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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 15 2014, 11:29pm
Post #1 of 41
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Peter Jackson frees ourselves out of Tolkien's obsession with battles
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Obviously, as I stated out of many, many scenes, P. Jackson did his best to avoid the gruesome violence he put in his former LOTR movies.
Now his orcs are less orcish, his fights are less horrid, the blows are more sparse.
What is significant is that many people blame the movie and keep telling 'LOTR' (his former trilogy) was an unsurpassable masterpiece.
But do they realize how much more violent LOTR was ? Do they realize that their despising The Hobbit looks just like asking for more blood and more drama ?
I came to be fed with the violence we find in LOTR movies. Since I watched The Hobbit (the three) I don't feel anymore the compulsory need to see the former trilogy another time.
I confess I valued them myself as much as so many people still do in much of their comments, but what my desire now is to see are my Blue-Ray copies of those 3D-HFR Jackson's Hobbits movies. No more the LOTR ones.
In fact, i see those so highly celebrated movies as a kind of ancient addiction. And addiction for addiction, I now prefer the new one.
I get the feeling the Hobbit movies are just more adult than the LOTR ones, more intellectually satisfying, more educative, more thoughtful
I feel important that Bilbo's main purpose was to try and avoid war
I feel important that greed is shown as a calamity
And above all I LOVE the visual improvements of the show. The landscape. The architecture. Laketown, Dale, Erebor.
They are and they will stay absolutely stunning. And no LOTR sets come close.
That said, what about Tolkien faithfulness ? I don't finally believe it has to be so important, so relevant.
I read the Hobbit-book and I find much of the book is in this movie. So, faithfulness there is, and plenty of it.
But I also remember my main opinions about Tolkien and the reason why I never felt attracted to his whole work.
Simply put : too much battles. Battles and battles and battles. Always against orcs, dragons and creatures.
Tolkien's Hobbit first introduced JRR's son into battle of five armies, but the story was a long and quiet trip before. The battle just put an end to the trip, a deadly end.
But that was not the case with Lord of the Rings. In Lord of the Rings the battles are ALWAYS at the horizon. And many battles, and more battles we get : Saroumane converts his home in a factory for monsters, and Sauron breeds orcs by thousands. Where is the necessity of all this ?
Same stuff and even more with the Silmarillion. Page after page, dozens of battles. Battles between everybody and everybody. Dragons and monsters everywhere. Where is the necessity of all those battles ?
When I was young I read the Hobbit and I felt that was enough for me. That's why I'm glad Peter Jackson gives us three great movies about it,
even if he added a little too many war-like animation in the story (a long Goblintown flight, the barrels confrontation and the Ravenhill one-on-one confrontations).
The most important thing to me is the certitude that in the end P Jackson and his crew feel the 'battle fatigue' and DID avoid the battles.
So this movie, The Battle of the Five Armies, shows the welcome understanding that too many battles are just too much.
Is 'battle fatigue' already known by movie industry nowadays ? I don't think so.
That's why I thanks Peter Jackson to calm down and throw out this ancient - and nocive - addiction to battles.
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Spriggan
Tol Eressea
Dec 15 2014, 11:53pm
Post #2 of 41
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Not sure I followed all of your points.
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But if you are asking why battles are necessary in stories, they aren't, but neither is the absence of battles. No necessity either way.
I'm not sure I follow why you think battles are bad, per se? You seem to say watching such violence is bad, but I'm not sure why that would be the case - experience and catharsis aren't the same as promotion.
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shadowdog
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 12:16am
Post #3 of 41
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I totally agree with you. If you step back from Tolkien's writings, there is little culture outside of animosity and warfare. To defend him to a level, he was trying to recreate an English version of the Norse and German mythology which were centered on war and those involved in epic battles. And I think he was severely scarred by his experiences in WWI and that influenced his writings.
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 12:19am
Post #4 of 41
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I maintain battles in fiction aren't necessary
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They just add to the already too many battles we meet in real life.
More so, if you glorify fiction battles between men and men-alike, you will in the end glorify battles between men, some of them you will call trolls or animals or anything worth destroying.
You just can't put war and peace on the same podium.
You might think so, but if you do I recommand you to go and see the movie some other times, until you get it right.
