Uh oh, another purist-movieist argument. I am weary of this....
Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
Honestly, I've yet to hear any pro-movie argument from you that didn't consist of 'They made a lot of money, a lot of people saw them & they won 3,759,3783,798,439 Oscars.'. The only criteria for 'success' you admit is numbers.
|
How about winning awards for
best adapted screenplay, and the love of the
majority of LOTR fans?
Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
There is another (&, some of us would argue, far more important) criteria - & that is faithfulness to the source. These movies are not at all faithful to Tolkien's original work. They cannot be called 'adaptations'
|
They
are adaptations in the sense that they are drawn directly from an existing source material. And if you've watched any movie that was based on a book in the past 20 years you'll find that considering the Hollywood standard for book adaptations, the LOTR films were
very very faithful.[/QUOTE]
Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
- & this is where your argument crashes & burns: the changes were not made out of necessity because of the difference between book & film. They were made purely & simply (whatever nonsense the screenwriters spout) because the writers thought they could improve on the original. What they did was take whatever bits they liked from Tolkien, changed whatever they didn't like - for no other reason than they didn't like it. Unfortunately, the main reason for this is that they didn't actually understand the book.
|
That's just your opinion. As for the changes, some were certainly made due to creative license, but many were made for genuine reasons(for example, Tolkien himself stated that Bombadil wasn't important to the narrative). You may disregard STW's argument that books and movies are different media but it holds true nevertheless. And IMHO the writers did improve on Tolkien in a few aspects; like, say, Theoden's speech at the Pelennor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
That is how they fail - as adaptations of Tolkien's work.
|
No, they don't. Even if they fail the 'faithfulness to plot' test(and IMO they don't), they excel in other aspects, like maintaining the look and feel(Sets, props, costumes) and the music(Howard Shore's score) of Middle-earth.
Having contributed my two cents, I don't think anybody's opinions are going to change, so it would be best to start a new thread from here on.