KJB said:

Spielberg's Jurassic Park and Lost World are the only movies based on books that I have seen and read that make the books horrible in comparison.

The NEW Harry Pothead said:

KJB said:

Spielberg's Jurassic Park and Lost World are the only movies based on books that I have seen and read that make the books horrible in comparison.

Well right there you lost all credibility to a real opinion on anything ever again, so this whole post is a non-issue now.

Chou_Zu said:

The Hobbit is a much more streamlined book than LotR, I don't believe there is any "fluff" in it. It's been a little while since I read it, but I don't remember any part of it that made me feel it should be left out. And it actually looks like they're doing the opposite, they're expanding on a lot of the book rather than cutting parts down, which i'm all for.

I disagree on your other examples. I've never seen a truely great Stephen King adaptation. I've only seen IT, The Shining, Carrie, and Firestarter, but in all of those the books are vastly superior.

Jurrasic Park is an odd one for me. I love both the book and the movie even though they're hugely different. And I don't think either detriments the other.

Rostron2 said:

It's always a case of book versus movie, and what to put in, and what to take out. Books (especially of the early-to-mid 20th century) had an audience that was quite different from today's book readers.

So, already, you have to translate to an 18-year old today what the author was thinking. An 18-year-old in Tolkien's day was quite a different person, and their education was quite different.

It's like Shakespeare. To me, working with it all the time, what Shakespeare verse and/or prose says is easy to understand, but it's an acquired taste, so I understand why people prefer the visual media version of the story.

Moviemakers, therefore, are already at risk. There are many concepts that simply don't translate to screen: Philosophical intangibles of the author that are completely lost on today's generations. All they can preserve (and I think they did this well) are the emphasis on character and their motivations, and that's why some people think its not as deep as it ought to be. They did understand that without good character development, the story collapses. You really began to care about each of them, good and evil. What does each one want? The One Ring even was a character, and that was brilliantly done in the films.

Fluff depends on your point of view. Oh, sure, I would have preferred a much more scholarly approach to film-making for the three movies, but it wouldn't have sold as well. It would be like doing a PBS version of Spiderman. Five percent of the audience would watch it!

Personally, I don't think there was a lot of fluff. Where I have quibbles with Jackson, and minor ones at that, is where they could have explained things a little better. Like Denethor's madness. There was a tendency to gloss over certain things that would take a lot of exposition to explain, because the cost per page of a book is much lower than the cost-per-minute of a movie.

The changes and cuts we saw in the Trilogy of films reflected a need for speed and the story flow. Nearly all of them I now agree with, with a few minor exceptions. What did I miss? The darkness of the Nazgul, and the pall they cast onto the scene, and the fear they create. That's an example of something that doesn't translate well from book to screen. Oh, you can make the picture darker, but that's not what the author is trying to convey.

Jackson stuck with a compromise solution, he didn't try to force the audience to feel what the characters were feeling. You have to draw that out. There's an old rule in stage. Don't cry tears in sad situations, but watery eyes will make the audience cry.

What was interesting in how some minor details were visually represented in the design aspects and art direction. The look and feel of the world they created was extremely real. If you read the books, and enjoyed them, you can catch the many details that are there, even if they aren't spoken about. Meduseld was a golden hall in the books, and the literal translation that a less conscientious filmmaker might have made was to make it much more grandiose, with golden tiles on the roof, and so forth. It would have looked cheesy. That's the mistake that many fantasy films make, and they didn't do that in LOTR. It had just enough grandeur to believe a king would have such a place, but not so much that it didn't look possible to build. So, I think from a design standpoint, there wasn't ANY fluff.

We'll see the same thing in The Hobbit. Some details will be left out, and we'll wonder why. But that's why we have these forums... to discuss these points, and ...dear reader, not to bash each other's points of view. You learned that from the Internet.

Thanks for the thread. It probably ought to have been on The Hobbit board, but there's no way to move it.

Rostron