Dumbing it down

[Lalwendë]

The books, as I see them, are intricately constructed, and to remove crucial elements of the story risks failure. Jackson effectively rewrote parts of the story, and he did fail at that. I thought I would extract and look at one aspect of the films which fails in comparison with the books, and that is the whole New Faramir episode.

I still fail to work out what the changes mean in terms of the revised plot as they simply do not fit into the narrative. If New Faramir has indeed been enraptured by the Ring, and he is taking it to Minas Tirith then what is the moment of realisation that he has done wrong? Is it when the Ringwraith appears above Osgiliath? Surely if he has indeed been enraptured then he is going to fight this Ringwraith in order to keep the Ring? And why does Frodo offer it up to the Ringwraith when he has been so successful in hiding it throughout? Why does the Ringwraith then not report back to Sauron on the whereabouts of the Ring, thus changing the eventual outcome of the story? These are just some of the puzzled questions that people who have not read the books have asked me.

I wondered why Jackson decided to alter this and I found this interview with himself and Boyens. His reasons for the changes are simply not justifiable. He says of New Faramir:

we've spent a lot of time in the last film and in this one to establish this ring as incredibly powerful. Then to suddenly come to a character that says, "Oh, I'm not interested in that," to suddenly go against everything that we've established ourselves is sort of going against our own rules.

But this does not follow on from the storytelling he has been doing. Frodo has already offered the Ring to various characters who have all recoiled in horror at the very suggestion that they take the Ring, so Faramir too should reject the Ring, if he is indeed a ‘good’ person on the same level as Aragorn or Gandalf. Instead, this episode detracts from the good nature of Faramir, as it makes him appear to have doubts, and ultimately, it ruins the whole plot line as it simply does not make sense. I shall be cynical here and wonder if the real reason behind the change was to get better value from the money spent on the Osgiliath set and the Fell Beast FX.

Jackson is a great film-maker, but neither he nor anyone else on his team comes close to Tolkien as a storyteller. LotR is not as simple a tale as your average bestselling novel, it has layers and complexities beyond imagining, and it’s risky to remove too many layers as eventually you will pull out the wrong one. It really does make me want to smack my head when I think of how easily he could have let the story alone and not created these plot holes, as the films are great renditions of Middle Earth. Did he make these alterations through over-confidence or was it due to financial reasons? Will we ever know?