I recently re-watched the Lord of the Rings Trilogy on DVD, and thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, all nine hours of it. Yet I came away with a nagging sense that something was missing. And having mulled it over, here is my take.
Superficially, the Lord of the Rings is about Frodo’s hero-quest to destroy the ring of power. At this level, Frodo’s quest is no more or less compelling than that of Luke Skywalker, Clark Kent, Eragon, Zorro, Captain Kirk or Harry Potter. What makes Lord of the Rings special is the richness, the detail, the layered folk lore and the resonances of the vast Middle Earth within which Tolkien sets Frodo’s hero-quest.
Clearly the hero-quest matters. Anyone who ever picked up the Silmarillion was already a Tolkien fan. But what differentiates Tolkien from mere mortals is the texture and the staggering scale of the Middle Earth he imagined.
When the book was translated into the movie the balance shifted away from the folk lore and resonances of Middle Earth, towards the driving action of Frodo’s hero-quest. Film, even nine hours of film, doesn’t have much room for discursive reflection. Something was necessarily lost.
Some of this loss is obvious. Parts of the book have just been edited out. Leaving out Tom Bombadil and his wife Goldberry, daughter of the river Withywindle, was sacrilege to many old-time Tolkien fans. There is no room either for Radagast the Brown, the wizard steeped in the lore of wild animals, or for Gil Galad the elven king, of whom the harpers sadly sing. One would never know from the movie that Pippin’s Took clan had a reputation unusual behaviour, perhaps because a Took ancestor may have married a fairy. When Sam sees an oliphaunt, he has no time to put his hands behind his back and “speak poetry”, to trot out the fireside rhyme about oliphaunts he learnt back in the Shire.
A more subtle loss also runs through passages that were amplified in the movie.Consider Anduril, Aragon’s sword. The sword is a big part of the movie. It is shown in the first scene, slicing the ring of Sauron’s hand. The movie introduces new scenes starring Anduril, like when Arwen and Aragon share a special moment over the broken blade, and when Elrond presents Aragon with the re-forged sword on the eve of battle (Aragon leaves Rivendell carrying Anduril in the book). Yet, the meaning of Anduril is overwhelmed by the urgency and tumult of war all around; the sword remains just a weapon.
Reading the book, I had time for my own imagination to work on Anduril, to transform Anduril from a weapon into a talisman. I knew that Boromir had come to Rivendell because he heard a voice saying:
Seek for the sword that was broken
In Imladris it lies…
For Isildur’s bane shall waken
And the Halfling forth shall stand.
I could let the rhythms of Bilbo’s little poem to Aragon ring in my ears:
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost…
Renewed shall be the sword that was broken,
The crownless shall again be king.
I had time to understand that Aragon is Elendil’s heir because he is the man who wields Elendil’s sword. A great sword forged by elvensmiths can’t be handled by just anybody. The sword chooses its wielder, and in so doing, defines the wielder’s destiny. I simply wouldn’t have understood that if I had watched the movie first.
That said, if something was lost, something was also created. There were scenes in the movie which were way more powerful than anything I’d imagined before. More about that in my next post.
Looking back, I am very fortunate to have experienced Lord of the Rings in three different mediums, in the right sequence. First, as a story told by a favourite aunt to the children in the family, second, as a summer holidays’ reading along with my cousins (competitively exchanging cool Tolkien trivia), third, as a big-budget film.
The only other works I’ve experienced in roughly the same media, in the same sequence, are the great Indian epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Am I comparing Peter Jackson to Peter Brook? Or to Ramanand Sagar?
2 comments:
I too am one of those who was livid about the leaving out of Tom Bombadil and the lack of history for Aragon, and background and significance given to Anduril. I was also horribly disappointed by the casting of Galadriel and Elrond Half Elven! (What was that???!!?!? Some kind of cruel joke??)
But that said, it is impossible to make a movie of Tolkien proportions, and given the limitations of screen and technology, as compared to the limitlessness of our imagination, it is truly incredible how well Gollum (and his history), the army of the dead, whose loyalty Aragon calls upon, and the battles... Helms Deep as well as the others, especially the one in front of Minas Tirth and the one at the Black Gates, and many other details, were all executed. This was indeed a set of movies that could never have been made before this. And I am in many ways glad that it still doesn't live up to the book. THAT, as far as I'm concerned is what highlights the staggering achievement of Tolkien. Nothing can be as good as the book. I am so glad that one still has to read the book to get it all. The movie, however fantastic, is simply not enough. For those of us who have steeped ourselves in it, starting wiht the almost fairy tale like Hobbit, to the intricacies and layers of all the histories of Middle Earth, reading first the culmination of the all those histories in The Lord of the Rings, and then reading "back" to get the histories in the Silmarillion, we are happy that in spite of the most mind blowing movie making talent and incredible computer animated graphics, J.R.R.Tolkien is still unattainable! :-)
Perhaps the best scenes in the movie were when Pippin lights the flame and the message is passed on across mountain tops, and when Frodo and Sam share the last of their lembas and friendship as they climb into Shelob's lair.
It makes a lot of sense that Elrond was played by the same guy who was Mr. Smith in the Matrix. Likewise, it is hard to take Orlando Bloom seriously in the Pirates movies after LOR.
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