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Ghan-Buri-Ghan, Where Are You?

© Douglas Charles Rapier

(Be advised: if you haven't yet seen 'Return of the King', and do not wish your first viewing to be 'spoiled', break off reading this article/review until after you have seen the film.)

Anyone attempting to reconcile the cinematic adaptation of novelistic prose will be met with an 'apples and oranges' situation. Read 'Moby Dick' and see the movie starring Gregory Peck or try the same experiment with the various film versions of 'War and Peace'. Not the same medium, not the same processes, not the same expectations, not the same audience. The stories of Beatrix Potter have not survived the transition from book to 'Big Screen' wholly unchanged and intact. There is no reason to assume that a story as vast or as complicated as JRR Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' would fare any better when fed into the mill of modern movie making.

When I saw the first two of Peter Jackson's films based on Tolkien's masterwork, I was moved by an overwhelming feeling of appreciation and gratitude to the 'powers that be' that the movies were made at all. Peter Jackson had set himself an enviable task but a terribly daunting one. That WETA, NewLine, Jackson, Walsh, et al. had gone to such fantastic strata of creativity and craftsmanship in endeavoring to present a version of the story which would preserve it and appeal to millions of movie-goers was an astounding feat.

Given and accepting the premise that films are not books nor books films, I chose to over-look rather than lament the loss of some of my favorite characters. Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, the River King's daughter, Glorfindel the Mighty Elven Warrior and Quickbeam the Ent, for example, hadn't made the cut. I took in stride the morphing of the story into one which excluded those essential figures to compensate for the expanded romantic role of the Elf Princess, Arwen Evenstar. I did not begrudge the simplification of the story nor the foreshortening of events from Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday to the fords of Rivendell. I fire-walled military logic and rolled a blind eye to the absurdity of King Theoden insisting that his civilian population march toward Isengard and Saruman's horde of Uruk-hai with a force no larger than his House Guard to defend Helm's Deep. These small sacrifices were traded, I believed, for glorious scenes of battle, CGI wizardry and the dissemination of Tolkien's saga to a wider audience.

Considering that the first two films, even in their extended forms, only managed to tell a bit less than half the tale, it was evident that Jackson's only choice was to pare, pare and pare again Tolkien's tale to fit the framework of a general release film or make his project a tetralogy. (I would have loved to have seen Captains Merry and Pippin lead the 'Scouring of the Shire' and Sam's planting of the Mallorn tree. But I already knew that those episodes, had not been filmed.) The third installment, 'The Return of the King' would, I felt, necessarily have to be twice the film of either the other two if loose plot threads were to be securely tied and denouements were to clearly and fully provide resolution.

The copyright of the article Ghan-Buri-Ghan, Where Are You? in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Douglas Charles Rapier. Permission to republish Ghan-Buri-Ghan, Where Are You? in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.