"My name is Bilbo Baggins." Why not? Much as I was disappointed in the Hobbit, it is hard to ignore that the industry climate this... Hydra... was created in is very different from the industry that produced the Lord of The Rings trilogy, which went into production 13 years ago, so the original trilogy kind of crossed the nostalgia border a little while ago. So I kind of have to admit: my disappointment in the Hobbit stems largely from trends that sprung up from the original trilogy.. The original Franchise changed the way movies are packaged, filmed, marketed and If Transformers was the game change for modern-film esthetic (and marketing), Lord of The Rings was the game change for film- -franchise (and marketing). So for the next three episodes we are going to look at the product, the content, the effect on the industry and culture that was the original Lord of the Rings film trilogy; starting with the Fellowship of The Ring, "the best film": the most cohesive; well edited and well written; best adapted film of the three Shall we? "Much that once was is lost For none now live who remember it" Except for you... That guy... This guy... this other guy... Okay, there are plenty of people who now live that remember it, but it was a cool line So let's talk a little bit about Genre I've always found it a bit odd that Fantasy and Science Fiction are lumped together in the bookstore, frustrating even, as I would not consider myself much of a fantasy fan. The two genres have a touch of an ideological split and while obviously every individual work has a different theme and purpose and level of originality, yada yada yada The basic gist is that fantasy is more 'history oriented' and backwards looking; where science fiction is more speculation and 'science oriented' and forwards-looking; obviously these things exist on a bit of a spectrum, you look at something like "Dune" which is sort of a weird futuristic slash historical fiction that's very influenced by history and mythology and "The Dragonriders of Pern" series which is at least as Sci-Fi as "Star Wars" was but, fantasy as a genre, has always been kind of limited by its influence and that influence in modern times has been one thing. BAAM!! The Modern-Fantasy Genre was heavily inspired by the works of Mr. Tolkien and Mr. Tolkien was heavily inspired by European languages in history (also the western world... ... we just like Europe). So as a result fantasy is very rooted in European Folklore in history. Movies like Princess Mononoke, for instance, which incorporate lots of Japanese mythology, yes But they don't define the genre to western folks the same way something familiar feeling like "Dragon Heart" or "Willow" might. Fantasy is the realm of magical expansions of things that are already familiar in the western collective unconscious: castles, kings dragons, fairies, magic, Old Beard guys and pointy hats Fantasy is folkloric, and yeah, you can just pull stuff out of your ass and call it fantasy and I guess that would be true but it's certainly not what comes to mind when people think of Genre. Marketing is a very important component. Especially when it comes to film. As a result, there's not a lot of wiggle room for new ideas. In film, fantasy has been the realm of the rehash of archetypes. Sci-Fi on the other hand... while Sci-Fi has had plenty of dumb and pulpy shit, it's also had plenty of opportunity to produce culture changing challenging cinematic master works like Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Blade Runner. Dun... wait. Oh also Sci-Fi has Star Wars. But wait, wait, you say, Star Wars is science-fantasy. It's got the Force It's not really science fiction and I might agree, but think again of Joanne and Cletus. So what did fantasy have? What were the great fantasy films? Dragon Heart? Labyrinth? Dragon Slayer? There was a bit of a fantasy craze in the 80's, fueled in part by the renaissance of the works of Tolkien and subsequent underground rise of Dungeons and Dragons, but it stayed pretty much underground. Fantasy up to this point had been relegated to something of a low art... ghetto. At best, fantasy films were cult classics. You had a couple of failed attempts at big blockbusters, no serious successes. At the end of the day these suckers just didn't make much money. Critics despised them and not a lot of people saw them. Fantasy was a niche market and even if Lord of The Rings was one of the best-selling books of all time, that didn't necessarily mean that the public "Joanne and Cletus" wanted to see a movie based on it Enter this guy: And thus begins one of the most baffling film careers in Hollywood history "Party is over" Peter Jackson took a sort of Sam Raimi trajectory, as he started in the realm of extremely low budget horror films This man would go on to produce the most Oscar-winning film of all time. You can definitely see this, shall we say, preoccupation in some of the fight scenes in Lord of The Rings The Peter Jackson oeuvre all throughout the 80s and early 90s was grossed out and goofy Then one day Pete is all like: 1 AM "I'm gonna do a serious art film!!" Heavenly Creatures was not only a critical darling, it also netted Pete an Oscar nomination for best screenplay Started his career in earnest in Hollywood and also this... lady... ah I forget her name. It also got him the attention of Miramax, who were the American distributors of the film and at the time were helmed by Harvey Weinstein who, for Pete, negotiated with the producer who had held the film rights to Lord of The Rings since the 70s. So Pete and his partner, Fran, presented to Miramax a two film version of Lord of the Rings, which was budgeted at 75 million. But after a bunch more revisions, some, you know, number crunching, they