Dumbing it down

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Fordim

PJ and crew had it even tougher than directors who put on Hamlet, however, insofar as Shakespeare was writing a text that was meant for performance, when Tolkien most emphatically was not.

This could be a justification for why the scriptwriters of LotR ought to have paid more attention to the content of the original text. Shakespeare wrote plays, Tolkien wrote novels, two very different things. Many years ago I voiced the opinion that Shakespeare plays were meant to be performed and that reading the texts was something entirely different. A play can be adapted, that is part of its nature, or rather, it can be interpreted, in the dramatic sense. A novel is not like that. You dramatise it in a modern setting (e.g. Clueless being a modern version of Emma), but this essentially changes it utterly. This is why it is even more important for the scriptwriter working on an adatation to pay particular attention to the original text as the smallest nuance of meaning is easy to miss or to change.

Yes, my main gripe with the films is indeed the textual changes, the changes of plot and character, and the use of too much modern idiom. I call this dumbing down because the sheer audience numbers showed that had these changes not been made or indeed, not made quite so clumsily, and more of the original and beautiful language used at the expense of some naff lines, there would have been no diminishing box office figures. Yet again, I must pull up things that those who have not read the books have said to me, and one of those things is that they comment on how some of the lines are incredibly moving and they cannot forget them. These, strangely enough, are Tolkien's own lines.

It does just frustrate me so much, when they made such a good job of everything else, that the main drive of the films, the scripts, could have been so much better, and it is in Two Towers in particular where they go noticeably astray. A double shame because that is the film where they portrayed the people of Rohan so beautifully.

Originally Posted by SpM

there are numerous Hollywood-made WW2 films that replace some or all of the original heroes with Americans to make them more appealing to American audiences. Clearly, such changes are made with the intention of increasing a film's appeal with its intended audience. And changing historical fact, with the effect that people end up believing that this is how it really happened, irks me far more, and seems to me to be much more of a crime, than altering what is, after all, a fictional story.

I daren't even mention Pearl Harbor to my father lest he start ranting about the insinuations made about the RAF in said film, so i understand your point. Now it might be slightly disturbing, but there is something about LotR which has entered my mind so deeply that it has become more than a mere fictional story. I think it is in fact nothing disturbing, it is simply that I love it so much, and I desperately wanted the films to be perfect.

Anyway...what's wrong with discussing things over and over? It reminds me of those long, smoky, drunken conversations of my student days when you would sit up all night arguing the same point over and over and suddenly look at the clock and realise it is in fact 5am and you had better go to bed. And though I may disagree with some people's points, I learn much from what they have to say!