Thoughts on Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Version

The masterly Sean Bean quoting one of my

favorite lines: It is a strange fate that we should

suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.

Such a little thing.

Following are my thoughts on Fellowship of the Ring, Extended Version:

1. Extended scenes--The extended scenes do add a lot. However, the one editing choice I have never understood--in both the theatrical and extended versions--involves Moria. There's an extra scene in there (that's not in the book) with a collapsing bridge. It goes on for about five minutes, and it is completely unnecessary. Jackson left it in the release-to-theater version and cut out much of Lothlorien scenes.

I think this was a huge mistake. Most of the women I've talked to, both those who like Tolkien and those who got dragged to the theater, wish there had been more Lothlorien in the release-to-theater version. It would have been very easy for Jackson to cut the completely unnecessary bridge scene and add more Lothlorien.

Yes, I know the movie was probably aimed at young men, but studies show that most successful movies attract both sexes, and it would have been such an easy substitution to make.

2. Lighting--Jackson's lighting is the weirdest thing in the world. I actually like it; it has a staged/picture quality to it. But it is strange. One minute everything is dark with cool, glowing lights all over the place. The next minute everything is in full sunlight with everything glinting. The whole thing is like watching CSI episodes over and over and over. Cool. But startling.

3. Casting--I consider The Lord of the Rings movies the best cast trilogy of, oh, the last 100 years or so. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but there are few book-to-movie films I've seen that completely and totally and without misstep cast the characters exactly the way I picture them. Except for Elrond, and I like Hugo Weaving so much, I don't care.

Interesting note about Hugo Weaving. Pre-Jackson, Tolkien's elves are portrayed much the way the Vulcans used to be portrayed before Star Trek: Enterprise came along: good and pure and wise and wonderful. And then Hugo Weaving showed up, and suddenly the elves (like the Vulcans) got edgy and a little annoyed and somewhat sarcastic. Which is frankly more interesting.

The glasses were added by a blogger!

About the hobbits: I know people confuse Merry and Pippin. I never did although that could partly be because I ran across Dominic Monaghan before Fellowship came out (Hetty Wainthrop mysteries). He isn't exactly like the Merry of the book, but he is given enough lines to clarify that he is the more perceptive and mature of the Merry and Pippin duo.

Sean Astin and Elijah Wood are perfect. I happen to think Elijah Wood's range of emotion was greater than Jackson pulled out of him. By the end of the first film, Frodo has been reduced to (1) scared and (2) more scared. If you watch the beginning of Fellowship, Wood displayed a much broader range. Frankly, I don't think Frodo interested Jackson much OR Frodo represented a type to Jackson. He gave all the ambiguity to Aragorn and Boromir.

I quite like Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn. The book makes clear that Aragorn is supposed to be scruffy and unattractive at first glance--a rangy Ranger with absolutely no appeal to civilized folk like Butterbur, the Prancing Pony owner. I think Mortenson pulled this off. He isn't as fine an actor as either McKellan (hard competition) or Sean Bean, but like Keanu Reeves, he knows how to act physically (which is pretty important!). The scene at the end of Fellowship where Mortensen walks down the hill towards the cast of thousands-De Mille crowd of orcs is frankly quite cool.

McKellan of course occupies his own class of perfection. And Sean Bean is so phenomenal that I hold him personally responsible for the cohesiveness of the latter half of the movie.

Which brings us to subplots.

5. Subplots--This is the third or fourth time I've seen the movie, the second time I've watched the extended version. The subplot with Aragorn is a lot clearer after that many viewings, but I don't think it was as clear as it could have been. The tension between him and Boromir, the (real) issue of Aragorn's allegiance, Boromir's (legitimate) concern for his people, and Aragorn's reluctance to test his rights to leadership are great themes and could have been emphasized. Not expanded because, okay, the movie is really long, but pointed to more clearly. There's lots and lots of implied dialog on these issues, delivered mostly by the masterly McKellan and Weaving, and the last scenes between Aragorn and Boromir are very effective, but the release-to-movie version really fell down here. (The extended version makes these themes much clearer. Even with the extended version, though, I think they could have been emphasized. I think Jackson, whom I like, is rather like Shyamalan, whom I also like: throw enough stuff at the screen, and you get a good movie. Which is sort of true. But sort of not.)

