The Hobbit on the other hand really feels generally awful. I watched a fan-cut of it that cuts all 3 movies down to about 4 hours of content and it felt just about watchable.

>The Harry Potter movies were fabulous in my opinion because the stories were not hacked by directors who felt they knew better than the original author. I may be wrong on that but that's my understanding - that largely the Harry Potter movies are true to the script.

I think you can attribute this more to JKR being still alive and in control of her creation than well-meaning production studios / directors.

I think the thing that really "solved" it for me was realizing that the vast majority of the people who watch LotR will never read the book, let alone the Silmarillion. And those who DO decide to read those after seeing the movie - the movie won't destroy it for them.

"Stanley & I have agreed on our policy : Art or Cash. Either very profitable terms indeed; or absolute author’s veto on objectionable features or alterations."

I don't think it was explicitly stated there, but I think it is clear they went for "cash". Though I recall some of his letters saying that the unexpected success of LotR meant that he wished he'd retired earlier. It was clear that there was a lot of financial struggle in his life, but that's not to say he wrote for the money of course!

Stardust is… okay. Cute. I need a new Neverwhere. Even though half the reason I gave “Vigil” a shot is because it had the Marquis as the captain.

Personally I prefer the books to the movies and dislike many of the changes.

I'm following the "Other Minds and Hands" podcast/video. Corey "Tolkiien Professor" Olsen and Maggie Parke talking about adaptation especially for Tolkien but also lots else.

Presumably Amazon decided on an original prequel series for reasons; perhaps that they didn't see a need for an LOTR series after the Peter Jackson films (and other adaptations), or perhaps there were rights/exclusivity issues.

I found the first season of Rings of Power visually stunning, and some of the characters and environments were appealing as well, but it's hard to beat the original material. On the other hand, I feel like Wheel of Time could turn out great by cherry-picking the best parts of its source material.

The Hobbit movies are different story. I don't know if we'll ever know entirely what happened, but from what I can deduce, there were too many studios involved looking for huge returns, and they made big changes too late, including moving expanding from 2 movies to 3, and switching directors.

The Harry Potter movies are pretty faithful, but they remove tons of content. The books get much longer as the series go on, but the movies don't, so 4, 5, 6 are really flying through scenes just to get through the main plot.

The problem, if you will, with a great but imperfect work of art is that no one else will attempt the same work again. Because it has already been done and it's hard to top a smashing success.

If it had been a bad LotR movie, one would be able to hope, probably reasonably, that a good one might eventually be made. It would be a dissatisfying situation, just like that 1978 film. But the 2000s LoTR films were, indeed, quite good. And so they will likely be the final word.

I think that's been going on for a while now:

https://reelrundown.com/film-industry/The-First-10-Musical-S...

Great, so it will for LotR the same as what was done in the films for The Hobbit.

If you are doing LotR in more than double the runtime of the LotR extended editions (which are 11h36m), I am…beyond skeptical.

Yes, in theory longer format should have more space to breath. In practice, we will get dialogs that will make you cringe, removal of everything that is not straightforward action, compression of everything nuanced into a single talking point and massive change in characters and plots.

> “But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him.”

The Mary Sue did a great long-form piece on how unfortunate it was that Eowyn's character wasn't managed better: https://www.themarysue.com/the-story-of-eowyn/

In any case, this is just one small example, but it's easy to imagine that with a longer treatment of Bilbo's birthday party, the hobbits might have been able to be more fleshed out as well, and less of just dumb comic relief. That said, even the 1981 BBC radio play that's considered by many purists to be the gold standard as far as LOTR dramatizations is only about 13h, so perhaps I'm being pretty optimistic to imagine that doubling that runtime could go anywhere good.

I think a remake of the LotR will happen some day, but not for quite awhile (a re-animation of the CG may happen first) - mainly because it was already filmed in high-def and on "modern" equipment.

If it does get made again, it's likely to be in a TV mini-series format, perhaps less on sets and more on dialogue/acting.

A limited series of 10 1-hour episodes will still be shorter than the extended editions of the film trilogy in total runtime.

Cameron has now surpassed that number, almost twenty years later. But for the time that was crazy.

Also, there is quite bit of fighting in the book.

But in general I’m not interested in a film of a book I liked anyway.

I was changed by seeing the new works.

Some things can't be unseen.

Like how they’ll never stop making Willy Wonkas or Alice in Wonderlands, and each gets increasingly painful.

Our experience of art is necessarily influenced by the world; works don't just pass pristine and unaltered from their creation into our consciousness. They can be both enriched and cheapened by the cultural detritus they and we float through on the way; whether it's the mythology of an artist died beautiful and young, or the commodification of something once felt precious and unique.

for me they don't "spoil" the original work and I ignore them, but it is, in a way... deeply, cosmically, saddening, to the see the world do a shit job with a thing that you love. It hurts. It feels tragic that the world could be so shitty, in the same way that reading news articles about horrible people does.

They gutted Rowling’s extremely clever ending that tied everything together neatly to replace it with a laser gun fight.

But as for the original Jackson trilogy movies, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate those as someone who loved the books. There are only two major gripes I can think of which are particularly inexcusable and a few smaller things I would've liked to change but which are excusable either for not being particularly consequential, or because of time constraints. Overall though blocking the two major complaints out of my memory, it's quite well done. For a twelve hour film to have only two major gripes compared to the books, I'm not actually sure if there are any other film/book adaptations with a ratio that good.

