Posted on 01/02/2019 6:02:27 AM PST by C19fan
The filmmaker Peter Jackson deserves more than an Oscar; he deserves a medal.
What the director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies has done with his World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, is more than restore archival film; he has restored the humanity of men caught up in one of history’s great cataclysms. This is an aesthetic achievement of the highest order, and a great service to history.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
BTW, tell me who has brought the LOTR trilogy and the Hobbit to the big screen who has done a better job.
You can get back to me when you find out no one else has.
“Jackson made chop suey outta LOTR. Good films, missing half the book though with 50% made up filler.”
It is impossible to fit 3 huge novels into 3 movies. The only format that can fit everything from the books into it is a 3 season mini series with 10 hour long episodes. Peter Jackson did a damn fine job with LOTR.
I agree with you except for one point: for me, a large part of the last section of "Return of the King" dealt with the effect of the War of the Ring on the Shire and how Pippin and Merry, influenced by the part in the War, raised and scoured the Shire. That, to me, was a key portion of the LOTR, to show that such infiltration and desolation could occur anywhere unless challenged. I think that Jackson missed the boat on that one. Some other scenes could have been scaled back just enough to allow "The Scouring of the Shire".
I really liked the LOTR movies, but I think he really missed the boat with The Hobbit. Expanding the story into three movies was a terrible idea. The endless Orc battles simply blended into each other. I barely made it through the last one. Jackson seemed determined to make the single book of The Hobbit as "big" as LOTR. If someone would cut the three Hobbit movies down to one there might be a movie there.
It makes you hope Jackson fulfills the promise, he hinted at, that it was a WORLD war, and that there are millions of feet of unseen film in the archives...
Iffa’, coulda’, woulda’, shoulda’ but didn’t.
And crap was the result.
Alas, poor Tom Bombadil...
Get back to me when you can identify who has brought The Hobbit to the big screen and done a better job.
I'll be in my office when you locate them.....
“...If someone would cut the three Hobbit movies down to one there might be a movie there.” [Sans-Culotte, post 24]
There are difficulties that can never be entirely overcome, in translating a written work into a film work. They are two different artistic media; of necessity, they focus on different aspects of perception and thought.
Written material can do a better job unpacking the inner workings of a character’s mind, with moral/intellectual conflicts and ordeals, than can film, the impact of which is primarily visual and must be briefer.
Thus, Peter Jackson’s Lord of The Rings films convey grand visions of JRR Tolkien pretty decently: the travels of the Fellowship, the escape from Khazad-dum, the ruin of Isengard by the Ents, and various battles (Helm’s Deep, Pelennor Fields etc) pretty decently. But they run into trouble with the more cerebrally and historically oriented portions of the books: Gandalf’s revelations to Frodo in “The Shadow of the Past,” the Council of Elrond, the fall of Boromir, and especially the moral trials of Faramir during his encounter with the Ringbearer in Ithilien, were much more difficult.
Jackson & crew were aware of the media crossover difficulties: probably why the skipped “The Scouring of the Shire” and watered down Faramir’s capture of Frodo into a contest of wills and father-worship containing none of the moral dilemmas the book explored.
Many purist fans resent the absence of “The Scouring of the Shire”, but constraints of time and money probably forced the action; fan upset over the films may have been focused and intensified by what the author put into his preface to the revised edition: that “Scouring” was an essential element of the story, foreseen from the very beginning (of his writing task).
It’s been missed by many, but the film-makers did slip a couple elements into the denouement:
1. The culture shock evinced by Shire-hobbits on witnessing the return of the Four Travelers - two rich kids, an eccentric scion of a family once seen as the pinnacle of respectability, and a gardener disappear, then come back over a year later, dressed in finery of questionable taste. And carrying swords! The pity of it all: they used to be so respectable.
2. The total inability of the stay-at-homes to grasp the importance of what Frodo and Company have been up to. Somebody in Bree or the Shire reminds the Travelers that the (yet-to-be-written) book had better address local events, because a book that mostly dealt with doings “away south” wouldn’t sell.
On film, these two instances are covered with deft brevity:
1. The Four Travelers pass Odo Proudfoot, who pauses in sweeping his porch, to frown in disapproval and shake his head. Frodo, Merry, Pippin, and finally Sam ride by on their ponies, grinning a little and nodding to Odo.
2. In the tavern scene shortly later, Frodo wends through the company, narrowly avoiding slopping ale from the four earthenware mugs he carries, as the locals laugh and cheer the arrival of the impressive pumpkin. He then sets the mugs on the table in front of his companions. They gaze about, exchange glances, hoist mugs, and clink rims - silently toasting their success, and the memory of those they helped (or were helped by) during the Quest, fallen and living. It dawns that their fellow hobbits will never even know what happened: you can see their facial expressions change. Then they take a draught from their mugs and accept reality. Clueless or not, the Shire-folk have not been found wanting - neither by the Four Travelers, nor the many who strove, suffered, and in some cases perished in their defense.
Bringing any written work to the silver screen faces difficulties; bringing a children’s book to that screen is tougher still. Jackson & crew did that with The Hobbit, transforming it from a beloved children’s book into an action film aimed at a wider general audiences. Purists are of course free to disagree, but there isn’t much point to making a film that follows a book faithfully but flops commercially, because it failed to attract the huge majority of moviegoers who haven’t read the book.
