Protecting One's Self

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The awesomeness of Galadriel's opening monologue has come at a price though...

But then, there's the thing: the movies start to go wrong right at that very point, and never get back on track. Overlooking the vile neologism of "gifted" as a verb, note that the entire monologue (with opening line lifted from Treebeard, for whom it is more appropriate than Galadriel), goes on with "for none now live who remember it." Now that is just silly, whomever the referent of "it" is, empty-faux-profundity; but then it gets worse: the Great Rings "were made." They "were given." Passive voice all the way; no indication who made them, or who gave them, and as to the why- well, the unnamed smiths created them to contain "the power to rule each race"-- unadulterated rubbish.

The book is, even at a surface plot level, being distorted out the gate by PJ and his co-conspirators, even before we get to "Men, who above all else desire power:" a greeting-card cliche (Philippa Boyens' hallmark), and about as wrong as is possible (Tolkien on umpty-leven occasions said that Men above all else desire immortality.) And given that he also said, on umpty-leventeen occasions, that what the book is really about is death and the desire for deathlessness, we can see how wrong things are going- even before considering aspects of this theme manifested, such as the temptation and horror of the Nazgul (which of course PJ gets completely wrong).

I could go on with a line by line and scene by scene fisking, but the point is- one could, I suppose, look on the movies as a sort of analogue of Classics Illustrated comics, a gateway drug to reading the real thing- but CI never presented its adolescent reader base with a warped and distorted version of the original, which they would have to unlearn if they are to understand what they read.