For instance I found interesting that P Jackson shows Smaug and even Azog suffering when dying (even if you can somewhat wonder if Azog wasn't in fact happy with his own death)
It reminds us of the suffering of any victim of a battle.
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TnuaccayM
Bree
Dec 16 2014, 12:20am
Post #5 of 41
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I agree with most of what you said
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But I don't think that the fact that we got less violent battles is because PJ didn't wan't to do them. In fact I think he did, but he was restricted with the PG-13, and if you have noticed, PG-13 movies are not as violent today as they used to be 10 years ago.
But I agree that The Hobbit movies are better, at least in story-telling. The characters in these movies are better than the ones on LotR, which in comparison, in my opnion, are rather boring and flat. In these movies every character has his own strong personality, and a back story to relate to. I really feel more attached to Bilbo and Thorin than to Frodo and Aragorn. I really never actually liked Frodo.
I think that most people that prefer LotR is because of the battles and the ''epicness'', but in The Hobbit is all about storytelling. I saw LorR when I was a kid, and loved it because it was just ''awsome'''. Even if some people say otherwise, I truly agree with you when you say that The Hobbit triology is more mature and adult, because they have a more personal and ''real'' story.
Everyone's got their opinion, but in this case, I like yours :P
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 12:31am
Post #6 of 41
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...for war took a heavy toll on him and his friends.
But let's not forget how many countries, how many cities usually manage to travel through centuries without meeting wars.
Scars of war occur sometimes and need not to be forgotten, but is it a cure to show them again and again and again when a war fails to be avoided ?
Too many war-remembrances just call for other wars. They built peoples into being mutual ennemies.
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Spriggan
Tol Eressea
Dec 16 2014, 12:51am
Post #7 of 41
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Battles aren't necessary, but neither is it necessary to avoid battles in fiction.
As I say, engaging with a battle is not the same as glorifying it or promoting it. Plato would certainly have disagreed with you that seeing fiction on a subject makes the audience more likely to engage with it - he thought it was in fact a preventative measure. Certainly, anecdotally, I haven't noticed myself feeling especially bellicose after watching LOTR.
To be slightly more serious, surely we wouldn't accuse the poetry of Sassoon or Owen of promoting war simply because it is the topic of their fiction? And we might even grant them the converse effect on the public perception of war, mightn't we?
I might even be pushed to offer the opposite view - that stories have a vital role to play in teaching us about morality, emotion and consequence. To ban war as a subject for fiction risks reducing the general understanding of its horror and loss (amongst other aspects).
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 12:55am
Post #8 of 41
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Thank you for this support ; this somehow has to be talked about,
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Because it's a great thing that P Jackson went to challenge his first trilogy.
Nobody else than him could have done it, because LOTR, in all their awesomeness, had a tremendous influence on what people believed what success is about.
Not that the message of the book ('it's necessary to throw the ring of power into the fire') was bad in itself, but PJ didn't really focus on it. In fact, he spent much time liking to show monsters. And doing so, many people followed him on this trend.
Don't get me wrong. For Tolkien, LOTR (the book) was a result of maturity : he understood that the will for ultimate power was a Nemesis for Mankind, which was rather a sound alert.
That was Tolkien's quest, for he stated that after the war of the ring, men finally find peace and keep it.
But did LOTR (the movie) achieve such wisdom ? P Jackson was still young, and still on the launch of his former provocative movies.
He seemed to improve in the second trilogy, realizing his influence, and so, his responsability.
Coming to the books, I don't think it would be very safe to try and adapt the Silmarillion, because most of it was written during Tolkien's youth, when he was still struggling with his war trauma and didn't dominate it.
That's the reason for that neverending "war, war and war" obsession you find in this solitary work.
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 1:05am
Post #9 of 41
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Banning wars out of fiction would be...
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...Asking them to stay into the stakes of History.
Unfortunately, real battles happen. We have enough to learn and discuss which mistakes lead to them and cause destructions that can't be repared.
I live in a country (France) that has been scarred by many wars, and that also occasionaly exported some wars outside its frontiers. Some other countries did, England and Germany, not being the least, US more recently.
Do you really think we need to invent fictional wars to adress their gruesomness ? Do you believe Sassoon or Owen poems were adressing fictional wars ?
Just walk into the streets of destroyed towns, even rebuilt ones, and you'll understand what I mean.
