Rings of Power: A New Thread to Rule them All

[The Marquis de Leech]

On the Beleriand front, I think there's quite a simple explanation: you don't want to confuse new viewers. This is a story of the Second Age. You explain why the Elves are in Middle-earth at all, and leave it at that.

[Werthead]

 

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CT detested PJ's films, and he seems the best possible proxy for JRRT's own views.

 

I think CT was in awe of his father's work and sometimes took an ultraconservative attitude to them that I'm not entirely sure was the same as his father would have taken: his father sold the film rights and had a somewhat flexible attitude to adaptations, accepting "cash" in lieu of artistic "kudos", as he said, whilst CT vehemently rejected selling any more rights until near the end of his life in any way at all. JRRT, being in control of the whole thing, may have taken views that CT felt he couldn't risk taking himself. In particular, JRRT more than once noted that as much as he hated the 1950s BBC radio adaptation, it did bring him an enormous influx of new readers who read the books and sometimes corresponded with him intelligently about it, to his enormous pleasure.

Although I do think JRRT may have taken the view that if you could adapt LotR in 11 hours as a quasi-faithful(ish) adaptation, why not adapt it more faithfully still in, say, 15 and have Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire and Beregond and his son and a more book-accurate version of Denethor and Faramir etc.

[Ser Drewy]

42 minutes ago, Ran said:

He would have hated it on many levels, even if he might have admired isolated elements like bits of the score or the recreation of Hobbiton and so on..

CT detested PJ's films, and he seems the best possible proxy for JRRT's own views.

Tolkien's letter on the Zimmerman script is probably a solid idea of how he might view Jackson's. I think he might've appreciated  some of the production design - such as the Shire, Rivendell and Moria, he'd probably wonder why Minas Tirith had no farms. He might have found value in Shore's music. On the narrative level - character, plot, tone and theme, I think he'd have myriad issues. 

He'd have really disliked Gandalf sputtering and such, even if he might've liked other areas of McKellan's performance. He'd dislike Jackson's representation of Weathertop. The treatment of Treebeard would probably offend him. I imagine he'd despise film Denethor and Faramir. The fart jokes and Old Toby being 'weed' would upset him. The lack of steps up to the apex of Orthanc would likely get some askance from him. I doubt he'd be fond of Gimli as mainly comic relief, and especially the slapstick comedy. I imagine Gandalf/Saruman physical fight wouldn't please him. "Kind as summer" Elrond being so bitter and hateful towards men would please him none (What of the Elf-Friends of old?) and I doubt the expanded Arwen stuff would go down well. I imagine he'd have a lot of critiques of Jackson's treatment of the Rohirrim and Theoden. Lord knows what he'd say about the Legolas stuff or Frodo sending Sam away. 

[DMC]

4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

I think CT was in awe of his father's work and sometimes took an ultraconservative attitude to them that I'm not entirely sure was the same as his father would have taken:

Yeah some of it definitely comes off as a son being overly-defensive of his father, which is of course very understandable.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

52 minutes ago, Raja said:

What happens when people say racist stuff to actors of colour that are on the show? Ignore that too? Pretend that these things don't affect people and actors? It is very easy to say 'pay no attention' - but to me, comments like yours are unhelpful given that this stuff is in the long line of things that people of colour are consistently facing in these big tentpole franchises - this stiff upper lip stuff that you're preaching here only comes from people that are not on the receiving end of racism, or other forms of bigotry.

 

Support the actors if you have a social media presence. Loudly. He's great BTW. He's got a kind of low key stoic intensity that sets him apart from even the other elves. I even like the forbidden romance sub plot.

23 minutes ago, Ran said:

He would have hated it on many levels, even if he might have admired isolated elements like bits of the score or the recreation of Hobbiton and so on..

CT detested PJ's films, and he seems the best possible proxy for JRRT's own views.

There are two questions here: Is the work "appropriate for film"? Maybe not in Tolkien's time, but I'd say "yes". Peter Jackson proved it 20 years ago when he made it into one of the most critically and commercially successful film trilogies ever. 

Would Tolkien have approved of it? Who knows?

12 minutes ago, Zorral said:

[Some large, loud portion of] fans are fascist?  It feels as though they are ruining at least genre entertainment -- I must be given what I want the book/adaptation/film/show to be/ because I am the smartest person in the room, and I get to have what I want because I am right -- and if it isn't what I want, I'll destroy it for everybody else -- and the thing itself even, even the people who made it, from writers to directors to the actors.  It's terrifying where we are in These Times.  And you can't ignore them, for they will not be ignored.

