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The One Ring Forums:
Tolkien Topics: Movie Discussion: The Lord of The Rings:
Obviously the "not a franchise" thing is a, um, CERTAIN way to look at it:
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Chen G.
Mithlond
Sat, 9:42am
Views: 93
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Obviously the "not a franchise" thing is a, um, CERTAIN way to look at it
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because, yes, from a marketing and packaging standpoint it very much is a franchise: it has all those aspects I'm less fond of like merchandising and all that stuff. But from the more artistic level of the films themselves, there is weight to McKellen's claim that it is just...a series of films.
I didn't get too in-depth into how these films are or aren't based on Tolkien because that's an entire aesthetic debate worthy of an article in its own right. But I'd say there are three basic tiers:
1. Adaptations of Tolkien's novels: These may be very faithful or looser, but in either case they're essentially adaptations of Tolkien. I'd count all six "core" films under this rubric: even The Battle of the Five Armies is still based on comfortably over fifty pages: longer than the entirety of short stories like The Man Who Would Be King, that John Huston had no qualms about turning into a two-hour movie.
2. Writing in effect an original story over a few Tolkienian plot points: I'd put Rings of Power in this category very much. It's adapting no more than 11 pages of broad descriptions (yes, I counted: more on that later) and turning them into no less than 2500 minutes of television. And it's adhering to those few pages none too closely: it has a similar relationship to Tolkien as a Tolkien-esque fantasy movie like Willow might be said to have.
3. An intermediate category: I'd say The Hunt for Gollum AND The War of the Rohirrim fall under this category where it's not a novel-length story with characters and scenes, but it's also not just a few bare plot points. The War of the Rohirrim is based on 3 pages, and it's only 120 minutes. The Hunt for Gollum is based on even more material - at least eight pages - and while it'll probably be longer it's still one film, so lets say 150-190 minutes. It's really not very different from trying to adapt the Gondolin chapter in The Silmarillion (nine pages) and yet nobody would have raised an eyebrow if someone attempted to do so.
This is more than just hard accounting: when I call the pages used for Rings of Power "broad" I mean that. The War of the Rohirrim may be based on three pages, but in those three pages we get not just the events but also a sense of the dramatis personae, what they did within the scope of the events and even a rudimentary sense of WHY they did what they did. The material used for Rings of Power really concerns itself almost entirely with the events: the only character about whose actions we have any sense of is Ar-Pharazon. Everybody else are just name-drops.
So I daresay the films - those we have and those we're looking forward to - do have more of the artistic lifeblood of Tolkien. You could say [1] is Tolkien having written a rough draft of the screenplay, [2] is Tolkien having made a pitch and [3] is Tolkien having written a story treatment.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Sat, 9:46am)
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Edit Log:
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Post edited by Chen G.
(Mithlond) on Sat, 9:43am
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Post edited by Chen G.
(Mithlond) on Sat, 9:45am
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Post edited by Chen G.
(Mithlond) on Sat, 9:46am
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