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Spriggan
Tol Eressea
Dec 16 2014, 1:16am
Post #10 of 41
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I understand what you mean - I just don't agree.
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Analysing historical events gives us one way into fields of thought, stories and art give us another.
I would no more think discussing a war in a story is a bad thing than discussing a war in a history class (and fortunately fictional wars don't kill real people or destroy real towns). We can learn valuable lessons from both.
Should we say of the TH that it is irresponsible to focus on greed and pride as its topics, as this will lead the audience to be greedy and proud? I'm sure you wouldn't say so, for the same reasons I mention above. TH focuses on these things but that is not the same as promoting them (quite the reverse, as it happens).
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 1:39am
Post #11 of 41
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Expressing himself about real wars surroundig you is often dangerous
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That's why I think many artists prefer to express themselves about fictional wars. That, I can understand.
But what do we get in our mainstream fictions ? Most of them build the fictional perception that human warriors train to fight monsters, which is never the case in real life.
How could it be a useful lesson ? Often enough, armies breeding for war build some kind of self-fulfilling fictions about what their enemies are.
Maybe, as someone pointed, PG-13 is the main reason why PJ-53-years-old did avoid showing as much violence as he did in LOTR,
but what I celebrate is the fact that there is less true violence in TBOTFA.
Dain Glasgow-kissing orcs is much harmless than Aragorn cutting arms
Should that mean, as many believe, that Fellowship of the Ring is vastly superior to Battle of the Five Armies ?
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 1:59am
Post #12 of 41
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... Fiction may have value when depicting some reality, because our brains usually deal with concept associations :
For instance, "I won't spare a single part of my treasure" may be usefully associated with many contemporary realities.
If this is what you think about, I certainly won't disagree.. (especially since my bedtime dictates the end of any arguing here)
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Name
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 3:13am
Post #13 of 41
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Haha, well, imo FotR is vastly superior to any and all movies!
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How many Tolkien fans does it take to change a light bulb?
"Change? Oh my god, what do you mean change?! Never, never, never......"
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Morthoron
Gondor
Dec 16 2014, 3:43am
Post #14 of 41
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That the historical period covered in The Lord of the Rings was the "War of the Ring"? A war constitutes several battles, battles being the components of war. Therefore, a book covering a war would cover several battles.
I do find it laughable, however, that you conclude that Tolkien had an "obsession with battles", whereas Peter Jackson somehow "frees" the plot from this obsession. If you actually read the book you will find that Tolkien dwells far less on blood and gore and decapitations than Jackson. In The Hobbit, for instance, most of the action in the Battle of Five Armies is told after the fact due to Bilbo being knocked unconscious; Jackson, however, bloats the battle to grotesque proportions, dragging in trolls and were-worms and armies far in excess number wise than the book. Jackson is synonymous with overkill.
Please visit my blog...The Dark Elf File...a slighty skewed journal of music and literary comment, fan-fiction and interminable essays.
(This post was edited by Morthoron on Dec 16 2014, 3:44am)
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HiddenSpring
Lorien
Dec 16 2014, 3:51am
Post #15 of 41
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Jackson is not obsessed with battles? That must be why he inserts random Orc attacks every 20 minutes in each Hobbit film.
Also, The Hobbit is bloodless because of the simple reason that it looks more artificial and "clean" than the LotR movies, not because the director is trying to make some sort of pacifist statement. If anything, he is even more relentless with the action scenes nowadays.
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glor
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 4:01am
Post #16 of 41
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Bloodless gets you a PG-13 rating
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Blood gets you an R or 15 rating.
Big budget movie trilogies do not get greenlit with anything greater than a PG-13 in today's world.
That's it pure and simple.
No mascara can survive BOTFA
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HiddenSpring
Lorien
Dec 16 2014, 4:13am
Post #17 of 41
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The bloodlessness has nothing to do with being anti-war.
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Spriggan
Tol Eressea
Dec 16 2014, 8:04am
Post #18 of 41
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Now, we move from one point to another
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Here you are saying that the messages most films have about war are wrong, rather than their inclusion as a topic acting as a promoter, per se.
If that is the case, then we would need to look at the messages in a given film - not just whether there is war in it or not.
