Tolkien: Book to Screen

Not to be a Tolkien Nazi (I did spring for the Extended Edition DVDs!), but there are legitimate simplifications of the plot that are necessary to take an epic to the screen, and then there are baffling alterations that leave you thinking that either the director foresaw some insurmountable wrangle that you cannot imagine or he simply wanted to play in the sandbox. My top half-dozen from Fellowship:

1. Bilbo Baggins Whining: The Bilbo in the book is a cheerful Hobbit who doesn’t snivel and who seems remarkably capable for his age and valiant after his own fashion. The Bilbo in the movie switches from senility to fecklessness to, sometimes, a combination of both. He snivels in Bag End and he snivels in Rivendell and you see in him not the slightest vestige of the happy-go-lucky protagonist of The Hobbit.

2. Aragorn Whining: The role is reasonably well scripted on the whole, but there are times when you wonder – especially after watching Bilbo snuffling over the harm the Ring has caused – why it is necessary for everyone to whine. The man is eighty-seven. He’s just a little too old for teenage angst. He knows that he is going to be King of Gondor and Arnor, and if sixty-seven years haven’t been enough for him to get over moping about something that happened three millennia ago then it’s hard to see how he’s fit to lead even a village with a population of two.

3. “If you want him, come and claim him.”: I can accept Liv Tyler as Arwen – after all, casting Arwen and Galadriel is like casting Helen of Sparta; you’re never going to please everybody. But need she ride around on Asfaloth brandishing her sword at the Nazgûl like a female Horatio Hornblower? You could, just possibly, take Galadriel riding to the rescue. Not Arwen, especially when it means no Glorfindel.

4. No Quest for the Sun: This is undeniably a bit demanding of me, but I loved that scene in the book. You can just see a disgruntled Dwarf muttering imprecations under his breath when Legolas runs off, leaving him beard-deep in snow, “to find the Sun.” What do you get instead in the movie? Twelve seconds of Elven shoes on the white stuff and a completely redundant scene about how the Ring is starting to claim Boromir.

5. Seventeen Missing Years: We know that it is the One Ring to Rule Them All and so on. All the same, the effect it had on Frodo was because he had possessed it for seventeen years; in the movie you’re left thinking it was more like seventeen days. The point about its insidious evil is that it is insidious; it doesn’t ambush you like a panther on a jungle trail.

6. Rivendell and the Hall of Fire: Yes, it’s a movie. Yes, it has to be short because if people are expected to sit in the theatre through five intermissions, they’ll probably discover more interesting things to do. All the same, a few minutes to establish that the Last Homely House was in fact home to somebody other than Elrond and Arwen would have caused no crisis. Besides, it’s all very well to create a general-purpose characterization for all Elves involving being aloof and cryptic and staring enigmatically into the distance, but without some music or art or poetry they are not really Elves.