Though this doesn't seem to happen in, say, mysteries and crime fictions, either as original works -- books getting pulled by publishers -- or in adaptations for the screen, of which they are a mainstay and always have been.0

I don't know "facist" or not. There's definitely some perceived struggle for aesthetic hegemony (not mine; I heard that somewhere) and people with various points of view who are willing to fight it. 

The specific criticisms often get deployed as weapons of reaction. Why was Captain Marvel called out as woke garbage and Alita: Battle Angel, released the same year, wasn't? I could be wrong but it seemed to me that the marketing for Captain Marvel was more conciously feminist and Alita's wasn't. The criticism of Alita came from another quarter: (some) online feminists saying that Alita was too consciously coded female and that her body type was unrealistic. I don't get it but maybe that's a limitation in me.

House of the Dragon was getting this bullshit too.

 

[Spockydog]

 

 

[Takiedevushkikakzvezdy]

I didn't realise that the actor who plays Elrond also played young Ned Stark on GoT. Which is funny, considering that adult Ned Stark played Boromir on LOTR.

[Zorral]

‘LOTR: The Rings Of Power’ Forges Biggest Premiere Viewership Ever For Amazon Prime Video

https://deadline.com/2022/09/lord-of-the-rings-viewership-rings-of-power-amazon-jeff-bezos-tolkien-1235107279/

 

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

2 hours ago, williamjm said:

For comparison, the Shannara Chronicles has a viewer score of 80% and I'd question how anyone could think that was the better show.

I've never seen it so I don't know.

However, looking at the RT pages for that show, the aggregates are very thin. 

Season 1

Critics: 29

Viewers: 655

Season 2

Critics: 5

Viewers: 423

Then again, it does have Manu Bennett in it...

 

[Raja]

4 hours ago, RhaenysBee said:

Of course it’s not. It’s years of frustration over exchanging competent and compelling storytelling, dialogue, direction, costume and character design for computer generated visuals and the appearance of being political (because everybody can tell that Rings of Power only appears to be inclusive and representative on the surface for marketing purposes and isn’t actually all that representative or inclusive), over exchanging effort, care and skill for budget.

Look, I'm all for legit criticisms of the show, especially as I'm in the camp of 'it's okay, but isn't really grabbing me' when it come to this show, but your take that inclusivity and representation is being 'exchanged' for good stories is nauseating, as if those things cannot co-exist ( And that's a *charitable* reading of your post, especially when I think about what you consider 'political')

Yeah, this is a bunch of nonsense isn't it. Honestly thought the discourse here was better than trotting out these tired tropes about seeing black & brown people on your screen, but I guess not.

[Zorral]

Fan maladie de la nostalgique derangement has destroyed, tries to destroy, more contemporary works and productions than we can ever know.

It's incomprehensible that seeing black, brown, whatever skin tones, seeing women and other 'Others' on the screen, particularly in centered roles, in entertaining entertainment, makes so many see RED, and then go off the rails.

 

[Ran]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

his father sold the film rights

To pay an unexpectedly heavy tax bill. If that hadn't happened, he may never have sold the rights at all, not finding any offers for "cash" sufficient to overwhelm his desire for "art". 

Drout's reminder of the anecdote that a children's play  displeased Tolkien whenever it veered from his dialog is what makes me pretty certain that Tolkien would have been terribly unhappy with PJ's film, even if, again, in isolation certain aspects might have pleased him. 

[RhaenysBee]

3 hours ago, Raja said:

Look, I'm all for legit criticisms of the show, especially as I'm in the camp of 'it's okay, but isn't really grabbing me' when it come to this show, but your take that inclusivity and representation is being 'exchanged' for good stories is nauseating, as if those things cannot co-exist ( And that's a *charitable* reading of your post, especially when I think about what you consider 'political')

Yeah, this is a bunch of nonsense isn't it. Honestly thought the discourse here was better than trotting out these tired tropes about seeing black & brown people on your screen, but I guess not.

Well I shudder to think what your reading of what I (didn’t) say would be if you weren’t “charitable” to me, which please, I respectfully ask you, don’t be.
They 100% can and should coexist (I don’t even know who questions that, I literally never heard anybody say otherwise on the internet) that’s what good modern writing is and should be. Do they, in Rings of Power? I don’t know, I’m not watching it. The general audience opinion (when you take away all the 1/10 and 10/10 reviews) seems to be that neither of those things are done right by the show even though they both should be. 

