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Because OLD demanded it. DISCUSS.
THE POWER!!! >:D
I love this series.
Me too.
The Silmarillion is epic, too. But very difficult to get through.
I think that replacing Glorfindel with Arwen was a good idea.
Yeah… the whole Arwen/Aragorn thing isn’t really explored in LotR proper, but to include it in the movie, they needed some moments like that. I watched the first two movies before I read the book, so I’m at peace with it.
Although… I read the book before watching RotK, and at the part where Sam leaves, I was like… WHAT?!!! But it was really good- it was perfect for the movie.
Well, only because he wouldn’t get what he deserves in his brief cameo. I can only describe him as the LOTR Chuck Norris.
LotR rocks.
I placed the TCG and the TMG. 2001-2003 were the happiest years of my life. [sigh]
Overrated.
I didn’t like how he brought them to Osgiliath, and showed all his sympathetic scenes. If he was flashbacking to everything that happened before, and those events shaped him to eventually give up the Ring, then why did he not just let them go? I would have just been happy with the scenes showing how he and Boromir didn’t get along with their dad. And then we would have had time for Shelob :D
Anyone else cheesed that they cut the Saruman and Witch King scenes? They even cut the Gothmog scenes, after building him up so much. (These are all the extended scenes. Should have said that at the start :D)
Gothmog slowly chasing Eoyn Eowin Rohan Chick across the battlefield. You will not know excitement until you see a crippled pink orc slowly chasing a crippled broken exhausted woman across a field of slaughter. And then Aragorn comes out of nowhere and stabs him. >:|
They should have cut his scenes. He only needed to be there for what, the river scene, defending Osgiliath, and being run down by the Rohan Cavalry.
Saruman got staff-ted. One line? From the tree-puppet? RAAAAAAGE!
The Witch King is built up to be a big threat. “I will break the Wizard” and all that. Here’s a guy near the top of his game, and he gets shanked by a midget and a princess. This is the guy who Razed Andor! He was stronger than Gandalf! And they remove the staff for the rest of the movie! No explination!
I’m just rambling now, so I’ll stop :D
Give me a break, not much sleep :D (wait, you call me on that, but you let Eowyn slide? :P)
I don’t know about Eowyn. What did she do? She blocks a mace with her shield, gets her arm broken, and stabs a dude in the face after the halfling ganks him from behind.
Sure you can bring up the fell beast, but they never seemed all that tough to me (I imagined them as bald, leathery parrots on my first read-through, and so they shall remain :D)
Black Breath? Huh, don’t remember that. Wait, wouldn’t then by extension Merry and everyone standing around them be effected by it?
I yeld to your superior knowledge in this subject!
Aha! Thank you! So, its a poison. That only really effected them after the fight. That they held off for about a day. I think I’m missing something D:
Anyway, anyone else mad that not one single Ent died onscreen?
Ah. Except it has a more mystic name.
I was disapointed that the ghosts cleared everything up. I wanted to see Aragorn fight Suladin the Serpent King atop his chariot, but what I really wanted to see was the good guys win a fight by their own merit. Have the Grey Company stroll out of the Corsair Fleet, have a good old fashioned tumble.
Also, did anyone notice where the Easterlings went? They just kind of walked into Mordor, and that was it. Seems like a waste of costumes :/
Maybe they appear in the extended scenes?
I was very confused when they were completely absent from the theatrical release.
I’m talking about the armored ones in the second movie, who walk into the black gate and never come out. In the books (I think) they went to go fight the dwarves, but they don’t really seem all that neccessary.
Also, the harad look like ninjas. Riding elephants. Win :D
Tom I am sooo glad they cut. Though I did once read an article saying that Mr. Bombadil was the alternate persona of a one Mr. W. King… :D
Scourging of the Shire would have been awesome. You could have cut out one of the 12 freaking endings to fit it in.
But I’m not bitter :D
Alright, I need to come clean, when I think of the Witch King, This is what I think of.
:D
Did it not look as good in the books?
I try and think in the Witch King’s voice when at all possible.
This is my hour! You will regret the day you cut me off!
Etc.
Related to LOTR: What did you think of “The Hunt for Gollum”‘s Aragorn and other characters?
Can someone post a link for the Hut for Gollum please? I still haven’t watched it.. Thanx! ;)
http://www.thehuntforgollum.com/
Nor have I.
I hated when Haldir and the Elves showed up at Helm’s Deep.
Stupid spotlight stealing elves… D:
:D
Ditto; I hadn’t read the books when I first watched the movies, so I was like “Oh! Wickedly awesome elves!” And then I read the book.
Christopher Lee has always been a badass.
The elves were there because they were playing with the idea that Arwen would show up at Helm’s Deep. They even shot a little footage, though thankfully it never reached the end stage.
@Snow White Queen
>But comparing the animated to the live-action, the live-action Ringwraith looks cooler.
