The Battle of the 5+ Armies

[Elmo]

I believe the correct term is 'as obsessed with LOTR as Gollum is with the ring'.

[tom the eldest]

I was quite confused that legolas and tauriel manage to travel from laketown to gundabad and back in two days,despite the the distance clearly larger than rohan to minas tirith.what worse is bolgs army.a massive orc army,no doubt carrying heavy weaponry,can reach erebor in one day,arriving just after legolas.the army is also onfoot,which remind me that rohan,with the best cavalry in middle earth,need three days to arrive to minas tirith(with some obstacles,of course).one must imagine that the orc is doing a painful forced march from gundabad to erebor(well the muscular orc vanguard did,and it looks like the run non stop from gundabad to erebor.poor thing

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by tom the eldest

I was quite confused that legolas and tauriel manage to travel from laketown to gundabad and back in two days,despite the the distance clearly larger than rohan to minas tirith.what worse is bolgs army.a massive orc army,no doubt carrying heavy weaponry,can reach erebor in one day,arriving just after legolas.the army is also onfoot,which remind me that rohan,with the best cavalry in middle earth,need three days to arrive to minas tirith(with some obstacles,of course).one must imagine that the orc is doing a painful forced march from gundabad to erebor(well the muscular orc vanguard did,and it looks like the run non stop from gundabad to erebor.poor thing

Throughout PJ's work, he has ignored or failed to comprehend Tolkien's dictum that "Days are days, miles are miles." T worked from Army manuals to ensure that travel rates per day in various terrain on foot and by horse were plausible; he even went back after the book was finished and drastically revised the whole intricate chronology leading up to the Pelennor Fields, where he had to restructure a vast number of moving parts - the Rohirrim, Aragorn, Faramir, Frodo, the Black Host, Gandalf - just because he noticed that some of them were traveling too fast to be realistic.... not that anyone would ever have noticed that the Grey Company took four days rather than five from Erech to Pelargir.*

To PJ, Middle-earth is about the size of Delaware. Thus Elrond can make it to Dunharrow in a couple of days, and Haldir's Elves can cover the 700 miles from Lorien to the Hornburg overnight. (related- in the Jacksonverse, everybody knows almost everything that's going on. Tolkien the signals officer knew that preindustrial communications were very slow and unreliable)

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* Sadly, the extra day he introduced as part of this process reduced Shadowfax' Great Ride to Minas Tirith from superequine to merely stupendous-- (a tiny number of) real world horses actually have covered 300 miles in 78 hours.

[alatar]

The answer to all of these 'miles are miles' discrepancies is as obvious as the plot of B5A. Characters in Middle Earth make use of 'worm holes,' which, for those of you that don't know, are 'shortcuts through spacetime.'

For all of you haters out there, PJ is just being true to both Tolkien's and Einstein's works.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by alatar

The answer to all of these 'miles are miles' discrepancies is as obvious as the plot of B5A. Characters in Middle Earth make use of 'worm holes,' which, for those of you that don't know, are 'shortcuts through spacetime.'

This is one of the more brilliant jokes I've seen in awhile.

Never let it be said that nothing good ever came out of these movies, for we have the worm hole joke.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

:d:d:d:d:d

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by alatar

The answer to all of these 'miles are miles' discrepancies is as obvious as the plot of B5A. Characters in Middle Earth make use of 'worm holes,' which, for those of you that don't know, are 'shortcuts through spacetime.'

For all of you haters out there, PJ is just being true to both Tolkien's and Einstein's works.

More likely the Spacing Guild and CHOAM, needing to protect the supply of melange on Middle-earth, has sent the Reverend Mother Nerwen Galadriel to promote the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva and look for likely candidates for their breeding program, particularly males of the Numenorean race.

We have worm sign, Usul!

[Tuor in Gondolin]

Hey, wait a minute. You mean there are FLYING worms on Arakis now. OMG.

[Sarumian]

Having seen the movie, I experienced feelings very similar to what I have found in this thread. I really enjoyed reading Downers' reviews and notes and do not want to repeat them as my own impressions are pretty much the same.

I went to see the movie for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to look at the landscapes of Middle Earth one last time. Secondly, I was curious how Peter Jackson was going to sort out the peculiarities of the story line in order to reach the beginning of his own LoTR exactly where it started.