It can be argued that Jackson & crew’s biggest achievement was to transform the dwarves of Thorin & Company into real characters one could recognize, and still care about. Books for children cannot be too realistic, but general movie audiences will refuse to see a film that fails to interest viewers in characters as “real people”, flaws and ambiguities and all. And those audiences do contain at least some adults.
Perhaps the best we as admirers of JRR Tolkien’s writings can hope for, is that the Jackson films will ignite an interesting a few moviegoers, and seduce them into actually reading the books.
I really did not have a lot of problems with faithfulness to the books. I thought LOTR was remarkably faithful, considering how unfaithful most film adaptations are. Many of the great moments from LOTR (Rivendell, Lothlorien, the Return of Gandalf, etc) were visually stunning and thrilling.
My problem with The Hobbit was that they simply padded it out with too many Orc battles. The Hobbit films reminded me of Man of Steel, the first Superman reboot, which was endless battles between Superman and Gen'l Zod and crew. In the age of CGI effects, I am not as impressed with spectacle for spectacle's sake because the creation of the effects is becoming sort of routine. Sure, there was some padding in the LOTR films (mainly in The Two Towers), but most of the great story elements were Tolkien's. I don't think the padding for The Hobbit was terrible interesting. They could have made one 3 hour film, or at the most, two; but the third was really pushing it. I hope I never see another Orc battle again! Even though it was a prequel, I think they felt the need to make it bigger (or at least as big as) LOTR.
There is no way a well made 1 or 2-part version of The Hobbit would have flopped. They probably wanted the earnings that a third film would generate. Can't say I blame them. I just didn't find it terribly interesting. The third film was for me an endurance test.
Jackson is more suited to this than adapting (modern) myth. He understands concrete history; he does not understand abstract mythology.
I have yet to see this. I did see Dunkirk, and thought it was atrociously done, both artistically and historically.
I like Christopher Nolan as a director, so I went in predisposed to like it. I know WWII history well.
“...I thought LOTR was remarkably faithful...My problem with The Hobbit was that they simply padded it out... I think they felt the need to make it bigger...They probably wanted the earnings that a third film would generate...” [Sans-Culotte, post 31]
A bunch of excellent points. Caught myself wondering why the director & screenwriters cut this, or added that. Missing from the first three films was a sense of the passage of time: from the years that went by at the beginning, while Gandalf was puzzling out the origin and identity of the One Ring, to the days that went by as the Fellowshipers walked and paddled their way through the great distances of the first stages of the Quest - at a snail’s pace, when contemplated by the mind of a modern moviegoer.
For all that, as someone fond of and familiar with the written work, I felt steadily more breathless, as director Jackson piled one detail after another from the text into the movies.
Peter Jackson may have filmed The Hobbit after he did LOTR, but that was exactly opposite to the way the author wrote them. After reading & pondering many comments from J R R Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, and numerous critics & academics, I got the impression that the Ring was a maguffin in The Hobbit, but it led to numerous new ideas and reappraisals, inducing the author not merely to write LOTR, but to rethink and revise many bits & pieces of his fantasy universe, its events and its timelines. LOTR in that sense was never a finished work, crafted to perfection; the author himself confessed to endless editing, “rewriting it backwards” as he described it in one comment. He also conceded that it was never completely consistent with itself, and that it was too short.
You nailed it perfectly, in pointing out that the films were about money. A feature of the entertainment business that can never be escaped, one gathers: literature-lovers love to condescend to film-lovers, insisting at times that authors care more about ideas (or the message) that about money, but one look at the book world gives the lie to it. Less morally & ideologically pure than many of us might yearn for, but inescapable in the age of mass media.
“...I did see Dunkirk, and thought it was atrociously done, both artistically and historically...”[YogicCowboy, post 33]
I read someplace that in making Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan & crew deliberately avoided a “top-down” viewpoint: it might be the approach taken by academic historians, analysts, and newsies, but it’s inauthentic to actual battlefield experience, especially that of junior enlisted folks. To the lowly private soldier or seaman no-stripe, nothing about combat makes sense, and they rarely see events in a larger context; they just do their duties, try to contain their own confusion and fear, and hope they get through it alive. Not all succeed at every point.
To that end, Nolan did not use very many big-name actors or concealed them (Michael Caine performed voice work for some of the RAF radio-call sequences, but his face never appears). In the mad scramble, I imagine a good many participants got shoved here and there in ways that made little sense, often finding themselves in small groups of utter strangers. You’ll note that few characters were mentioned by name.
When it comes to historical accuracy, no film on war can hope to convey the complete experience: if one did, moviegoers would be throwing up in their seats, stunned and deafened, or fleeing the cinema in terror. Missing also has been a sense of scale: by the time WW2 rolled around, battlefields were strangely empty. Foot troops in particular were fired on by adversaries they never saw, and frequently returned fire without first seeing an identifiable target. Any director who brought that to the silver screen would lose the audience.
My understanding of prevailing weather in the area in early June 1940 is that there was a thick low overcast, which prevented the Luftwaffe from hitting the fleeing BEF and the evacuation ships to any serious degree. Pretty prosaic, and moreover it would not have worked onscreen - where good weather and long-sighted vistas provided a backdrop for the film that was at once breathtakingly beautiful and somber, as if pointing out the puny scale of human squabbles.
I came away from viewing Dunkirk with a renewed appreciation for British participation in the conflict: not marked by boldness nor especially canny battlefield leadership, but a sense of muddling trough, of inglorious slogging, a persistence that ultimately paid off.
‘trough” = “through” in last sentence. Egad.
Just purchased my ticket for the January 21 showing.
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