Well, duh. EVERYTHING is cooler than Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings.
There are 3 rings in marriage.
The engagement ring.
The wedding ring.
Suffering.
Did anyone else find it funny that Elrond sent the elves to Helm’s Deep from Rivendell and Haldir is from Lothlorien?
Nitpicky, I know.
I was more caught up with the fact they were there at all >:|
But then the wall exploded, and I was happy :D
SWQ – I noticed that too! And I was most displeased. This was before I’d even read the books, too!
But in the books, they mention stuff about “messages from Rivendell” when they’re in Lothlorien, so I sort of marked it down to that.
Elven women don’t fight, unless with magic.
Why? Really I want to know. I don’t know a lot about elf lore and all that.
Well, Tolkien explains that since women are life-givers, they’re too valuable to send into battle. Makes sense.
But how exactly was Faramir a wimp? Because in TTT Peter Jackson made him affected by the Ring as well? (That annoyed me, I’ll admit, but the consistency argument given by the movie makers was a valid one) Because his father hurts his feelings by completely neglecting him in favor of Boromir? (it’s happened to me- it hurts!)
The rest of the stuff you mentioned was weapons-related and went completely over my head. But as the Armourer, I suppose that weapons would be your area of expertise.
@SWQ
Okay. I thought maybe there was some special reason that specific to elves. I still need to read Lord of the Rings.
Things I didn’t like about LotR:
The elves. Seriously, there must be a better way to make them look elvish besides the long hair (have you noticed, very few men look good with long straight hair?), pointy ears, and stiff-board walking.
Yeah, they screwed up Faramir bigtime.
Frodo’s acting in general. Don’t even get me started on the accent.
Saruman’s anticlimatic skewer-death.
Legolas. Hah. “A red sun rises. Blood has been spilled this night.”
And some other stuff…
Otherwise, I really love those films, not least because of the stunning costumes and props and everything (MUSIC). Also there was a lot of good acting to make up for the briefly cringey moments. I don’t mind that they cut things out of the movies, they were long and detailed enough as it is.
I didn’t like how at the end of The Two Towers the metric butt-ton of Rohirim that show up.
Seriously. There’s like, three times more Rohirim than refugees D:
Also, extrememly minor quibble, but did anyone else notice that Gimli started calling them the Uruk-Hai, when there was no way any of them knew what Saruman was calling his pet project?
Can’t an Orc catch a break?
I never read the books, but I didn’t like the movies. I had a hard time sitting through them.
Am I the only one who thought Gollum was a tragic character?
“One thing about the Elves – yeah, how DO you make Elves look like Elves aside from pointy ears and making all the men bishonen?”
The people in the costume department can’t do it. It’s up to the actors to make the characters appear elvish, otherwise they are merely humans with pointy ears. They can do this by portraying how someone how has lived for hundreds (for some, thousands) of years.
So what do you guys think of the newly released post-humous books? I recently read sons of Hurin, by far the collest story from the silmarillion, but it has been to long since I read the silmarillion itself so I couldn’t spot any differences. there was another one by name “the legend of …... & .........” but I can’t remember the names.
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún? It’s an old Norse legend, I believe.
@Devin Monahan: It sort of seemed like the costume department did all they could (they could have used fewer robe-dressy things, but whatever, I’m a nitpicker), and the actors sort of just stood around looking solemn and not trying. Sigh. The only elf who struck me as being comfortable as an elf was Legolas, and even he had his iffy moments.
I liked the major elves (Elrond, Galadriel, and Legolas). Everyone else was a human dressed up like an elf.
And about Gollum being tragic… yes, of course he is, he’s so terribly tragic! I still hate him, though.
There’s a lot of minor quibbles we can make about the movies, but to be honest, they were pretty decent adaptions, considering how most book-movie adaptions turn out. Tolkien himself always said it was impossible to turn it directly into a movie. So considering the scope of LotR, I think they did about as well as they could. The movies were accessible to people who’d never read LotR, but still included a lot of stuff for Tolkien freaks. And while, yes, they did mess up some things, the overall product wasn’t bad.
Re: Arwen instead of Glorfindel- that was to build up Aragorn and Arwen’s relationship, though. Seeing as they couldn’t really go back through and do the whole Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, they had to put it in wherever they could. So they just took the opportunity there, I think.
EDIT: BEST IDEA EVER. So LotR is just too big to put into a movie, right? So they should make a Lord of the Rings TV show! They could divide it up into seasons (either 6 or 3, depending on which way they split it) and everything! That way they wouldn’t leave anything out!
They could make a Silmarillion series, too! gets way too excited
I KNOW! It would be so awesome!!
Aww, I love Gollum, despite the fact that’s he’s very ugly and kind of creepy.
Yeah, Saruman’s death was not as cool. In the theatrical versions, he just disappeared.
