Now that nerd culture has been embraced into mainstream media, I have been given a golden opportunity to use my intimate–if not embarrassing–knowledge of arcane lore to offend a wider audience than ever before.
My mother always taught me that it is an error in judgment to squander an opportunity. Or something like that… something about squandering, anyway, and I’m fairly sure it was my mother. Reasonably sure. I wouldn’t put a lot of money on it, but it seems plausible.
I shall begin with the first of three annoying essays.
While I was still in the midst of reading through the books for the first time, I was already story-boarding epic movies based on The Lord of the Rings. I knew that they’d be impossible to render on film, because of the scope of the scenery in the books is enormous; imagine a cast of somewhere in the vicinity of 80,000 characters, including walking trees, trolls, monsters of various kinds, and sets the size of a geosyncline. A few decades later, computers solved all these problems, and the movies were made, using brilliant CGI to illustrate things that could never possibly be rendered in the real world.
Unfortunately, the movies were awful in a number of ways. I understand that they are among the highest-grossest, most-viewed movies in history–and presumably this implies that many people really enjoyed them and considered their money well-spent–but they were not nearly as good as they could have been.
I have ranted before about the way that script writers combined and conflated characters so that key bits of dialogs ended up coming out of the mouths of different people, in ways that fundamentally change their characters and/or confuse the bejesus out of anyone paying attention. Consider the following dialog from the battle in Moria:
Movie version:
Leogolas: “What the heck is that thing? It’s scary.”
Gandalf: “It’s a Balrog, you silly teenager. We’re boned.”
Book version:
Gandalf: “What the heck is that thing? It nearly kicked my ass!”
Leogolas: “It’s a Balrog, junior. We’re boned.”
If you look carefully, I’m sure that you’ll be able to detect the slight difference in nuance… but, as I’ve said before, I’ve already ranted about this, and I won’t rant about it again today.
The movie is peppered with other changes from the books; enough to fuel many arguments between people who have only seen the movie and people who have devoured the books. Many of these I chalk up to simple poetic license–the scriptwriters felt that they needed to make some changes in order to create a movie that appealed to a wider audience, and to trim digressions in the plot in order to fit in the given budget/running time. Hence we have the hearth-throb elf prince instead of the ancient scion of an ancient house; the wise-cracking, pattering dwarf instead of the dour, taciturn dwarf prince; an attempt to make Gandalf a more vulnerable, sympathetic character and the Witch King more frightening by having the Witch King taunt Gandalf and break his staff in a confrontation that never appears in the book, and which, all readers agree, would have ended quite differently–if Gandalf and the Witch King ever did fight one-on-one, all the smart money says that the fight would be brief, and there wouldn’t be enough left of the Witch King to bury in a match box when it was over.
Non-central characters are removed or coalesced; women are given more lines. Geography is redrawn so that characters can pop up at unlikely and logic-defying times. In the book, the heroes find that while they were off fighting the war, the war came to their home; their village has been ransacked and their friends and neighbors tortured and killed, while in the movie the heroes come home to a heroes welcome and they all live happily ever after.
I could revisit my usual rant about the dog’s breakfast that the writers made out of the characters and their dialog, but instead I will dwell on their second tragic mistake.
On their behalf, I have to say that I understand their reason for the abandonment of the backbone of the narrative structure of the books. It would make a difficult movie, and people don’t like difficult movies. People don’t like uncertainty, and in any case there is a strange paradox that suspense that can be sustained for hundreds of pages in a decently written novel comes across as trite and obvious in a 30-minute sitcom. And so the books, which are written from the perspective of the characters, who frequently don’t know what the other characters are doing, and generate a lot of angst wondering whether so-and-so is dead or coming to help or whatever turns into a movie where the audience sees every one of the sub-plots unfold concurrently. All of the uncertainty and suspense is completely lost.
For example, in one of the climactic arcs of the novels, we have three characters–who for the sake of argument, I’ll call Gandalf, Aragorn, and Theoden, who part ways to perform separate errands that are central to the plot. They’ve learned that a city occupied by their friends and allies is about to be attacked. Gandalf rides to a city, which is besieged almost as soon as he arrives. Aragorn goes off in a different direction, looking for help, on an errand that he doesn’t explain in any detail to anyone before leaving, but his implied destination is known to be so utterly perilous that people believe that he has undertaken a suicide mission; some actually begin grieving over him. Theoden has promised to gather his army and ride to the assistance of the city, but is unaware that the road to the city is held by an enemy force that is stronger than his own and has prepared an elaborate ambush; Gandalf has no way to tell Theoden that he is riding into a trap.
