Cry 'Havoc!' and Let Slip the Wargs of Fandom! - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
Strange as it seems, when you go back through the book, Eomer doesn't do a whole lot from the time Gandalf heals Theoden until Theoden's death. Eomer is just there to fill in some gaps in the information presented to the reader. Technically, he is bonding with Aragorn, but even that plays through a bit weakly.
The movie simply gives Eomer something more useful to do, although the audience was wondering where he'd got off to for a while. The movie is fast-paced enough that people cannot dwell on any one anomaly for very long.
If anything, it's a little too fast-paced for the first 30-40 minutes. But I couldn't see any way to tighten it up or slow it down. Peter had to give the audience the equivalent of "Meanwhile, back at the ranch" three times in a row. He tackled part of that problem by having Aragorn figure out what happened to Merry and Pippin (as in the book but with visual cues to the audience). I was very reminded of Prince Humperdink in "The Princess Bride". I almost expected Viggo Mortensen to pick up a bamboo phial and say, "Iocaine powder. I'd stake my life on it."
But Viggo plays a very good Aragorn. He clearly takes the role seriously and works with the material he is handed. One of the criticisms which has been levelled at the first movie (even by me, when people insist I analyze this aspect of it), is that Viggo's Aragorn starts out with less self-assurance than Tolkien's Aragorn.
In the book, Aragorn expresses self-doubt only when the mantle of leadership has passed to him. And then he pretty quickly gets past that stage. After he decides to follow the Orcs who have snatched Merry and Pippin, his resolve and his decision-making ability increase rapidly. Aragorn grows stronger.
In the movie, while Viggo is clearly very comfortable in his performance, his character is plagued by inner turmoil. He doesn't believe he can be any better than Isildur. He is not simply humble, as the book Aragorn is on at least one occasion -- the movie Aragorn honestly believes he is set up for failure.
But now I see that Aragorn has been compressed, as have so many other characters -- and so many events -- as a means of editing out a lot of the narrative exposition which Tolkien relied upon. Cinematic story-telling tends to suffer when you rely upon narrative exposition. Some people actually complained about Cate Blanchett's voiceover for the Prologue to the first movie -- but if that is not the way to present all that history, what is?
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