Legolas looked cool, but almost EVERY SINGLE THING he said made me burst out laughing. Irritated my brother, who’s a Legolas fan, but who can’t laugh at the line “I feel a tingling in my hands. The drink…I think it’s affecting me!”
Snickers
Oh yeah. Such crappy lines. But the thing with the oliphaunt- soooo made up for it.
And that it was Orlando Bloom. He was much better as Legolas than as Will. He seems to do well as characters that are SRS, not just characters that take themselves too SRSLY.
Yeaaahhh! He took on a whole oliphaunt by hisself, that was awesome!
“That still only counts as one!”
I don’t think Orlando Bloom is a great actor period. But as Legolas, he was mostly eye candy anyway.
As it should be, with elves.
This is very true. I could scrutinize the movies, but they are currently my favorite movies, and it would take me a while to think up of things. About the ‘blood has been spilled this night’ That line was also used in the books. Aragorn had very dramatic lines too, but he managed to deliver them a lot better, so…
I thought Orlando Bloom was better as Will than Legolas, but I’m attracted to pirates, so it probably has something to do with that. ;)
Oh. I thought Orlando Bloom looked better as Legolas, even if his acting sucks. Maybe I like elves.
I liked him better as Legolas, too. Something about the pointy ears.
It’s Boromir.
They wimpified Frodo, but Sam was so awesome that I thought it balanced out to a neutral. I was always a Sam fangirl anyway. squee
Movie!Faramir was a lot different from the book version. I love him in the book, but I’ve watched the commentary and I do understand why the filmmakers did what they did. Not that I necessarily like it, but they didn’t do it just for laughs and giggles. Also, the extended edition makes him a lot more sympathetic as well.
As for the elves, a lot of the artwork portrayed them that way. The pointy ears, I believe, were described by Tolkien himself and were actually very natural looking in the movie. Long hair- well, I don’t know, I’m just so accustomed to seeing them that way and shorter hair to me just looks jarringly modern when I envision it.
Yeah, I’ve come to an understanding about most of the plot/character changes (Faramir and Shelob… not that I was complaining much about Shelob to begin with. It worked for the story the movies were trying to tell.), because I had to realize that the movies are only an adaptation, not a translation. When you remember that, a lot of changes make more sense, because they really did have to tell a slightly different story than the original book because of the severely limited time of a movie.
On the ears: This is a toughie. Tolkien never said “they have pointy ears”, but he never said “they don’t have pointy ears”. There’s evidence to support the “pointy ears” side of things (especially because they were described as “leaf-shaped”, which many people take to mean pointy), but it’s never explicitly said.
This is a toughie. Tolkien never said “they have pointy ears”, but he never said “they don’t have pointy ears”.
Then I must be misremembering. But I don’t think the ears are really that much a cause for complaint, simply because they were so subtly done. They looked pretty awesome, in fact.
And, come on, every interpretation of elves ever, even when Tolkien was still alive, has had pointy ears. It’s common enough that I don’t think it’s wrong to give them to Tolkien’s elves, even if this whole thing is a big misunderstanding and Tolkien really didn’t mean for them to be pointed or whatever.
At least they weren’t those really ridiculous long ones that extend up beyond the head.
What, this? But they look so realistic and utterly non-ridiculous! Totally!
Imagine all the piercings you could get with ears like that…
I’m thinking somewhere in the seventies range?
Even if they had to have longer hair, couldn’t it just be down to their shoulders and no longer? And have you noticed that Legolas never gets dirty, and his long flowing blond hair never gets tangled?
Movie logic, honestly. If you really want to iron everything out, just pretend that Legolas cleans himself vigorously all the time, and every time the camera’s not pointed at him he immediately starts combing his hair. Sure, it’s not exactly the most, uh, accurate—but is it supposed to be? Imagine if you did have Legolas getting dirty and having his hair tangled. You’d either get random shots of him with his hair tangled in one scene and then untangled the next (presumably because at some point he combed his hair off-camera), which would be confusing and odd, or actually show him grooming, which would be boring and rather pointless. In my opinion, it’s one of those nitpicks that, yes, is a valid point until you consider it in context of storytelling through the medium of movies.
it’s one of those nitpicks that, yes, is a valid point until you consider it in context of storytelling through the medium of movies.
It’s the law of conservation of detail.
Namely, that at some point, too many details bog down the story.
It also makes for hilarious crackfic about Legolas never letting Aragorn borrow his hair straightener, hence why Legolas’s hair is always perfect and Aragorn’s never is.
^ Also, Legolas spends so long in the bath that he’s the only clean one by the time the Fellowship needs to move on.
Maybe he’s born with it…
Maybe it’s Special Elf Shampoo™!
Lol.
I just don’t like guys with long hair.
You get used to it when you listen to heavy metal. Then they all have long hair, whether it really looks good on them or not, so when a man looks moderately okay in it, I think much better of it than maybe it actually looks. XP