Ghan-Buri-Ghan, Where Are You?: Problems of going from book to movie underrated

» RichardLender - Problems of going from book to movie underrated

Sounds like you're scarce now, but I thought I would post a comment after having viewed the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings.

I count myself as something of a Tolkien fanatic as well. I've read the books at least once a year for the last 20 years or so. Like Tolkien himself I long felt that LOTR was unfilmable - and like you was pleased to see just how much of Tolkien's vision made it onto the screen.

Yet we come to the inevitable difficulties of book adaptation. I recognized even before some of Jackson's early comments (including a few questions I was able to ask him myself) that compressions and excissions were inevitable. The rule of thumb is that one page of script equals a minute of screen time. Obviously a good deal of the 1,000+ pages of LOTR simply can't make it to screen if there's too be any realistic limit on running time. The theatrical runs add up to nearly 10 hours of screen time - a staggering amount by Hollywood standards - as it is. You have to work with what the studio gives you.

The second difficulty is that film is a different medium which has different requirements than the written page. What works in the one doesn't always work in the other. Film is more unforgiving in terms of its demands for taut dramatic arc. For Jackson, that meant, rightly, that anything which did not drive the main story forward had to be considered expendable - not least because even pared down, Jackson would still be presenting to the audience with a veritable horde of characters to keep track of and come to know: by my count, excluding the Nazgul, about 27 characters spread over three films. It's inevitable that minor charatcers not truly essential to the main storyline - like Imrahil, Beregond, Quickbeam, Glorfindel, Gildor, Nob, Fredegar Bolger - will get cut. I honestly did not mind Arwen's absorption of Glorfindel's role once I recovered from the shock of it; it's a reasonably valid way of working her into the story, certainly far more so than the original Jackson idea of having join the Fellowship.

With these factors in mind it was obvious from the start that certain sequences like Bombadil would have to be axed. I love the entire Old Forest chapter and Bombadil in particular as a pure delight of classic Tolkien imagination. Yet he essentially stops the story in its tracks, even in the book. On the screen you can't get away with that so easily. The Scouring quickly became another early candidate for omission for reasons already noted by others: it's simply anticlimactic. The climax is the fulfillment of Frodo's quest and not, as some suggest, the final growth of the hobbits characters (save for Frodo's, which is already finished - which helps underline my argument) as they come into their own in defeating Sharkey's thugs. When you consider the considerable criticism ROTK received for its drawn out "multiple endings" as it was, one can only shudder at the fire Jackson would have drawn for the extra half hour or so of post-climax screen time that would have been required by the Scouring - to say nothing of how long of a film you're going to end up with. Jackson, Walsh and Boyens explain their reasons on the DVD commentaries and it's hard to fault their logic. However much we book fanatics would have loved to see Merry rallying the hobbits at the Battle of Bywater, it simply would not have been feasible for an effective movie.

Likewise the Mouth of Sauron, whose excision from the theatrical run makes sense after viewing the commentaries. In the book it's a powerful moment because each storyline is done seperately rather than intercut as in the movies; and last we heard of Frodo in The Two Towers, he was held captive in Cirith Ungol with Sam despairing. In the movie we know they've escaped and are working their way across the plain of Gorgoroth. So the Mouth of Sauron parley (added back in for the extended release) loses a lot of dramatic impact - and having said that, the decision by Jackson to have Aragorn strike his head off was egregiously out of character.

On the other hand, I think you make some fair criticisms, ones which are not fixed by the extended edition. And these points are valid because they relate precisely to the effectiveness of the movie, not fealty to the book: 1) The constant and excessive cutaways to the Arwen storyline, which quickly become apparent as the contrivances they clearly are and fail by Jackson's own announced standards of sticking to what drives the main story forward - one or two quick flashbacks might be tolerable to make clear how central she is in Aragorn's thoughts and hopes, but after that it gets tedious; 2) the Voice of Saruman, now restored to the extended edition, was cut amidst complaints from fans and Christopher Lee because Jackson felt at the last minute that it felt to much like a "wrap" from the previous movie, but on reflection ends up leaving what is really the major villain of the first two movies with an unresolved fate; 3) Character deformations added in to build up character development and dramatic tension: Aragorn's self doubts on screen seem overdone even by the requirements of good scriptwriting, and Denethor's madness is simultaneously overdone and left largely inexplicable without the breaking strain of the palantir.

Finally, my biggest beef with ROTK: the handling of the Army of the Dead. 1) The Dead came off as over the top, leaving a Disney "Haunted House" or "Pirates of the Caribbean" feeling more than anything else. With terror, sometimes less is more. 2) In the extended edition we finally get to see the confrontation with the Corsairs but we're left wondering how the Paths of the Dead exit right at the Anduin - which admittedly solves the difficulty of losing the horses, but in a way which makes a total hash of geography. 3) The use of the Army at the Pelennor has a deus ex machina effect, rendering all human efforts of the Western forces nugatory. Once they showed up, Aragorn and Eomer might as well have sat down for a cup of tea. Jackson was clearly working at some story compression here, which I don't object to per se but in this case it ended up creating more problems than it solved.

But like you, I am on the whole astonished at how much *did* make it on to the screen, and that a coherent and reasonably faithful version of the story made it onto the screen in under 10 hours of screen time. For that, we must remain thankful to Jackson and Co. And retain inside what we always envisioned of the books themselves.

We'll always have those books.

-- posted by RichardLender