Books to Movies: A Short Rest and a Great Setting

These posts examine the often necessary changes that occur between mediums: books to movies to radio drama. I am using Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to make my comparisons. 

"A Short Rest"

Three differences between the book and the movie:

1. The elves in the book and radio drama are mysterious, hidden, and whimsical, not noble irked warriors. Jackson took the elves from The Lord of the Rings as his baseline here, which I think was wise.

 

2. Galadriel, of course, does not show up at Rivendell in The Hobbit. But I appreciate her appearance in the movie. One of my favorite scenes is her interaction with Gandalf. As preparation for The Lord of the Rings, the various arguments made by all the parties--Saruman, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel--is quite illuminating.

 

The appearance of Galadriel is not as unbalanced as it sounds. In fact, the Rivendell sequence is one of the most seamless, possibly because the action is confined to a single location. It brings together at least two of Jackson's arcs without much fuss (discoveries related to Smaug plus the problem of the Necromancer). It also explains why the dwarfs and Gandalf are temporarily separated.

 

2. In the book, the dwarfs don't protest Gandalf's decision to take them to Rivendell. In the movie, Thorin would prefer to avoid it.

 

The tension between Thorin and Elrond exists in the book and is generally well-handled in the movie. I especially get a kick out of the "intellectual" elves and the frat-boy shenanigans of the dwarfs. Aiden Turner, who could easily have been cast into either group, has such a boisterous, rowdy time as a dwarf, the audience is convinced, "Yeah, these are the guys to root for."

 

A note about voice overs. 

 

I generally vote against them. I think a movie is supposed to be a visual achievement. 

 

So...in the Rivendell chapter, Tolkien gets meta for a moment and comments that good times "are soon told about and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome may make a good tale and take a deal of telling anyway."

 

Yet SHOWING those good times is necessary to establish what Bilbo misses and what the dwarfs are fighting for. And I will say--as comes up with Merry, Pippin, and Boromir--that Jackson exercises a skilled and light hand when it comes to "showing" good stuff. That is, he devises scenes that quickly convey that the dwarfs are a rowdy, happy group who stick together (preparing us for Thorin's later out-of-sync behavior) and that Bilbo likes Rivendell. Bilbo will naturally return there for his retirement.

 

The setting is really, honestly, something else. It achieves Miyazaki's "I want to live there" levels of enchantment, one of the best-conceived settings within both franchises. Kudos to the artists and designers!

 

But the action must continue--which involves the Misty Mountains and Bilbo's encounter with Gollum.