The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

59 minutes ago, Werthead said:

There's also the fact that Numenoreans and their descendants were beardless, and Tolkien specifically said that Denethor, Boromir, Faramir, Aragorn and Isildur did not have beards. But for some reason it's fine that they have beards in the movies.

How well was that information known at the time?

33 minutes ago, Darryk said:

I'd hardly call him a wimp. The character is portrayed as vulnerable, which worked pretty well I thought, but possesses a lot of inner strength to go through what he does.

I'm not really a fan of alpha-male heroes. Thought Frodo made a nice change from your usual cinematic hero.

Frodo in the books was hardly an "alpha-male" either, but showed a lot more strength and maturity than movie Frodo who at times looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over. Again compare the different versions of Frodo at the Ford or Amon Sul and look at "go home, Sam" and the absence of the scene where he curses Gollum

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

How well was that information known at the time?

Tolkien confirmed it in more than one letter as late as the early 1970s, so it was reasonably well-known. Also the fact that at no point in LotR are any of the Dunedain-descended characters described as having a beard (in contrast to the Rohirrim, the people of Bree etc).

[Ser Drewy]

5 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

How well was that information known at the time?

Frodo in the books was hardly an "alpha-male" either, but showed a lot more strength and maturity than movie Frodo who at times looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over. Again compare the different versions of Frodo at the Ford or Amon Sul and look at "go home, Sam" and the absence of the scene where he curses Gollum

Yeah, honestly, one of the character choices I disliked the most in Jackson is Frodo being such a passive figure. Especially when Jackson actively deletes or hands over all his proactive moments to others. He's not as caricatured as Denethor or Gimli, but it grates imo. 

[Ran]

31 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Tolkien confirmed it in more than one letter as late as the early 1970s, so it was reasonably well-known

As far as the Jackson films go, they stuck to LotR, which is what they had the rights to, and in LotR you get things like Frodo and Sam seeing the statue of the Numenorean king with a "carved beard", or the rather odd bit of Legolas hailing Imrahil for his Elvish descent, while seemingly ignoring all the other Dunedain who allegedly are supposed to be beardless as well.. but then, Legolas doesn't actually reference Imrahil's beard. There's a passing reference to a letter from 1972 in Unfinished Tales, but PJ wasn't supposed to use that, while Letters and The Histories of Middle-Earth don't reference the matter. It's only with the publication of The Nature of Middle-earth that we've gotten the direct text.

If anything, these guys seem to have gotten a little more right to look at non-LotR stuff on a case-by-case basis, hence their citing the Letters (misleedingly, but still). 

[Calibandar]

58 minutes ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

How well was that information known at the time?

 

Not well known at all.

 

[Werthead]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

As far as the Jackson films go, they stuck to LotR, which is what they had the rights to, and in LotR you get things like Frodo and Sam seeing the statue of the Numenorean king with a "carved beard", or the rather odd bit of Legolas hailing Imrahil for his Elvish descent, while seemingly ignoring all the other Dunedain who allegedly are supposed to be beardless as well.. but then, Legolas doesn't actually reference Imrahil's beard. There's a passing reference to a letter from 1972 in Unfinished Tales, but PJ wasn't supposed to use that, while Letters and The Histories of Middle-Earth don't reference the matter. It's only with the publication of The Nature of Middle-earth that we've gotten the direct text.

If anything, these guys seem to have gotten a little more right to look at non-LotR stuff on a case-by-case basis, hence their citing the Letters (misleedingly, but still). 

Oddly it didn't stop the Ralph Bakshi film from portraying a beardless Aragorn, in line with Tolkien's intentions (the Rankin-Bass Return of the King does give him a beard, but it also has disco-dancing orcs, so fidelity to the canon was not a strong point of that work) some three years before Unfinished Tales was even published.

The novel itself never says Aragorn has a beard so portraying him without one is just staying true to the text and not getting you into hot water legally (unlike, say, having to have Gandalf deliberately pretend to forget Alatar and Pallando's names in the Hobbit movies so as not to get into trouble).

Jackson just felt that the cinematic shorthand of showing someone with a semi-beard at all times as a way of telling people they're living off the land, weather-beaten, been too busy fighting orcs to shave etc trumped sticking to the canon.

[Ran]

23 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Oddly it didn't stop the Ralph Bakshi film from portraying a beardless Aragorn,

Right, because there's basically nothing in the text either way. LotR leaves it as a choice, the letter from 1972 published by Hostetter in 2021 makes it explicit.... but that's neither here nor there, because it's nothing Jackson had access to, and in any case, sure, he might have decided to disregard Tolkien on this point.

But fans in general weren't reacting because the evidence in LotR itself was ambiguous, and what little there was outside of LotR was at best implicit rather than explicit.

[Darryk]

2 hours ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

How well was that information known at the time?

