Saucepan man, well, yeah, if you read Flieger's books you will see the point I'm making, expressed far better than I myself can make it. Why is that patronising? And even if I expressed the point in a patronising way, that doesn't invalidate the point itself, does it?<BR>I hated the movie (& I stress MOVIE, because like the book, its one story split into three). The writers haven't understood the real point of the book. They've put the surface onto the screen & left out what really matters.<BR>Why all the emphasis on violence, brutality & ugliness at the expense of the beauty, nobility & overwhelming sense of loss of the original?<BR>Without the Warg attack we could have seen Frodo & Sam sharing a meal with Faramir at Henneth Annun. Without the Elves at Helms Deep episode, there would have been time to show Merry & Pippin with Treebeard at Wellinghall being told about the loss of the Entwives.<BR>Wherever the film makers found any conflict in the book they put it on screen in the most violent & brutal way they could, & if they couldn't find enough violence in the book, why, they just invented some of their own.<BR>They've taken something 'high & beautiful' & churned out something both morbid & silly.<BR>Look, its like someone looking at the peaks of the Himalayas, being overwhelmed by their beauty, & deciding they want to make that beauty accessible, so they chop the top 20 feet off the mountains & put them on the ground, so people can see them easily. But you lose the majesty & the sense of awe which made them special, and just end up with a lot of big pointy boulders. The depth, meaning & subtlety of the book is lost in these movies. They are Harry Potter meets Star Wars, & if thats your bag, that's fine. I liked Star Wars, & thought Harry Potter was ok too, but Lord of the Rings is more than an action fantasy, it is a work of genius by a great writer, a profound work of human imagination by a man who'd known tragedy , horror & death first hand, a deep meditation on humankind & our relationship to eternity & the divine ('Nobody tosses a Dwarf!' - how we laughed at that one!)<BR>Finally, if the writers didn't think they could do better than Tolkien, why would they change things, because they thought they could make them worse?
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