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The Lord of the Rings, redux
You may remember that a while back I wrote some sarcastic posts complaining about the "lame novelizations by some hack with the fake-sounding name of J.R.R. Tolkien" of Peter Jackson's "brilliant" Lord of the Rings movies. One of those posts was over on GoodReads.
Well, someone read that post recently, and took it literally. She wrote to scold me, and tell me that JRRT was the original author. I wrote back and explained that my post had been pure sarcasm. She responded quite nicely, apologizing for getting angry at me, and suggesting that the expanded editions of the movies explained why it had been necessary to make changes from the books. My reply:
Well, someone read that post recently, and took it literally. She wrote to scold me, and tell me that JRRT was the original author. I wrote back and explained that my post had been pure sarcasm. She responded quite nicely, apologizing for getting angry at me, and suggesting that the expanded editions of the movies explained why it had been necessary to make changes from the books. My reply:
No problem! I've been online since the 1990s; I've been flamed by professionals. :D
I only saw the first two movies. The second one made me so angry that I refused to watch the third, and I won't be watching The Hobbit or any other Middle-Earth movies they put out.
You see...have you read Fahrenheit 451? I don't quite have a photographic memory, but my memory IS excellent - and I've been re-reading the complete TLOTR every six months (or less) for the last 30 years. So every change that Peter Jackson made practically exploded in my eyes.
One thing (of many) that bothered me was that Jackson changed the words. The language of TLOTR was brilliant. Yet time and again, Peter Jackson substituted his own language for JRRT's. Jackson's lines weren't shorter, and they certainly weren't better; in every case, Tolkien's language was both more moving and more dramatic. So as I see it, Jackson decided to rewrite TLOTR because he thought that his own (lame) dialog was better.
That's utterly wrong, and unforgivable in my eyes. It rendered the movies unwatchable. Oh, if they weren't supposed to be based on The Lord of the Rings, I might have enjoyed them. But since they claim to be based on my favorite books, but instead pervert them...well, I think I've made my point.
Many of my friends are die-hard LOTR fans, and almost none of them dislike the movies as much as I do. But I'm an old-fashioned curmudgeon, and they're used to me. :D
I'm convinced that as the years pass the Jackson movies will be seen as superficial and flawed at best, while the books will remain the deathless classics that they always have been.
Take care!