Home » Reading & Literature » J.R.R. Tolkien » Look what they've done to Middle-earth, Ma

Look what they've done to Middle-earth, Ma

© Michael Martinez

Well, after a week of frantically updating my own LOTR movie news site with graphics sent to the Webmasters by New Line Cinema's official Web site, I spent a hectic two hours in a chat room with dozens of other glazey-eyed Tolkien fans waiting for the official Internet preview to become available on the official LOTR movie Web site. Was it worth the wait? Sure. But it would have been nice if I had had a T1 connection. After several false starts it took me more than an hour to download the sneak preview, although I must have watched it at least 15 times as it downloaded. I saw new images each time I played the movie (which requires Apple's QuickTime 4.1 and is over 18 megabytes long). What did I see? Glimpses, here and there, of things to come. Sean Bean as Boromir holding the Ring (earlier I said it was Isildur, but I've been corrected on this point), a gorgeous Liv Tyler racing through the woods, five Nazgul attacking hobbits (probably the Weathertop scene), a fantastic (and quite inaccurate but otherwise forgivable) rendition of the Company of the Ring moving through (I think) Lorien (probably on their way to meet Celeborn and Galadriel), thousands of Orcs marching through Mordor, four members of the Fellowship trekking down a hillside (probably in Eregion), a skeletal projection of a troll, a woman in a mysterious prosthetic body (possibly for helping model the troll, or maybe an Ent). The music they selected for the promo was excellent. I stole a pair of speakers to make sure I could hear it, but the quality of the sound was distorted. I'm not sure if I selected the wrong size file to download of if the source file was corrupted, but one person did mention bad sound before I left TheOneRing.Net's IRC chat room. There are other shots I haven't mentioned. Peter Jackson appears in front of what look like warriors in full plate armor (another mark that Tolkien purists will hold against the films, I'm sure, but it wasn't clear to me whether these were models for some sort of CGI or someone's foolishly misguided idea of Middle-earthian knights). My initial reaction is that it's all quite breathtaking. I hope to be able to watch the show again with a more reasonable computer sometime in the near future. Am I discouraged about the films? Nope. I expected visual inaccuracies, though not for the reasons people might think. Peter Jackson should not be faulted for the way his warriors are adorned (and the Orcs, though very much like Alan Lee's Orcs, little resemble the creatures Tolkien described, but I think they'll win legions of admirers who are sick-to-death of RPG-style green-skinned Orcs). No, Jackson is not to blame for the misappropriation of Tolkien's world. He is, after all, relying on people who should know better than to foist some of this nonsense on the world of fantasy film.

The copyright of the article Look what they've done to Middle-earth, Ma in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish Look what they've done to Middle-earth, Ma in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.