Del Toro refuses to copy Jackson

TheOneRing.Net ^ | July 19, 2008 | xoanon

[MarkL]

“...and didn’t really understand the point of the whole thing in cutting the Scouring Of The Shire.”

That’s easy; the Scouring of the Shire is Tolkien’s assault on socialism. We can’t have THAT in a movie, now can we?

Interesting... I never really saw it like that. I always saw the "Scouring of the Shire" as an important lesson that one can't hide from evil. Remember, Hobbits always avoided "adventures" and liked peace and quiet. They believed that if they ignored the outside world, then it would ignore them. The Scouring of the Shire showed just how wrong that belief was. That there's no place to hide from evil, and that it MUST be confronted.

At least that was always the message I got from it.

Mark

[aruanan]

I never really saw it like that. I always saw the "Scouring of the Shire" as an important lesson that one can't hide from evil.

I guess the entire story of The Lord of the Rings is that one can't hide from evil and that, no matter how small you are (or how furry your toes), you have a place, perhaps the most important place, in defeating it. The Scouring of the Shire is an additional lesson. As 'scouring' indicates, they were having to do some radical cleaning to return the Shire to its original condition. They had fought and defeated evil as manifested through Sauron on a large scale. Now they had to fight and defeat evil as manifested through Wormtongue in their own home and people they knew on a small scale. It seemed more a collectivist rather than a socialist evil (socialism being collectivism with cable). As far as it not being in the movie, it would have been anticlimactic and added too much to the already long movie, though it would have been good to see them coming back and kicking ass and setting things to right in their own home. That could have inspired folks to The Scouring of the Shire of Western Civilization.

[ecurbh]

Ring Ping!!

Anyone wishing to be added to or removed from the Ring-Ping list, please don't hesitate to let me know.

[Xenalyte]

Jackson shortchanged Eowyn? Dude, that was Tolkien who did that.

Eowyn and Arwen have always struck me as characters that exist solely because someone said, “Y’know, JR, women ain’t gonna read that unless you put some chicks in it.”

[El Sordo]

What? You got sumthin’ against Rotoscope?

: )

[SuziQ]

That’s easy; the Scouring of the Shire is Tolkien’s assault on socialism. We can’t have THAT in a movie, now can we?

Actually, the Scouring was Tolkien's assault on INDUSTRIALIZATION.

[fishtank]

bflr = bump for later reading

[Billthedrill]

Jackson shortchanged Eowyn? Dude, that was Tolkien who did that.

Oh, I don't think so at all. Eowyn was a truly proto-feminist character way before her time. There's a great deal of Tolkien's wife in her (weird aside - did you know their gravestone reads "Beren and Luthien"?) and supposedly she represents women he knew who wanted to go to WWI with their men. She wasn't a throwaway - the point was that Faramir was second to Aragorn only in those aspects her growth led her to no longer consider most important. Whether one likes how she developed is quite another issue, but her character did as much real development in LOTR as any minor character, so I wouldn't consider her shortchanged at least in that aspect.

But as a minor character most of that necessarily got chopped in the film and she ended up looking (IMHO) quite a bit less profound than she was in the novels. She wasn't the only one like that, of course - Saruman, Denethor, Theoden, and both Merry and Pippin all suffered from dramatic truncation and Bombadil famously didn't make the screen at all.

I agree with you with regard to Arwen, however. She was, in essence, Luthien rewrit, and it seems to me that Tolkien was attempting to lever a bit of the earlier story into LOTR - the same issues, certainly, of the choice of death and love. In order to close that deal Jackson would have had to film the Appendices as well. Not likely.

[BlueLancer]

"“Ralph Bakshi.” "

Oh, well, I guess that I must be the only person in the world who likes Baskshi's version of Lord of the Rings (as well as "Wizards"). The music score for the Bakshi LOTR was great and the animation wasn't that bad either. Personally, I liked the Aragorn in the Baskshi version between than Viggo Mortensen.

[Drawsing]

I tried to read the Silmarillion. I gave up about one third of the way in.

[boogerbear]

You’d definitely be alone in that. Even Bakshi doesn’t like his version of LOTR, largely because the studio kept changing the rules and slashing the budget and shrinking the scope. It’s not even close to the movie he wanted to make.

[purpleraine]

...but, better is always different.

[Billthedrill]

I’ll have to get trashed right along witcha, because I thought Mortenson was an immature disaster of an actor who didn’t understand his character at all. It is a decidedly minority opinion... ;-)

[MarkL]

I agree with you regarding the lessons, and you’re right that it would have made a really long movie even longer.

Still, I think that it was an important lesson that was sort of lost. Besides, in the movie, Wormtongue was killed at Eisengard.

For a quick (and funny, but extremely rude, crude, and socially irresponsible) synopsis of LOTR, check out this YouTube clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRNUIxpTHvA

Warning: Not safe for work.

Mark

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

I thought Mortenson was an immature disaster of an actor who didn’t understand his character at all.

He was a lot better than Stuart Townsend who was cast originally and had started filming when they replaced him.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

The music score for the Bakshi LOTR was great and the animation wasn't that bad either.

Was that the score which included the song 'Where There's a Whip There's a Way'?

[Free Vulcan]

I could never understand why Tolkien barely mentioned Arwen in LOTR, much less developed her. Galadriel and Eowyn at least get time in the sun.

Considering Arwen was the Luthien of the Third Age, even taking into account the story in the appendices her treatment is pretty thin. Considering how much time women got in the Silmarillion it’s strange. I think Jackson should be credited for developing her as much as he did in the movie.

[Faraday]

The key point about The Hobbit relative to the Lord of the Rings is that the former was written for children, the latter for adults. The humor, motivations, and moral choices confronted mainly by Bilbo, and to some extent the dwarves, are aimed at the level of a child. I hope that the film version retains this sensibility.

[Billthedrill]

Stuart Townsend...

(Shudders) Yeah. You got a point there.

I'm thinking Samuel L. Jackson would have made a great Aragorn. OK, maybe it's a stretch, but think of the speech he'd have made at the Fields of Pelennor...of course, there goes the PG-13 rating...

[BlueLancer]

"Was that the score which included the song 'Where There's a Whip There's a Way'?"

No, that was another one. That one was done by Bass and Rankin, the same people who did the animated "The Hobbit" which had Orson Bean as the voice of Bilbo, John Huston as the voice of Gandalf, and Richard Boone as the voice of Smaug.

The music score from the Bakshi LOTR was almost entirely orchestral and really quite good.