Frodo in the books was hardly an "alpha-male" either, but showed a lot more strength and maturity than movie Frodo who at times looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over. Again compare the different versions of Frodo at the Ford or Amon Sul and look at "go home, Sam" and the absence of the scene where he curses Gollum

The innocence of Elijah Wood's Frodo worked pretty well for the cinematic version so I don't think scenes of him cursing anyone or yelling at the Nazgul would have worked. It was a good change IMO. He's the heart of the trilogy but the others do the fighting.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Jackson just felt that the cinematic shorthand of showing someone with a semi-beard at all times as a way of telling people they're living off the land, weather-beaten, been too busy fighting orcs to shave etc trumped sticking to the canon.

I still want to know how Aragorn kept the “perfect stubble” beard when we never see him shave for the entire film and he ends up with a full beard when Arwen shows up in Minas Tirith…

[RhaenysBee]

3 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I still want to know how Aragorn kept the “perfect stubble” beard when we never see him shave for the entire film and he ends up with a full beard when Arwen shows up in Minas Tirith…

He grew that to look more kingly… and I hope Arwen made him shave it for their wedding  

[Corvinus85]

4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I still want to know how Aragorn kept the “perfect stubble” beard when we never see him shave for the entire film and he ends up with a full beard when Arwen shows up in Minas Tirith…

A good ranger packs a razor in his saddlebags. And he has a knife. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

A good ranger packs a razor in his saddlebags. And he has a knife. 

When was he clean shaven… ever… during the events of LOTR?

[Werthead]

I read the Empire article (which required me buying a physical magazine for the first time in at least four years) and the most interesting bit was the producers pushing back on the budget. They said the show was "the length of three Marvel movies, filmed on the schedule for two with the budget of one." Even assuming an Endgame-level budget, that pushes them firmly back down into a similar budget realm to the Marvel TV shows and Stranger Things. Still very expensive, but not as absurd as some earlier reports were suggesting.

Otherwise, mostly the PR lines we've seen already and some head-scratching bits of information, like the idea that Elrond is a thousand years old when the series (starts he should be ~1600 or ~3400 depending on how they're managing the timeline). There is some good stuff on the Harfoots, confirming they are a nomadic tribe with no fixed abode wandering the world and avoiding contact with "the big folk" at almost any cost.

[ASOIAFrelatedusername]

17 hours ago, Darryk said:

The innocence of Elijah Wood's Frodo worked pretty well for the cinematic version so I don't think scenes of him cursing anyone or yelling at the Nazgul would have worked. It was a good change IMO. He's the heart of the trilogy but the others do the fighting.

Movie-Denethor, movie Gimli and movie-Faramir (to a lesser extent) also "worked" for the cinematic version. That does not mean that their characters (like Frodo's) were not butchered.

And a more potrayal of all these characters would have absolutely worked.

 

[Darryk]

1 hour ago, ASOIAFrelatedusername said:

Movie-Denethor, movie Gimli and movie-Faramir (to a lesser extent) also "worked" for the cinematic version. That does not mean that their characters (like Frodo's) were not butchered.

And a more potrayal of all these characters would have absolutely worked.

 

Their reasoning for changing the portrayal of Faramir made sense, that to spend so much time establishing the ring as this dangerous entity that corrupts people, only to have a human character who is not at all affected by it, undermines the threat you've worked to establish.

I was fine with movie-Denethor except I wish they'd revealed the Palantir and its effect on him.

I didn't like the portrayal of Gimli, one of my few major gripes with the trilogy. It was too cartoonish and didn't fit in with the tone of the films. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, Darryk said:

I was fine with movie-Denethor except I wish they'd revealed the Palantir and its effect on him.

Movie Denethor was a brutalization of one of the truly gray interesting characters in LoTR.  Denethor wasn’t introduced as crazy douchbag whose incompetence nearly destroyed Gondor.  Denethor was a competent leader absolutely overmatched by an incredibly powerful opponent who is winning despite all the competent and rational actions Denethor is taking who is eventually driven mad by despair over his inability to stop that enemy.

Nothing was added to the film by making Denethor into a carpet chewing madman whose big game is to see how much of an incompetent asshole he can be on any given day.

[Ran]

Yeah, Denethor is the character whose adaptation choices I enjoyed least in LotR, and was a dark spot in RotK... but there were a lot of Jacksonian excesses in that film that made it less good than the films preceding it, I admit. There's so much pathos in Denethor in the novel, and it's pretty much gone in PJ's rendition. Shame.

[Werthead]

Movie Denethor only just works thanks to John Noble's outstanding performance. He got every drop of pathos and tragedy he could out of what was in the script.

[Ran]

Eh... he chewed the hell out of the scenery. He went big, doubtless at Jackson's direction, but it basically was a direct counter to building any empathy for the character. His disgusting eating as Pippin sang his song, for example.

[Myrddin]

31 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Movie Denethor was a brutalization of one of the truly gray interesting characters in LoTR.  Denethor wasn’t introduced as crazy douchbag whose incompetence nearly destroyed Gondor.  Denethor was a competent leader absolutely overmatched by an incredibly powerful opponent who is winning despite all the competent and rational actions Denethor is taking who is eventually driven mad by despair over his inability to stop that enemy.

Nothing was added to the film by making Denethor into a carpet chewing madman whose big game is to see how much of an incompetent asshole he can be on any given day.

Here I thought your favorite moment in cinema history was his 5k of Flame?