one of these days I might actually write up something for my website about why the Peter Jackson LOTR films rubbed me very much the wrong way, and also using that as a vehicle for reexamining the books and talking about what about them still works for me and what doesn't. I'm not nearly the Tolkien fan I used to be, but LOTR _was_ my "Undertale" for a while, the popular work that woke something up inside me that I hadn't felt before.
@InspectorCaracal I'll have to rewatch the films O_o I bet it won't sting as much this time. I was really excited about the first one and went to see it with my then-partner on my birthday, and walked out a bit stunned: how had my beloved "Fellowship of the Ring" turned into...THAT? And it would get worse.
there's a lot to complain about, but if there's any one thing I'd pick out as a pervasive fault of the films, it's their almost complete mishandling of the characters. Jackson's versions do and say things Tolkien's would never dream of doing and saying. Crucial, character-revealing moments of decision are smudged out or taken away.
@kara_dreamer I figure; he tries to make it all "charming" comic relief, cool visuals or pulse-pounding action. And Tolkien's originals are more poetic, gentle and slower paced.
LotR is story heavy and that kinda keeps him in line but Hobbit is maybe 4 hours of movie expanded to 9, so it's subject to his worst excesses.
@Leucrotta I was thinking just now of a particular moment that really emphasizes the jarring disparity between Tolkien's quietness (his best moments usually are his quiet ones) and Jackson's loudness, and that's when Frodo accepts the burden of the Ring at the Council of Elrond. In the original, Frodo makes the decision at a moment when it seems that everyone else at the Council is sunk in thought, at a loss for what to say or do. Someone needs to act, and Frodo decides it should be himself. Jackson instead fabricated a ridiculous argument so that Frodo could holler, "Okay, okay, I'll do it already!!" to shut everyone up.
@Leucrotta It ties in with Jackson's decision to handle the Ring's influence in a manner completely devoid of subtlety, a hamfisted approach he announces in the first five minutes of the film and cements with his mishandling of the fight between Bilbo and Gandalf over the disposition of the Ring. What should have been merely "disquieting" to Gandalf, a sign that something was wrong, is turned into something out of "The Exorcist", only with less vomiting of pea soup.
@kara_dreamer I would be interested in this. I never understood why people got so invested in LotR; when I saw the movies, my response was basically "oh this is pretty, wait this is D&D." I know D&D along with most of our modern fantasy is heavily influenced by, if not directly adapted from, Tolkien's stuff, so my exposure to LotR is pretty backwards.
@green I can try! It'll be a bit difficult, maybe, after all this time, to try to remember just what was going through my head when I was (I think) 12 or 13 and "The Lord of the Rings" became for me the most important book I'd ever read. It wasn't even my first exposure to LOTR; I read "The Fellowship of the Ring" in its entirety when I was some years younger, maybe 8 or 9, and liked it without falling in love with it.
@kara_dreamer the simple answer to me is that Tolkein was a pre-Modern, and Jackson is a postmodern.
I grew up saturated in pre-1950 and 1800s literature. The expressed longing of JRR Tolkein was for a mythic England from his childhood. There is almost no functioning soul kinship with 1990s/2000s Hollywood megafilms.
Tolkein was building a myth of mythical Little England from something like a Roman Catholic Pre-raphaelite vision from before World War 1.
@pnathan there's a lot of truth in that, I think. Tolkien's LOTR is _very_ backwards-looking in much the same way that (say) Hesiod is: his Middle-Earth is a world filled with relics and reminders of a heroic age that's gone forever, and even the greatest achievements of the story's present-day heroes come across more like the last gasp of that older, greater world.
@kara_dreamer I am wrapping up my work for the week and I don't have my scotch yet, but, how do you say...
Tolkein saw the Modern as destructive of the beautiful world he had grown up with. He lived through the last of the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars. As a student of ancient literature by profession, how could he do other but cry for the world that had been lost?
@pnathan *nods* and as an old Classics student myself (and I went into Classics in college partly because of Tolkien, although C. S. Lewis was the greater influence by that time) I can really sympathize.
@kara_dreamer I like Lewis, but Tolkien I think will hold up better
@pnathan my attitude towards Lewis has fluctuated considerably in the last few years. I'll say this for him: he wrote _Till We Have Faces_, which automatically puts him far ahead of Tolkien in my books even if I fall out of love with everything else he ever wrote.
@kara_dreamer never read. I imagine you'd recommend I should? :)
@pnathan oh yes! it's his most pagan story, and therefore his strongest ;)
@kara_dreamer hahah! Not a fan of Narnia
@pnathan I like _some_ of Narnia, there are nice touches, but yeah, Narnia doesn't do much for me. It's Lewis's most popularly known work, sure, but it lacks weight. it's a poor "subcreation", to use Tolkien's term
@kara_dreamer Looking back at it from an adult, I think it's somewhat shifty in quality. I would have to check, but I'd guess it was his first fiction work. And, too, it has a certain British twee to it, which sets my teeth on edge (Almost certainly this was a product of the time). I favor things Deeper and Wilder, more of a brisk and sharp wind from the soul.
Almost all Christian fiction is never sure if it wants to be a good yarn or evangelism. Which is a pity.
@kara_dreamer Too, Lewis in many parts was fighting a particular form of Modernism, sort of the next generation past Chesterton. The polemics become nearly illegible: that battle is past.
@kara_dreamer I will look forward to that, if you write it! I'm largely interested to see how much intersection there is between what bothers you and what bothers me tbh. >.>