6. Speaking of the final scene--First of all, I never thought the Boromir being shot full of arrows scene funny. I can see why some people rolled their eyes, but I've got a C.S. Lewis-medieval knights-Beowulf fan inside me, and I've always thought it utterly chivalrous and honorable and gosh darn heroic! I also don't find it improbable. The human body can take an amazing amount of damage before it shuts down, as one realizes when one watches Civil War documentaries.

In fact, that whole last scene is my absolute favorite battle scene in the LOTR trilogy. It's exactly like a Civil War documentary, only with the added bonus of really old statues and much cooler armor.

And I love the chivalrous, heroic stuff. I don't think anyone but Sean Bean could have pulled off that last scene, but he is Sean Bean, and he did. His confession to Aragorn and his plea for his people, Aragorn's promise and his kiss on Boromir's forehead all hit a note of high medieval romance. It's better than King Arthur because stupid Launcelot isn't there to drip excuses all over the place.

Tangent-time: Questions have been posed (many by my brother) about why teenage girls get into stuff like yaoi and such--that is, why do many teenage girls and women get enthralled by male-to-male dedication/loyalty/devotion?

I think the reason is that these types of relationships don't imply subordination in the sense of weakness (Boromir is not weak for finally professing loyalty to Aragorn) and also because the relationship allows for objectivity. It isn't oh-now-I'm-in-love-I-must-immediately-lose-my-ability-to reason (and therefore get together with a guy who will beat me because I luuuuuv him so much). Both parties are allowed to retain their dignity.

I think this dignity is possible for female-male relationships, by the way; there simply isn't a whole class of classical literature out there that deals with it. (Dorothy Sayers and Jane Austen all by themselves do not constitute a class). George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote about the desire of women for this type of relationship with a male spouse/companion (and she had such a relationship herself), but she didn't succeed in creating one on paper: in Middlemarch, Dorothea marries a gasbag and then a self-promoting politician--a nice self-promoting politician but still--

Thoughts on The Two Towers, Extended Version

I consider the extended version of Fellowship better than the cut version. Not so with Two Towers. I consider the cut version (with one exception) to be far superior to the extended version.

I've seen the cut version of Two Towers several times, and I've always considered it pretty straightforward and streamlined. After seeing the extended version, I must congratulate Peter Jackson on making such intelligent cuts for the release-to-theater version. The extended version is downright convoluted. Talk about confusing! And I'm reasonably well-versed in Tolkien lore.

The extended scenes do carry some interest. There's an entire section between Boromir and Faramir which gives you insight into the brothers and their father, Denethor. A line is spoken which is echoed in the cut version: "Now is a chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality"; when you realize that the line was originally spoken by Faramir's father, it lends the line (spoken the second time by Faramir) some pathos.

And it's nice to see Sean Bean again. But, still, the scene is very confusing. It's a back-flash, coming at a point in the narrative when we have cut away from the main action (Rohan) to Frodo. It's too many balls in the air and consequently gives the extended version a clunky feel.

Likewise, there are a number of scenes in the extended version that underscore Aragorn's identity as Isildur's heir. In the books, this is terrifically important. One reason Sauron gets so freaked out--if one can use that phrase about a big, evil eye--regarding the resistance of Gondor is that he believes that Aragorn is coming to reclaim his throne and that Aragorn has the ring.

In order to make this clear in the movies, Jackson would have had to make the whole Isildur/ Gondor/ Aragorn-as-Boromir's-boss thing just a tad clearer in the first movie than he did. So I think cutting that material in the second made a lot of sense.

Because, really, the Two Towers is about Rohan and the battle with Saruman's forces. Some of the best performances of the movie come out of this storyline. Bernard Hill as Theoden is nuanced far beyond what the role calls for, and he has some of best lines in the movie (hey, I have a yen for weighty dialog). Miranda Otto is marvelous. Karl Urban is totally underused but at least he shows up. And Brad Dourif as Grima is just about as good an ambiguous bad guy as a character can get.

The amazing Brad Dourif

There's a point near the end of Two Towers when Saruman sends the orcs out to trash Helm's Deep. Grima, standing behind him, begins to cry; it is so poignant, it rips at your heart. Here is a self-serving, nasty-minded fellow who believed that his self-serving nasty-mindedness was limited--he wanted a girl, he wanted a little bit of power. And then he discovers that the little bit of power he wanted to wield never mattered to Saruman; Saruman isn't interested in playing power politics with Grima; Saruman is interested in destroying every human being on the planet. It's a huge miscalculation based on evil intent. It's one of Tolkien's subtler moments (the crying isn't in the book but Grima's ambiguity is).*

Back to the extended version: The only scene I regret Jackson cutting between the extended version and the release-to-theater version is a scene where Faramir eulogizes a dead soldier of Sauron's. In both the book and the movie, some rather generalized soldiers from the South stomp up north to help Sauron. Tolkien doesn't say much about them although he gives them "Oliphants." Both Lewis and Tolkien have been accused of insularity in their use of bad guys from the south who bear about them hints of the Arab world. From today's perspective, it is hard not to assume both Lewis and Tolkien are responding to modern terrorism. In fact, however, their insularity is a tad older. They are responding to and utilizing medieval attitudes towards Arabs which extended back to Hannibal's elephants climbing the Alps to attack Rome.

