LotR1-FotR-Seq02

[Mister Underhill]

Originally Posted by Boro

I actually think most of these are pretty well answered early on. Maybe because I've read the book prior to the movies, but I thought the movies answered these pretty well. Atleast the first two questions, maybe not the Nazgul.

Quite right, Boro -- and you've done a proper job of explaining how the film answers these things. I was just wondering how it might work in a scenario where the audience wasn't given the answers to these questions right off the bat. Because as it stands now, we already know the Ring is the Ring, we know it's bad news, we've learned that it's the creation of the Big Bad Dude in Black Armor -- we spend the good part of this sequence waiting for Gandalf to start to catch up to what we already know.

On the other hand, the prologue arguably works in the sense that we know that this evil thing is in the Shire and are anticipating, "What is going to happen in this idyllic, peaceful place because the Ring is there?" It's hard for me to judge one solution against the other objectively because I can't recreate being a movie-goer seeing the story unfold for the first time Jackson-style.

Whether you keep the prologue or not, though, I was simply noting ways in which the sequence might have been presented more from Frodo's point-of-view rather than Gandalf's. Just sort of wondering what motivated that choice, and how it impacts the story as a whole, and what effect a different approach might have had.

And any way you slice it, you're absolutely right that you don't give the Ring's history by having two characters sitting and chatting about it. But flashbacks with Gandalf (and maybe Elrond too) as narrator are interesting to think about.

Originally Posted by SPM

Or, to put it another way, film-makers have less leeway, in terms of timing and audience expectation, than authors.

I tend to agree with this, but I still don't see how it necessarily militates for Jackson's solution. In fact, conventional moviemaking wisdom dictates that you don't start a movie with ten minutes of solid exposition, so in a way I see Jackson actually bucking a traditional "mass-appeal" dictum with his approach.

Interesting side note: in ancient Greece, a character named Prologue would come onstage and simply tell the audience the information they needed to know in order to understand and become emotionally involved in the play.