The Capturing of Myth

[davem]

Originally Posted by SPM

To my mind, the films didn't fail at all because that was not what they were trying to achieve. They might not have been directed at being what you wanted them to be, but that does not make them failures. On any level, in the context of what they were trying to achieve, they were overwhelmingly successful.

Well, they failed to be movies of the book, & if they didn't achieve that, then I don't know in what way they can be said to have succeeded. My problem all along is that I've never been clear about what , exactly, Jackson did want to achieve. If we start from the position that the books, as CT stated, are unfilmable, that it is impossible to dramatise fantasy, then its clear that the only thing they could 'succeed' in being is action movies - but LotR is not an action movie in book form. The spirit of the book cannot be communicated in dramatised form - & its not a matter of directorial skill, but of the nature of fantasy itself. If the movies are 'successful' they are successful as something else.They are not a successful translation of book into film, because that's impossible.