It looks grim. All reports are that the road is impassable; Theoden cannot help, and Aragorn is lost in the wilderness.
The enemy assaults the city, and the siege goes on for a few days. Eventually the enemy breaks the gate and prepares to sack the outer city and assault the inner citadel. All flee the outer city in terror, except Gandalf. Alone in the square behind the shattered remnants of the main gate, he calmly waits, alone, for the enemy to enter, his pulse presumably a steady 68 beats per minute.
This looks grim, but it also holds great promise. I had been waiting for several hundred pages to see what happenes when Gandalf lets Narya and Glamdring off their leash, and this certainly appears to be a perfect opportunity for this to happen. The reader has been hearing second-hand accounts of the astonishing feats that Gandalf has performed, but they always happen out of view of the narrator (and any other witness–at least, any witness who survives to tell the tale), and Gandalf uses such a terse, sketchy, and self-denigrating way of describing his feats that the reader is given very little idea how or what, exactly, Gandalf did. We only get glimpses of what he can do; it seems like foreshadowing, building toward some epic confrontation.
This is that confrontation! This time it’s all going to happen right out in the open. The narrator is right there. We’ve got ring-side seats!
But no. Gandalf does nothing except be nonchalant. We have been teased.
Theoden arrives with his army, extremely unexpectedly, and the assaulting army regroups to deal with this annoyance. This is all very mysterious, because we don’t know how Theoden could have gotten there in the nick of time, much less have arrived in full force–explanations come later. Gandalf races off in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the king of the city, who believes that all is lost, from killing himself before the enemy can take him. Gandalf never even crosses swords with any of the enemy.
Theoden and his army attempt to break the siege, and are nearly successful, but are overmatched by the superior numbers and placement of the enemy. For a moment the battle looks like it could go either way, but then Theoden is slain, followed by another terrible setback–an enormous number of enemy reinforcements are observed sailing toward the city.
Things are looking fairly hopeless once again, but as the ships get closer it becomes apparent that they are flying Aragorn’s flag, and carry reinforcements for the city instead of the enemy. This is again all very mysterious, because we don’t know how Aragorn could have gotten there in the nick of time, much less have captured the ships of the enemy–explanations come much later.
There’s suspense. You really don’t know how the characters are going to survive. You know that some of them will–the title of the volume gives a pretty strong hint that Aragorn will survive the battle–but it’s clear that Tolkien is an author who is more than capable of killing off major characters, and he certainly puts them in situations where the means of their survival is less than predictable.
And now for a bonus–when we do find out how Theoden managed to sneak around the army sent to block his path, it’s still a good read. There’s still suspense, because don’t know how he’s going to do it, and things happen along the way, etc. Similarly, Aragorn’s story is riveting, when one of his companions relates it to the narrator.
But let’s compare this to how it unfolds in the movie: Gandalf, Aragorn, and Theoden part ways. A short sequence of scenes shows each of their progresses toward the city. The people in the city are worried–Theoden won’t make it! The viewer is unconcerned, because he just watched Theoden sneaking around in the woods. The people are worried–Aragorn is certainly dead! The viewer is unconcerned, because they just saw him negotiating with the head of a rogue army. Oh, where is Theoden? He’s got his army, and they’re riding, riding, riding toward the city. Oh, where is Aragorn? He’s taken a bunch of the enemy ships and is sailing toward the city! Oh, where is Theoden, now that the gate is about to be broken? No worries; he’s busy giving his army a pep talk before they attack. And where is Aragorn? Sailing up to the city, just like he said he would in the previous scene.
Without much question about how things are going to unfold, there’s no tension in the scene where Gandalf waits alone to stop the enemy army, and therefore the scene doesn’t occur in the movie. It’s one of the moments that every reader comes back to revisit and stage in the theater of his or her mind, and they couldn’t find a way to write it into the movie at all.
For shame.
I’m still waiting for someone to make a movie based on The Lord of the Rings.
