A few random thoughts because I need my breakfast...
"No parent should have to bury their child". This is a line I always find quite striking, and the delivery by Bernard Hill is perfect and it is very touching.
But, I find it stands out a little too much and though I like it, I find it somewhat incongruous; it seems somehow too modern and emotional for a king such as Theoden. So, it's a well delivered line and provides an emotional moment, but it is also out of context.
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Beleg Cuthalion
Those who say that Jackson and crew supposedly "improved on Tolkien's work by making it more accesible" are really not taking it for what it is. In my oppinion, the biggest reason for the popularity of the films is because they dramatize Tolkien's epic, not because the characters drop "accesible" lines like "Let's hunt some orc".
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When I hear people say that the films are better than the books, that they improved on the books, my blood pressure starts rising and I start to get irrational thoughts.
To me the books
are LotR, the films are just something else, like an extra, like another appendix, or an extremely beautiful special edition in a different cover but with so many printing errors I have to put it on one side and go back to my battered paperbacks.
How could Tolkien's work be made
more accessible? LotR was
already one of the biggest selling works of all time, and most readers who were likely to have enjoyed it would have read it already anyway, unless they were too young to have done so by the time the films were released. It is not exactly a difficult or daunting read, so I wonder who are these people who would never have read LotR and had to have this accessible version? Surely this means all those people who never read books anyway? It can't mean those who read the books after the films and enjoyed them, as they would likely have come to the books in any case, despite the films. So the films were made for the class of people who hate reading? Or are they made for those who like reading but couldn't be bothered with the books? I know I thoroughly enjoyed the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch, as it saved me reading a book I found unutterably dull; is it for this reason that the films were made? To save people from having to bother reading the books?
A final thought I had is that in many cases the books were adapted to such a ridiculous degree by the scriptwriters that many aspects of the story actually became more
difficult to understand. One example is what they did to Aragorn in making him be such a reluctant heir to Gondor, and in the changes to Frodo, turning him into a victim. I've had to explain so many things in cases where parts of the story were changed from how they appear in the books; clearly, in many respects the films actually made Tolkien's world
less accessible, and
less explicable.