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 9:23am
Post #19 of 41
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that the addition of small battles throughout the hobbit trilogy is not an indication of temperance for Peter Jackson regarding war-loving. As well as the inclusion in the movie of the dialogs between Thorin and Dwalin, then between Thorin and Kili. Those two additions led Thorin and his dwarves into the battle, so they weren't peaceful in the core, even if, in my opinion, they just fill the gap in Tolkien's tale, who had almost 'forgotten' these dwarves at this stage of his story but launches them anyway in the scrum, (which leads their leaders to their deaths and none of the other dwarves warriors, which is the exact contrary of what happens ordinary).
We must also concede that PG-13 might not alterate in the core the war-mongering mood, but may feed it the way 'virtual' warfare feeds real warfare in setting the murderers away from the gruesome consequences of their acts and unaware of the sufferance done.
That said, the point is there is no storytelling in Tolkien without wars, as if the professor couldn't handle his own created world without wars. When peace arrives (the fourth age), his storytelling simply ends, as if he had nothing more to say.
The fact is that historically Tolkien added massive wars to old fairy tales (maybe that was the key to his tremendous success as well as the success to Indian fairy tales too) ; to achieve this, he had to add horrific and nonsense characters, that were his orcs and many non-existent monsters who takes the readers out of touch with reality.
The movie-making of this world is a somewhat different affair. Maybe it is not a entirely voluntary movement from Peter Jackson, but a movie-making is dealing with reality more than any writing can do. And in this reality, Peter Jackson had to stay into PG-13 rules, he had to avoid hurting his actors, his stunt actors, the animals, the nature around.
Then we have to scrutinize the differences in message between Jackson and Tolkien and compare : For instance, Tolkien sends an army of Laketowners to Erebor, where Jackson instead sends refugees searching for a shelter in Dale. Which one is best in touch with peace-mongering ? Maybe none of them in the end.
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Bumblingidiot
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 3:21pm
Post #20 of 41
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There are many other unpleasant things that we surely do not want replicated in fiction - there are already quite enough of them in real life. Murder, crime, conflict, arguments and misunderstandings: surely we don't want to further encourage these negative aspects of human life by inventing even more of them in our books.
As for the authors; they do seem to be wilfully encouraging this kind of thing with their writings. Jane Austen is one of the worst - her books are choc full of misunderstandings, conflicts, snarky comments and on occasion, just plain rudeness - it's almost as if she wanted the world to be a place where everyone almost accidentally marries the wrong person. As a result of her writings the world is now full of young women deliberately misunderstanding each other, and getting slightly upset.
Surely those of us who are more in touch with the qualities of peaceful coexistence could take on the burden of rewriting some of these books, for the good of public morality. I myself have had a go with the Lord of the Rings, and have removed all the conflicts, battles and other inconveniences from the tale (there are enough of those in real life, after all - why create more?). Anyway, here's my version of LOTR:
"They went for a walk. It was nice."
I was going to put in a description of the flowers and trees, but flowers of course are just the sex organs of plants engaged in a life-or-death struggle for survival with other species, and trees shade out and kill smaller saplings as they grow - do we really need to be reminded of such unpleasantness in our fiction?
"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear."
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Morthoron
Gondor
Dec 16 2014, 3:37pm
Post #21 of 41
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And, as everyone knows, reading Jane Austen leads directly to heroine addiction.
Please visit my blog...The Dark Elf File...a slighty skewed journal of music and literary comment, fan-fiction and interminable essays.
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 3:54pm
Post #22 of 41
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Because war hurts much more what you should propose to stop at
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You can't find many things more destructive for men than human wars.
And even few destructive things that can be affected by human fictions.
You can fictionize about flowers and trees, volcanoes or asteroids, that won't make them go differently
But if you fictionize about wars, you can ignite them
I clearly remember which words were flying over Yugoslavia in the end of 1980's. People then were getting used to call themselves 'Ustachis' or 'Tchetniks' like in WWII, even if it was altogether a fiction because motives and organizations had change since.
On those premises, they got into war and more than 200 000 people died out of their bed.
What we own now from Tolkien's fictions is the habit to call 'trolls' (fictional stupid and evil beings found in Tolkien tales) real people that we want to oust far from our views.
But real trolls they aren't, are they ? Since trolls are just fiction. But you're nevertheless inclined to treat who you call 'trolls' the way trolls are treaten in Tolkien fictions. First, vocally. But what next ?