 

 

[polishgenius]

Tolkien supposedly once considered a treatment for an adaptation of LotR in which he completely excised Helm's Deep, and was known to have been constantly editing and retconning his work, so I think it's a stretch to say CT's text-essentialism was taken from his father. It just wasn't a near-religious text to him the way it seemed to be to Christopher. 

[Mithras]

I cordially dislike book purism in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

[Raja]

19 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

 Do they, in Rings of Power? I don’t know, I’m not watching it.

So when you said this

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because everybody can tell that Rings of Power only appears to be inclusive and representative on the surface for marketing purposes and isn’t actually all that representative or inclusive

You were saying it about a show you haven't watched?

Yes, totally a logical thing to comment on a show's inclusivity and representation, and then using that to make a broader point when...you haven't even watched the show.

 

 

[Ran]

34 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

Tolkien supposedly once considered a treatment for an adaptation of LotR in which he completely excised Helm's Deep,. 

He suggested dropping Helm's Deep from the script because it was done very badly (i.e. was not portrayed properly) and in any case the script proposed to make a single film of the entire trilogy and he rightly pointed out that it reduces the excitement of Pelennor Fields to have the Battle of the Hornburg before it.

You can read the text of Letter 210. It is a doozy, especially when he basically just gives up commenting.

He had very strong opinions about his published work being faithfully adapted. His unpublished stuff, well, he never would have offered it to anyone to adapt in the first place.

 

ETA: Actually, here's two bits on the Weathertop scene where he would explicitly have disliked PJ's films:

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Strider does not 'Whip out a sword' in the book. ...  Why then make him do so here, in a contest that was explicitly not fought with weapons?

The Black Riders do not scream, but keep a more terrifying silence. ... There is no fight.

 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

25 minutes ago, Mithras said:

I cordially dislike book purism in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

You will never convince me that the carpet chewing moron who replaced the actual character of Denethor in the LOTR films was an improvement.  Denethor was a legitimately “grey” character who did everything he thought he could to defend his nation up to sacrificing his son (not in the suicidal and stupid charge into fortified positions in broad daylight portrayed in the films) to gain time for help to arrive to attempt to beat a foe he knew to be unbeatable.  

He, eventually, went mad from despair and grief… but he was not a one note madman sloppily chomping on tomatoes.

Oh… how film Denethor pisses me off.

[RhaenysBee]

1 minute ago, Raja said:

You were saying it about a show you haven't watched?

Yes, totally a logical thing to comment on a show's inclusivity and representation, and then using that to make a broader point when...you haven't even watched the show.

Yes, I said that about a show I didn’t watch. And no, I didn’t use that to make a broader point. I used the experience with Star Wars and Game of thrones and MCU to make the broader point (and  suggested that the audience would apply those negative expectations for RoP), which is (contrary to your interpretation) not about inclusivity.  The entire broader point was that people’s animosity toward Rings of Power is not about inclusivity itself. Nobody has a problem with that, or maybe there’s .001% of people with minds stuck in the 50s who do. People have a problem with bad storytelling and worse PR that does disservice to everything else (entertainment value, audience, cast, source material, and yes inclusivity and representation too).

[polishgenius]

5 minutes ago, Ran said:

 

You can read the text of Letter 210. It is a doozy, especially when he basically just gives up commenting.

 

Thanks.

There is some excellent snark and is more acerbic about the whole project than references to it make it seem, but it's still very much Tolkien engaging with the concept of adaptation and almost all his objections are 'this change isn't necessary for the adaptation to work why are you making it' and not 'fie, fiend, with the concept of the slightest change to my work'. 

It does also feature a line that is both really quite racist and Tolkien seemingly becoming aware of his own racism, though (that line about the features of the orcs). I really do understand why a Buryat friend of mine is so frustrated by Tolkien's depictions of evil and how both the language and the people are drawn from what Tolkien found ugly about Asian people and their culture, especially because of the long-term effect it had on fantasy as a whole. 

Actually a few really interesting things in that: Tolkien's reference to Saruman's death suggests, though doesn't confirm, that his views on suicide may be more nuanced than you'd expect from a die-hard Catholic of the time, and his views on Saruman's voice suggests that at least in that instance his mastery of language in getting his readers to perceive what he wanted us to failed him, because 'Z' will have been far from the only person who read the effect of Saruman's voice as inducing a trance, or something akin to that.