[Fordim Hedgethistle]

OK, so the conversation has been about how the film attempts to be more "accessible" -- but just what is being accessed.

I've got to say right from the outset that I am a wholehearted fan of the films, both as films and as adaptations of the story. I think that they succeed in every respect. Sure, the characters and events got changed, plot elements were rearranged, relationships altered, but the thematic concerns of the story came through loud and clear. The movies celebrate friendship, and self-sacrifice, and the perservation of the natural world, and humility, and pity, and duy and honour and bravery; they deride cruelty and disregard for nature, they abhor the unthinking application of force and power, they postulate that the only response to tyranny and self-aggrandizing power is resistance: bloodless resistance, if possible, but armed if unavoidable. In the book and in the movie the central conflict is the same (Power vs free will) and in the end both resolve that conflict in the same remarkable manner: a miracle happens and the Powerful Object is destroyed rather than used. The Men of the West kneel and pay homage to Hobbits. The Towers are thrown down and evil defeats itself. When I put these really important similarities up against an alteration in the order of events, or more screen time for Arwen, or even the wholesale rewriting of Faramir and Denethor -- well, those kinds of changes seem relatively unimportant to me.

Greaty to PJ's credit he was always very clear that he was making "a version" of LotR and not the definitive translation of it to screen (which he knew as well as Tolkien was impossible). Another word that's been getting a lot of play in the thread is "successful" -- are the films successful? Well, certainly they were with audiences, but I also think they were entirely successful with their intended aim: they preserved and presented the ideals and themes of the story in a completely different medium.

I like to think about the films as 'covers' of the story, like in music. With all really good covers, the differences between the original and the cover version are what make it a good cover. The music is kind of the same, but there are more differences than similiarities really: shifts in tone and tune, key, pace, melody even. But the words are always the same -- the message is still there even though the song, and thus our experience of it, is entirely different. My favourite examples are "Stand By Me" and "My Way". Whereas the original SbM is a slick 50's pop song about boy and girl togetherness, Lennon's cover is full of an angst, and anger, that makes the song far more social and even despairing, I think. Both versions of the song are about the need for togetherness and relationship in difficult times, though. "My Way" was famously covered by Sid Vicious in such a way that they satirically ironised the song -- so it is possible to mangle the original but only by changing the words. Sid did deliberate violence to the intent of the song.

PJ and crew did not do anything of the kind to the core values and vision of LotR. They changed all the props and stays of story telling, and adapted them to the screen so that those core values and vision could be maintained and made accessible to a movie going audience. Moral? Yer darn right that PJ and crew had a moral obligation to Tolkien to maintain his vision -- and they did, by maintaining Tolkien's moral vision!