I liked the Gandalf vs. Sauron battle in the second film. This of course was a big change from the book timeline in which Gandalf got in, found Thrain, and got out safely.
The Lord of the Rings - newbie questions!
- Thread starter Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
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It just doesn't get any groovier than this, does it?
It just doesn't get any groovier than this, does it?
ETA-- I think that we may have scared away @Admiral Jean-Luc Picard .
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They really should have gotten a modern popstar to do a cover of that to go along with the Peter Jackson trilogy.
I still want to see a cut of The Hobbit that splits it into two films and includes the Gandalf/White Council subplot, as planned before the last-minute expansion to a trilogy. There are some fantastic edits out there that trim most of the fat from the movies, but I actually really liked the Dol Guldur stuff and would like to see it integrated properly.
I guess I could just try and learn video editing myself, but...well, see my avatar.
I guess I could just try and learn video editing myself, but...well, see my avatar.
Are the Extended Editions of The Hobbit movies worth watching? As much as I enjoyed the theatrical cuts, I've never really felt the need to watch the extended cuts, they're long enough already. And part of the appeal of the LOTR EEs was to see characters and scenes from the books that didn't make it into the theatrical cuts, that wasn't really an issue with The Hobbit, since pretty much everything from the books was already in them, and of course a whole lot more.
To someone who likes the Hobbit movies the EE cuts are definitely worth seeing, to everybody else probably not.
I don't like the Hobbit movies much, it was too much studio interference to make a marketable product that would piggyback on the massive commercial and critical success of Lord of the Rings but at least i felt that there wasn't as much heart behind the making of the movies as was in LotR. It's not like the Director's Cut elevates the movies to something better like it does for Kingdom of Heaven for example.
Rings of Power is very entertaining but has split fandom straight through the middle into purists who hate it with a passion and those who like it because they either have not read the Silmarillion ( basically the history of Middle Earth until the events of The Hobbit) or understand that the Silmarillion as written would make for a boring and/or unfilmable show and are ok with the changes ( i'm in the latter camp if it wasn't obvious).
Without diving into fandom drama, what's the main objection to Rings of Power? My understanding is less "changes because TV show" and more too many changes to the point of "just call it something else." Yes? No?
Nah. Rings of Power is wholy based on Tolkien, if not a straight word to word adaptation.
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The problem starts with the show not having full rights to all of Tolkien's literary work, so they can't use certain characters for example. This leads to some, let's say creative, choices by the showrunners that didn't sit well with the purists. The other is that the book this is based on spans thousands of years of history and there's periods of hundreds or even thousands of years where nothing remarkable happens other than certain characters leaving the story due to the massive time jumps and others come up.
In TV production reality following this closely and word for word would mean exchanging main casts almost completely every season and sometimes mid season, which is just not practical in a show production environment. To solve this the showrunners compressed the timeline, sometimes extremely, and it appears all of the main storyline happens within a few years at most - strike two for purists.
Strike three would be the addition of new characters with their own storyline, sometimes contradicting later comments by Tolkien though "scholars" disagree because Tokien didn't flesh out big parts of the age where RoP actually happens and only gave the broad points, so the showrunners got creative again for the sake of their own show.
So it basically boils down to purists wanting the written words of Tolkien translated word for word to the screen while others are ok with what happens because the show tries to focus on the spirit and broad events of the larger story at play. It's an age old discussion between purists and people comfortable with adaptations and changes. Hell, LotR did change quite a few bits of the book, leaving out several characters, rearranging some storypoints to happen earlier or later than in the books and even then, 25 years earlier, the same discussion happened and LotR is still regarded as one of the, if not the, best fantasy movie of all time.
Up for anyone to make a decision for themselves. I know the book source, love it, but i also believe that a 1:1 adaptation of it may have failed spectacularly, so i'm ok with the changes and additions/ommissions, because to me it still feels like the magical world Tolkien wrote about with larger than life characters and events fighting the everlasting battle between good and evil.
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^ I recently LOTR movies and then read the books back to back for the first time, and I was shocked by how much they actually had changed. Before there had been a fairly big gap between when I first read the books and watched the movies, so I had only remembered the broad strokes. But this time with the movies fresh in my mind as I read the books, I was really shocked by how different they actually were. But I still think they did a great job of capturing the significant moments, and the tone and feel of the books.
I saw The Fellowship of the Ring at a friends house which interested me enough to read the entire book series of Lord of the Rings. I got through it in time to see The Two Towers, and Return of the King, and would regularly reread the book between film releases. So, I had a list of items I felt were missed.
As I got older, and my (now) wife got in to Lord of the Rings we would go through the changes and I was struck by the ones that really bothered me. The films made changes similar to the Hobbit films, yet seemed to be completely unscathed for comment, save for the book purists, whom I would occasionally encounter and rejected the Similarion.
In my opinion, an adaptation that captures the moments like the LOTR trilogy is quite good, but it is hardly a perfect work and I think it misses some parts to its detriment. They are still very good films, but still different from the books.
This is me exactly also. I have rewatched LotR numerous times, but only The Hobbit once and probably won't again.
A couple of the four-hour fan edits of The Hobbit movies are an improvement. I didn't need extended editions of what was already a vastly bloated adaptation of a short fantasy novel for children.
I saw these movies back when they first came out, but I haven't seen them in some 20+ years. I have the (theatrical cuts) of the LOTR trilogy. Is the big multi-disc Blu-ray set worth getting if I end up liking the films? Are the Hobbit prequels worth seeing? Then there's several animated movies and the Amazon TV series. Big franchise that I know virtually nothing about. Which entries are the good ones?
Yes. I recommend the extended versions AND the Hobbit extended versions. I love all 6 films. If you look at the Hobbit films as films rather than one book you will enjoy them. They were fantastic films and everything I would have wanted in a fantasy films as a kid. Yes they added to the stories but I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of all three films. One has to not think about the book story and constantly compare.
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