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Morthoron
Gondor
Dec 16 2014, 4:28pm
Post #23 of 41
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You can't find many things more destructive for men than human wars.
And even few destructive things that can be affected by human fictions.
You can fictionize about flowers and trees, volcanoes or asteroids, that won't make them go differently
But if you fictionize about wars, you can ignite them
Again, how does Tolkien glorify war, propogate war or ignite war? It is Jackson that over-emphasizes and glamorizes war and battle, adding a hundredfold to what Tolkien originally wrote. Tolkien emphasizes the loss of war, the aftermath of strife, and the grief of the characters. Samwise looks upon a dead Haradrim and wonders about his life and whether he was forced by Sauron to fight in a war he knew nothing about. We see the faces of the corpses in the Dead Marshes, reflecting the horror Tolkien experienced in WWI seeing his dead comrades floating in bomb craters filled with rainwater. We, the readers, experience visceral pain when we read about what Saruman has done to the beloved Hobbiton in the Scouring of the Shire. In the Silmarillion we see the Elves fighting a hopeless war against Morgoth, what Tolkien referred to as "the long defeat". Jackson does not even reflect on those sequences, and omits several, preferring to dwell on explosions, CGI characters and the violence of war.
You are utterly wrong.
What we own now from Tolkien's fictions is the habit to call 'trolls' (fictional stupid and evil beings found in Tolkien tales) real people that we want to oust far from our views.
But real trolls they aren't, are they ? Since trolls are just fiction. But you're nevertheless inclined to treat who you call 'trolls' the way trolls are treaten in Tolkien fictions. First, vocally. But what next ?
The internet term "troll" does not come from Tolkien at all. Perhaps you should do some research before making such completely inaccurate comments.
Please visit my blog...The Dark Elf File...a slighty skewed journal of music and literary comment, fan-fiction and interminable essays.
(This post was edited by Morthoron on Dec 16 2014, 4:31pm)
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Milieuterrien
Rohan
Dec 16 2014, 5:22pm
Post #24 of 41
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The fact is war lies all over Tolkien's books
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May you like it or not.
If you deduct wars out of Tolkien's books, you can't be sure that those books could stand alone.
Tolkien earned a pile of money complaining about wars in books all his life, and he kept adding fictional war after fictional war in each of them.
Real people around him just suffered from real wars without any gain. They suffered not because of Tolkien of course, but because of the reality of wars.
Tolkien prospered because of the fiction of his wars.
I feel tired hearing over and over people sanctuarizing Tolkien like a god 'inventing a new world'. He invented neither the old myths and legends out of whom he dragged most of his concepts, including trolls, neither the wars out of which he dragged the complains of suffering.
Come to see the villages in France. In each of them you find monuments with the names of dozens lost. For us it can't be and it will never be as if JRR Tolkien had been the only man to know suffering out of WWI. One of my two grandfathers lost a leg there, the other one was an ambulancer in Verdun and in the Dardanelles.
I feel even more tired when I hear the same people bashing a cineast that drew on screen wonderful images and making a living for thousands of people around him doing so, and come here rejecting on Jackson the responsability for the battles Tolkien wrote.
Of course Peter Jackson shares something of Tolkien's battles he puts on screen, but he and his crew put on screen much more than Tolkien's words and Tolkien's wars. Get a look at Laketown and all of the other sets. Did Tolkien wrote about those sets more than few lines ?
This movie stuff doesn't come out of Tolkien's own only, nor does it come out of Tolkien's heirs, who keep on dismissing the simple fact that movies have been made, even when Tolkien's Estate earns much money because of those films.
P Jackson has anounced that he feels now the need to shoot something about what New Zealanders suffered when they were brought to the Dardanelles and died there in masses during WWI, fighting against people that were just defending their own country.
Will you be there to insult their remembrance because it wouldn't come out of Tolkien ?
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Spriggan
Tol Eressea
Dec 16 2014, 5:37pm
Post #25 of 41
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Clearly, you are very passionate about this
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But I can't see that you have established any link that stories which feature war lead to real war or, in the specific case, that Tolkien promotes war in what he writes on the subject (or that this had any consequences).
Without those pieces the rest doesn't seem to link up to me.
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