realized that the movies were really probably realistically going to easily cost twice that for both of them. So Miramax was like "Make one movie" So for contract reasons, Pete had about four weeks to shop this sucker around Hollywood to find a studio that would actually let them make the two movie pitch that they made Eventually they landed at New Line, where Pete had a friend there named Mark Ordesky. And Ordesky was very interested in the presentation, and he took the pitch on one condition that: the two films be made into three The Lord of the Rings is a big-ass-sprawling-heavily detailed-many characters-often meandering high fantasy epic. It is the story of a little hobbit named Frodo Baggins and his hundreds of billions of friends who all fight in a war over a ring of power which is... powerful and dangerous in some manner. Frodo also falls down a lot: Also despite the fact that it is a high fantasy epic, it's also the story of the everyman. It works more naturally here due to the setup. So often it's hard to get the everyman into the protagonist slot because what business does everyman having the doings of war and shit? OH, the great lengths some books and movies go to get the coded everyman into that protagonists slot! So often you find that they are the products of some predetermined destined Messianic prophecy or whatever Someone barges in and tells them they've been Jesus the whole time...: "You're a wizard, Harry" Or sometimes it's just idiotic: "The coordinates to the cubes location on Earth were imprinted on his glasses" But the setup of the Ring works very naturally for Frodo. "I'm giving it to you" "DON'T tempt me, Frodo!" I get the ring, I could become this: or this: You? Worst case scenario? This Because you do not matter and you have no power. So because of the powerful corrupting nature of this ring, only a non powerful unimportant person can carry it. But of course, as in any adaptation, they added a bunch of crap and they cut a bunch of crap out. So let's get this Tom Bombadil thing out of the way So the hobbits are running for their lives, escaping the Shire, fleeing and they meet this weirdo in the woods and the plot just... stops... and they hang out and... he's like a big lipped alligator guy. And that it happens, and then the hobbits leave and it's never brought up again (okay, yes, I know Gandalf brings him up at the council but only to mention how he's completely useless to their endeavor) I feel like Bombadil made more sense in an earlier draft, where the adventures were more episodic, like in the Hobbit and then Tolkien was just so enamored with the character he kept him in anyway. SERIOUSLY, Tom Bombadil sucks He is just a tension destroying element; I mean, he feels out of place even in the book; I mean, for the most part, whenever a character comes into the book they like, payoff later or pop back up at some point but not this guy. Nope But besides that and the scouring of the Shire, which happens at the end of the third book, they didn't cut out a whole lot Although there is one biggie that I remember people getting their panties in a real twist about and that is Arwen, Warrior Princess "If you want him, come and claim him" Which, well... Originally Arwen and Éowyn were gonna be kind of mushed together into one character, when it was just one movie, and then, when it got expanded into three, they kind of kept the Arwen Warrior Princess angle anyway... Sort of You see, it's most pronounced when we first see Arwen and she replaces Glorfindel which yeah, why not? You know only action thing she does in all three movies, but then she pretty quickly recedes into her original role in the book of Passive Elf Lady, where all I do is sit and look pretty and wait for my man and carry with me the wisdom of the ages You can see some scissor marks when it comes to Arwen's development They did film a bunch of the Arwen Warrior Princess stuff and after her big action scene she immediately retreats back into delicate ladyship and stays there for the rest of the three movies With the Elves... who are a touch... racist... "It is in Men we must place our hope." "Men?'' ''Men are weak" ''Hate those guys. There's one chump after my daughter? Can't get rid of this guy" Looks like it's time for a FORCED PEEJ CONFLICT!! Not enough there in the source material?? Jam that conflict right in, may or may not feel incredibly forced and contrived, but hey, it's a conflict Aragorn! In the book he's not very interesting. I mean in the book he's ready to step it up and be the hero king when the time comes. He carries around the broken sword with him cuz' SYMBOLISM. Doesn't have very much in the way of internal conflict. I mean, he does sometimes second-guess himself during the quest but he doesn't have that huge internal dilemma about whether he's even worthy to begin with, so: let's add one "The same blood flows in my veins." "The same weakness." I guess if you've got Elrond raising you your whole life, bearing down on you about how weak he thinks you are, Then yeah? Maybe you develop a bit of a complex. "She stays because she still has hope -" "She stays for you." "She belongs with her people." Do you understand you are not as good as ME? And also they added a bunch of crap with Aragorn and Arwen but we'll get into that one next time. So not only does Elrond not believe in Aragorn and men in general, Aragorn doesn't believe in himself. 'You will face the same evil." "And you will defeat it." 