike charm of the beginning or tragedy-pathos towards the end.
It occurs to be it might be told well bookended "Princess Bride" style though:

Open the tale with old Bilbo telling the tale before the fire, a passel of little Hobbit children listening rapt of the floor. Boucy dwarves and silly adventures..

Come back to the framing tale, and see the fire has died down, the hour grown late. Little hobbit children are passed out on the sofa.
Lost in memory and perhaps with one too many pints in him, ghost-haunted Bilbo has begun to let fall the real story, blood and pain and all - to a tweenage Frodo.

It's how I imagine it anyway. : )

Elleth wrote:PJ... like Lucas, did a great job as long as there was someone to say "no, that's stupid" or even "no, that would work in another film, but it doesn't match THIS milieu."
The more free rein he got, the worse the movies became. :/.

This is EXACTLY what I keep trying to tell people! The more they let Pete off the leash, the worse his movies got (and by the time he got to King Kong... yikes). Unfortunately, the Hobbit films were plagued by production problems from the outset as well, which didn't help. But yeah... I feel very much as though Jackson delivered to Tolkien fans in the Hobbit films pretty much exactly what Lucas delivered to Star Wars fans with his own prequel trilogy. Although, having just watched the first two Star Wars prequels, I have to admit that this particular analogy may be a bit harsh (those movies were baaaaaaaad, haha), and I actually did think the first Hobbit film was watchable. It had some very nice bits.

Open the tale with old Bilbo telling the tale before the fire, a passel of little Hobbit children listening rapt of the floor. Boucy dwarves and silly adventures..

Come back to the framing tale, and see the fire has died down, the hour grown late. Little hobbit children are passed out on the sofa.
Lost in memory and perhaps with one too many pints in him, ghost-haunted Bilbo has begun to let fall the real story, blood and pain and all - to a tweenage Frodo.

THIS! SO MUCH THIS! That would have been a truly excellent way to frame the story. I do think they tried to get something of that feeling going on, but it was pretty sloppy.

For what it's worth, I don't think PJ did a uniquely bad job. I think he probably wasn't the best person on earth who could have produced a Middle Earth film franchise, but he was the person who actually went out and insisted on doing it. Then put a decade and more of his life into the work. That far outweighs every purist good intention anyone - myself included - might have.

Moreover - a purist LOTR/Hobbit/Silmarillion just couldn't get made. The investment required is (presently) so tremendous that it needs to be mass-market.
And mass market 21st century audiences by and large want 21st century drama with 21st century characters, just in funny clothes.
To get into theaters, something was going to get broken: Legolas Bieber and Gimli the Clown, Xena the Warrior Elf, parkour barrel rides - to get into theaters 2000-2015, there was going to have to be some atrocity done to the material. A close rendering of the Silmarillion would likely put most audiences to sleep - the ones it didn't have out picketing the studio at any rate.

Add to that the fact we all have goofy flights of fancy - there's a reason authors say "kill your darlings."
Working with a team makes you do that. Getting big means you don't have to. Enough adulation and awards and even the best artist will be tempted to stop thinking they have to.


I do think there will be in the future a really, REALLY good, true-to-source adaptation. But it won't be until 3D video (and voice!) rendering is both easy enough and effective enough that a small team without funding can do it in a basement on a shoestring budget without needing to pay off investors.

And even then, there will be bits of PJ.. and Howe.. and Lee...and Falconer.. running through those renderings. They've become part of the subconscious sense of Middle Earth, and I'd like to think the best of them will live on in whatever becomes of it.

We already live in an age of miracles. There's more to come.

Elleth wrote:"
Working with a team makes you do that. Getting big means you don't have to. Enough adulation and awards and even the best artist will be tempted to stop thinking they have to.

I think this, once again, hits the nail squarely on the head.

Personally, I am a die-hard fan of the Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. In fact, I had never read anything by Tolkien when I saw Fellowship in theaters, so I would by no means consider myself a Tolkien purist. Having now read the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, as well as a portion of the Silmarillion, I think Jackson & Co. did a stellar job adapting the stories to the screen, by and large. However, as Jackson's influence with the studio grew, his reins were loosened, and by the Return of the King, there were some liberties being taken that even I, as someone who had not read that book at that time, found disappointing. Even so, I feel that, as a whole, the Lord of the Rings films were basically successful in what they were. Fellowship was stellar, Two Towers was a great film, but perhaps not the very best Tolkien adaptation, and Return of the King was spotty as a film, and questionable at best as a Tolkien adaptation. I feel like An Unexpected journey was probably on par with Return of the King in that respect, but not unbearable. It was only in the second and third films of that trilogy that I became seriously disappointed. Still, I think there's a great deal of excellent material in them, and now that the extended editions of all of them are out, I believe there's plenty of potential for a really solid fan-edit. It wouldn't solve all the problems, but it would cut a lot of the fat, and could make it into something a little more watchable.

We'll see about further adaptations down the road. I personally think the Silmarillion could be adapted into a really fantastic, long-running Game-of-Thrones-style series, if someone really good took the helm. People are used to more slow-moving, politically-motivated fantasy series nowadays, and there's plenty of material to work with. But for the moment, I'm at least happy that I've got three Lord of the Rings films that are satisfyingly decent, with some parts that I think qualify as excellent.

For me, what bothered me the most is the pandering to talent that PJ unfortunately has a penchant for. Stephen Fry as the Master, Ryan Gage as Alfrid, and the horrid Billy Connolly as Dain (who publicly criticized the author) did as much as anyone to ensure the last two films dragged along. I hated the tone, personally. the script, when left to be filled in by what little resource material they had, was just bad. Attempts at comedy floundered, and this should have stayed a two film series. I am waiting for the fan supercut. I feel the best thing about the films, as always, is the attention to detail we do see as to the world, but too much CGI was used as well. I had high hopes for Hobbit, as I think we all did, and it failed me on a personal level in many areas, but I did like the ending, and Bree, always love the Pony on a rainy evening

Ken

I am waiting for the fan supercut.

For what it's worth, in looking for "The Tolkien Edit" I found the Maple Films fan cut. (Just google fan edit Hobbit and it should show up)

No Tauriel, no Radagast, no Dol Goldur, deeply cut Master/Alfrid and Azog if I recall correctly, and even the mess from the horrific (and cut out) "gold statue" scene is rotoscoped out from Smaug's flight.
(that's some dedication!)

The editor does ask those downloading to pony up and buy legal copies of the films on principle, which is entirely reasonable.
I've not had a chance to see his edit, but it does sound very promising.

Ken, I coulnd't agree more. Those are my sentiments almost exactly (except that I enjoy Billy Connolly, despite his disdain for Tolkien, and actually kind of liked his wacky take on Dain - but I can totally see why it would bother many people).

And Elleth - I had heard about some really solid fan-cuts out there a while back, but my biggest problem with these was that the fans who made them didn't wait for the Extended Edition of the Battle of the Five Armies to come out, so they still lacked certain extremely important cut scenes - like Thorin's funeral. If they were to add some of that back in, I would absolutely grab a fan edit and pretend the theatrical releases never happened.

...Friggin' fraggin' gold statue mumblegrumblegrrrr....

Being honest, I've only really seen the first Hobbit movie. I watched probably about half or so of the second (I literally kept dozing off. That's never happened to me before while watching a movie. It was that boring.) Haven't even tried to watch the third yet. I might get around to it someday but it's not high on my list of priorities.

I just got the extended trilogy editions that match the book look that LOTR had so I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of why things were chosen to be done this way or that and maybe I'll appreciate this series more