In the books, Faramir was pretty much the one redeemable part of the house of stewards. Yes, the ring may be tempting, but I think that was already sufficiently shown throughout earlier moments in the movies and there was no need to throw Faramir under the bus. He was already a relatively minor character in the books, why do him dirty like that? Everyone, both the characters in the book and the readers outside the book, looked up to him. One of his men broke a rule (punishable by death) to save him in the books and from the context you can imagine most of his reports would have done the same, but if all you knew of him was what you saw in the movies, it gives a very different impression. He came around in the end but at the very least he should have done the right thing sooner than he did in the movies.

As far as the Sam (and Frodo) thing goes, admittedly it's been a year or two since the last time I read the trilogy and it's easy to confuse the books/movie in my memory, but I don't remember seeing any signs of contention between them the way it was shown in the movie, and certainly if there was, it was not even close to the same degree. Among other things, I think the movie was trying to show the darker side of the ring's effects, but again, it's already been shown multiple times throughout the movies and they just went overboard with it. Frodo pretty much had the highest trust for Sam (even in the movies this is basically true outside this incident), and would Sam really give up and abandon Frodo that easily because of a few crumbs? Tangentially, I don't remember Sam being particularly cruel to gollum in the books, and that's really the root of this breach of trust in the movies. That entire aspect of Sam shouldn't have been there to begin with, and if it wasn't, the staircase scene would also make no sense to show that way.

Boromir redeems himself - Gandalf and Aragorn say so.

I’m in the camp that the quality and faithfulness in Peter Jackson’s movies were an insanely improbable miracle—lightning in a bottle that we should be thankful happened once and you could never hope to capture again. But I’m still flabbergasted at the decision to make the ghost army omnipotent. They were so thoughtful with everything else, especially the changes they made—you can see this clearly in the behind-the-scenes discussion. So what in the world happened here?

But yeah, I agree with you, I'm happy it turned out as it did for the most part, some of my favorite movies for sure.

Let's put the ring into context. Imagine you were walking along and you came across an ordinary looking smartphone. Amazingly it works and you can make calls on it. Anywhere in the world. For free!

That's not bad. But it turns out this phone has a dangerous superpower. For, you see, Stalin developed missile guidance before the Americans and leaked the details. But there's a back door and this phone you hold in your hand is the key to it all. With the right knowledge, this phone could launch any missile from any country at any time. The phone has a primitive AI which attempts to phone home every now and then but no-one has answered it for years.

And here's the kicker: Stalin is still alive! Barely. Now just a disembodied brain in a vat hidden somewhere deep in Russia. And he wants his device back now that there's a massive arsenal for him to command.

Every agency in the world wants to get their hands on this thing. But you've got to somehow get it into the Kremlin so it can be plugged in to some ancient terminal and deactivated. But you’re not alone. Oh yes, you’ll have some help from a few random individuals who represent various interests, have a few fighting moves and are pretty good at keeping you hidden but without having any authority to make stuff happen for you on your journey.

So that's the position the Fellowship find themselves in. Does the film manage to convey any of this? No.

Moving on, the way the information is surrendered to the reader in the books is much more gradual than the film. In the books, Gandalf is the reader's and the hobbits' touchstone. When he's away the reader has no clue what's happening and it's not until the hobbits get to Rivendell -- after many close shaves -- that the full details are finally revealed.

Not so in the film: Galadriel narrates the whole thing before the opening credits!

This ruins the film twice over: Gandalf becomes redundant, reduced to opening the door to Moria and taking on the balrog. Thanks to the magic of cinema, the director teleports us everywhere so that we can witness Gandalf battling Saruman. Gandalf battling the necromancer. Gandalf battling the balrog. Instead of us learning all this from Gandalf himself after he reappears suddenly later on.

And Galadriel, the mightiest elf in middle earth, has had her grand entrance already: right at the start, as a voice over.

For me, the hobbit who undergoes the biggest Hero's Journey is Pippin. He starts out as a carefree young hobbit and comes back to lead the Shire in the uprising against Saruman. Again, the film chose to ignore this pretty decent character arc in favour of a bunch of CGI effects.

Visually, the films are great. It's a shame the screenplay is utter drivel.

Obvs. my take is offbeat because the films were a massive commercial success and the Academy showered them with awards.

It saddens you that Tolkien found a publisher? How did you want them to disseminate? By the oral tradition in mead halls?

I know you mean debased beyond the printed word but that happened when Ralf Bakshi made his not very good cartoon and when Leonard Nimoy read the poems.

Waterson has a degree of artistic integrity that's sadly vanishingly rare these days.

You might note that the author worked hard with Allen & Unwin to have it printed and offered for sale.

If you have the official ‘60s paperbacks from Bellentine you’ll see the back cover is a letter from Tolkien complaining of the unauthorized Ace editions and telling you you should buy only the authorized editions (Ballantine or Houghton Mifflin).

It’s been commercial since the day it first went into print.

"Perfection" really isn't the right concept here. The Silmarillion is not perfectly written. It also isn't adequately written.

I must disagree on Harry Potter. All the moves after Columbus stopped directing them were bad. From angry-American Dumbledore, to Fiennes’s bizzare Voldemort, to Hermione being bolstered at the expense of Ron.