'Cuz men are prone to weakness and greed, and so Aragorn's subplot is basically a three movie long journey where he finds his confidence and overcomes his great-great-great-great-times-like-20-great grandfather's man-weakness. Conflict! On the production end of things, Viggo Mortensen wasn't cast as Aragorn until a couple of days after shooting started. Aragorn was originally gonna be played by Stuart Townsend as in (Incoherent vocalizing) Dodged that bullet. But for the most part, all three films are pretty impeccably cast so I continue to kind of be bewildered by the casting of Hugo Weaving as Ageless Elf Lord Elrond. Oh, he's a fine actor but Compared to the other delicately featured elves, the fig wits, the "Legoli", the Arwens, rough, hard-edged, crankypants, craggy Hugo Weaving? He's a touch out of place, and you know who was rumoured to want to play Elrond and they didn't cast him? "Voodoo." "Who do?" "You do!" "Do what?" "Remind me of the babe!" And you didn't cast him? What? (Speaking Elvish) On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Kate Blanchett as Galadriel and here, they didn't so much add a conflict as put the one that was already there on steroids "In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen!" He also made her a little creepy - where in the book everyone adores her, here, we get some setup. "One who has seen the eye!" I'm sorry, I didn't mean to freak you out! "Stronger than the foundations of the earth!" Frodo's reaction here is priceless. Okay, geez, I - uh - never mind! Honestly most of the goofy shit that feels kind of out of place in Fellowship was from the book and then roided-up for the movie "I'm not hurt." "You should be dead." Wait, yeah? Magic chainmail or no, buddy, how did you survive that? And how do you get anywhere falling down as much as you do? Did you just make Boromir fall down too? Speaking of Boromir, "It is a gift." I don't get the impression that Tolkien much liked Boromir as a character. In the book, like Aragorn, he's not terribly interesting, but he's also kind of a one-note douche-nozzle. Yeah, he gets redeemed before he dies, sure, but his purpose was more or less a cautionary "Ah, see what happens when you get all power-hungry?" You get orc'ed Shorthand of film language notwithstanding, movie Boromir is more dynamic and with very little change from the book really They added a bit about how he's worried about his father's rule, and how he doesn't want Aragorn to be king "Gondor has no king!" "Gondor needs no king." And then we find out that he's really just worried for his people, and he gets some bonding moments with the hobbits that aren't contrived or ham-fisted. And then, in the end, he comes around to Aragorn, and this death scene, man... "Our people." "Our people." Honestly, this, to me is why Fellowship feels like the best movie. The ending has the best build-up, the most sincere payoff, and it doesn't drag. Okay, okay, this drags a little Okay, it drags a lot, but the bit with Boromir doesn't! "My king." But my big takeaway from Fellowship is that it's a study in successful adaptation. I know they moved a lot of lines and scenes around, they cut shit out here, added it there, but ultimately it was to the benefit for the piece as a whole. The filmmakers even found ways to sneak chapter titles into dialogue. "Shortcut to what?" "Mushrooms!" "Shadow and flame." "Riddles in the dark." This film, more than the other two, does stay surprisingly close to the source material Hell, a lot of the stuff that feels like goofy shit they added just for the sake of action were actually in the book and, more importantly, drove the plot forward. Ahem. So back to the idea that fantasy has historically been kind of backwards-looking, history-oriented, often even a little self-indulgent, It doesn't mean to say that it couldn't be done well. It just hadn't been by that point. Or at the very least it had not been commercially successful. And it's kind of easy to see why it is hard to be genuinely, emotionally sincere about something that's just so Out there. Like the Balrog scene, for instance; even the dialogue is pretty much directly from the book, and this could be so easily so goofy with dialogue like this: "I am the servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor." "The dark fire will not avail you, Flame of Udûn!" But this is Sir Ian we're talking about. Sir Ian's like, "go hard or go home." If we were to draw a graph of my process of my method, it'd be something like this: Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, action, [???] YOU SHALL NOT PASS! Cut. Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian So the fact that these films exist at all were a colliding of stars that weren't terribly likely - - that they'd be made with these people who, for the most part, had good instincts adapting this material for a modern audience, that the studio allowed them the freedom to make the film that they more or less wanted, and that they were allowed to make three movies at all. When you look at the way things are today, it's kind of ironic to think that they had to fight to get three. But also the fact that these movies came out in the climate that they did. Fellowship of the Ring came out not four months after 9/11, we had just invaded Afghanistan, Iraq was right around the corner, the world was changing, and suddenly the High Epic simplistic world of Tolkien's emotional sincerity didn't seem so unpalatable anymore We wanted that escapism to go to the world of good versus evil, where friends are truly good friends who truly love each other, and the bad guys are genetically engineered for evil and ugly so we don't feel bad when they die and you don't have to be ashamed of your hairy feet... It is Escapism, but it's high Escapism. And while it is difficult, incredibly difficult, to do that well, or credibly, as we found out, there was a place for that. With Frodo, on the ground, ♪ Frodo of the nine fingers and the Ring of Doom ♪
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