I was indeed quite satisfied with the settings and, on the other hand, was not disappointed by the content as my expectations were pretty low. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that Jackson avoided showing another epic battle in Dol Gudur (though there was one in the book); I was also quite surprised that both Tauriel and Radagast survived. We have not obtained an idea of how Thrain's map came to Gandalf, neither we have learnt much about Saruman's corruption.

Overall, my biggest question is why Jackson needed altering the original storyline ceaselessly? Viggo Mortensen, I believe, highlighted the key point. Jackson proved to be a messy director. He hadn't had a clear idea of what he was going for at the start of the shooting. Or, may be, the scale of both trilogies overwhelmed his ability to master consistent plans. There is nothing wrong with such attitude in general. As we all know, in the case of Apocalypse Now Francis Ford Coppola had a very vogue idea of the movie he was directing even after the shooting had ended; he basically worked it out only in the process of cutting. However, Coppola was creating a narrative from the scratch – he was not attempting to screen a piece of literature that had by that time obtained a status of classics for both the quality of story telling and the way the story was interwoven with the imaginary universe of Tolkien's myth. To achieve this, one needs to be extremely tidy with the ends and means.

Well, I am not writing off a chance that a brilliant director can get away with a radical alteration of a narrative, even of a classical one. Apart from the Benedictine Sherlock S.-S. Holmes, I dare mention Le Notti Bianche by Luchino Visconty and Hakuchi by Akira Kurosawa, both based on the novels by Dostoevsky (a writer on par with Dickens, I believe, and a dedicated admirer of the later). This, nonetheless, requires deep knowledge of Tolkien's universe in order to keep the story faithful to the context – unless a director goes for a universe of his own (which doesn't seem realistic, taking the scale of the task into account). In any case such an egg-dance is possible for one who can clearly see the purpose of the undertaking, the way to achieve it, and the boundaries that must not be violated – from the very beginning to the very end.

Having said that, I am not going to claim that Peter Jackson totally lacks talent or, in particular, imagination. It is rather vision that is missing. Without the big picture, imagination tends to led the narrative astray: one alteration for the sake of a moment that would look pretty on screen leads to characters changing their “characters” and roles in the story; and, in the end, the logic of the whole is gravely compromised.

I wonder how it all would work for a novice who watches all six movies in chronological order. Is LoTR trilogy going to be of any interest to such a viewer or would it rather seem predictable and unclear at the same time?

Happy New Year!

[mark12_30]

My favorite B5A joke was "...and that's how Legolas invented the escalator."
but Alatar' s spacewarp is good. Physics or engineering? Choices.

I enjoyed the concern on Thranduil' s face when Thorin ordered Bilbo thrown from the gate.

[Lalwendë]

It's fresh in my mind because we watched it again about two weeks ago. I had a bad time with this film. I wanted to disengage and just enjoy it like the others, but I couldn't. It's partly my fault as even when I was a child, I found The Hobbit a disappointing tale once Smaug was done away with, and my only interest even then was in seeing that Bilbo got home again. So I was never going to find it that exciting. And add to this having a small boy who has watched the other two films so often, I feel like they're etched on my eyelids. Watching things over and over again, unless they are Guardians of the Galaxy, tends to make you a bit bored with them.

Anyway, I had a huge urge in the cinema to yell "War Pigs!" when the Big Yin rocked up. And then to yell "Hey, am I watching Tremors?!" when the orcses came out of the ground screw thingummies. And, more miserably, "Oh hurry up" during Thorin's final battle. No, it wasn't doing it for me.

But I did enjoy the scene at Dol Guldur; it had Christopher Lee, how could I not enjoy this? And Bilbo was fabulous, especially in that last 5-10 minutes, that was wonderful. Gandalf and Radagast were good. And also Balin and Bard. Thranduil is utterly fantastic - I have a keen liking of camp. Give me a film with Smaug, Saruman and Bilbo in it, fan fic or not, I would enjoy that.

I suppose I am generally grumpy about this last film because I've seen it all too often, but I put on a brave face with the last film and make to love it for the little fella's sake. Even though it's really not cool that his namesake is the butt of the jokes.

I'm very sad about there being no more Lego sets though

[mark12_30]

***off topic*** how are we changing our font size?