The Children of Hurin - The Film

[tumhalad2]

Originally Posted by Formendacil

As far as your basic premise goes--namely that CoH elicited some very different responses from reviewers than we were used to hearing, and that it would be interesting to see what a faithful adaptation would do along those lines--I think you posit an interesting question... but what I'm trying to say is that it's almost as counterfactual as asking "what if Cecil DeMille had lived long enough to make a LotR movie in the late 1970s--would it have changed people's perceptions of Tolkien?"

Obviously, I think the answer would be yes... but it's entirely too fraught with other things to really be answered at all. I think part of the reason we're so used to thinking of "hobbits, orcs, dragons, middle-earth, good vs. evil" when thinking of Tolkien is because of the movies we've already seen. Obviously, it goes deeper than that, because Tolkien's works have been around for over half a century now. All the same, it is precisely because the movies ignited such a Tolkien-craze in the past decade that CoH received so much attention--critical and otherwise--when it was released, and I daresay those same movies coloured the same critics' previous views of Tolkien to a large extent.

Definitely, certain expectations were created by the films' release, expectations that sometimes had more to do with the movies themselves than with the themes of the novel.

I suppose I'm thinking more along the lines of theme and atmosphere, as opposed to plot elements per se, when considering what a movie CoH, faithfully adapted, might do. I realise it's very hypothetical, and I realise it almost certainly will never happen, but the question interests me precisely because we saw how powerful films could be in spreading certain ideas about the thematic nature of an author's work.

The Lord of the Rings films were phenomenal, in the sense that they were a phenomenon. Much can be said about the many defects inherent in the trilogy, but they did create a market for Tolkien, and furthermore they created particular expectations. CoH, in many respects, and despite the fact that it has "dragons, orcs, good and evil" etc. paints a starkly contrastive picture with LoTR. I agree with you, it is far more character driven that LoTR, in fact far less epic, in a sense. Not to mention Turin is a highly ambivalent character, not always driven by pure desires. For all his flaws, i find him much more amenable than Frodo or Aragorn; in fact I can imagine he would quite enjoy mocking Aragorn's faux heroic pronouncements.

I suppose to really answer this question we need to look at CoH itself, and more narrowly come to see where it contrasts with LoTR, and particularly the filmed version thereof, but I think it is obvious, even from cursory inspection, that the kinds of characters and thematic outcomes audiences were led to expect would be thwarted by a faithful film version. Perhaps there are larger issues at stake here, or at least more general questions. How do adaptations of famous authors work to mould expectations about the texts an author produces? And what happens when these expectations are not met?

Few authors are as famous or as widely read as Tolkien, and I cannot think of another example of a whole trilogy of megablockbuster films adapted from such a comparatively well known novel. Obviously the effects of the film trilogy have been enormous, and this is especially glaring in cases where people assume that some element of the film plot occured in the books. Many, for example, swear that the Army of the Dead really did liberate Minas Tirith, when in fact the Dead's role in the film amounted to a crude deus ex machina poorly executed.

But I digress. An hypothetical CoH film (faithfully executed) has the capacity to shift expectations and widen Tolkien's pop culture appeal, or at least generate a sense of nuance. Conversely, a badly made adaptation has the capacity to cheapen Tolkien and threated to make him even more generic than he is already perceived to be.