Which doesn't make it any less insular, of course.

In any case, in the extended version, Faramir gives this nice little speech in which he pities one of the dead soldiers and says, in effect, "Why is his honor any less than mine?"

C.S. Lewis would have approved.

It's nice because first of all, it makes clear that Faramir is the more introspective of the two brothers and therefore, prepares the viewer for Faramir's rejection of the ring. It's also nice because I get tired of orcs (BAD GUYS, BAD GUYS, BAD GUYS) and their residences (BAD PLACES, BAD PLACES, BAD PLACES). I mean, really, what kind of civilization is Mordor? It is one big desolation; what do its occupants eat? I assume even orcs eat meat and carbohydrates. At least, I assume they don't just eat each other and rocks. [Note, I wrote this before my Mordor post.]

I don't have a problem with this most of the time because Tolkien was writing world fantasy with mythic good pitted against mythic evil, and the bad guys aren't automatically supposed to be Grimas (ambiguous and undecided villains). They are supposed to be bad. But I thought it was a nice touch to point out that badness has its own agendas and its own ways of garnering support. No way those guys from the South are stomping North because of some big eye. They're thinking, "What will we get out of this?" and Faramir's speech pointed that out.

However, Jackson may have thought he was cutting it close to the PC line with the "Oliphants" anyway, so the speech got cut.

He left in, however, one of the best lines of the movie given by Bernard Hill:

"What can men do," Theoden says to Aragorn, "against such reckless hate?" What indeed?

My second favorite line comes at the end of the speech Theoden gives right before the battle starts:

Where is the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow. The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. How did it come to this?

Give Tolkien credit--Two Towers is one of the few pro-war/warrior movies I've seen where people spend a large percentage of the time feeling hopeless and wondering how things got so bad. Which is how good people usually respond to terror and war and reckless hate.

To end: in terms of weighty speeches, I don't even mind Sam's speech, but I confess that what I really like is the beginning portion--from Tolkien's point of view, there is no return, no going back to Exactly The Way Things Were. It's a principle fantasy writers should never forget:

It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

And Frodo's end is foreshadowed.

*For Voyager fans, Brad Dourif plays Suder, the sociopath who tries to control his sociopathy with Tuvok's help. There's a 2-parter where Suder--who has laid off the killing due to Tuvok's influence--must help save Voyager by killing intruders. The despair with which he agrees to this course of action is wrenching; he knows that once he starts killing again, there is no going back. The Voyager series was lucky to get Dourif!

Thoughts on The Return of the King, Extended Version

So I recently saw The Hobbit: The Unexpected Journey and really enjoyed it. I will probably see it again before it leaves the theater and multiple times after it comes out on DVD. However, it will be another year before the second movie comes out, and I was feeling Middle Earth-deprived.

Faramir-Eowyn scenes that are thankfully

included in the extended version

So I rewatched Lord of the Rings for the millionth time!

Here, finally, is my review of The Return of the King, the extended version. I have reviewed the extended versions of both The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers (I actually started these reviews in 2007--hence, the "finally".)

I put off watching the extended version of The Return of the King because I remembered the movie as fight scenes, more fight scenes, even more fight scenes, fight fight fight fight scenes. Some dialog.

And although I am a devotee of action movies from The Fugitive to The Avengers, I get bored after a couple of fight scenes, especially if a single scene doesn't end after about 2 minutes. (I don't care how many people an Oliphant tramples--my reaction isn't disgust; more lack of interest.) 

There is a lot of fighting in the extended version of The Return of the King. However, the extended version fills in a number of gaps, especially regarding Faramir and Eowyn. Unlike the extended version of Fellowship, which simply provides more information, and the extended version of The Two Towers, which gets downright confusing, the extended version of The Return of the King flows quite nicely between character interactions/dialog and battle sequences. 

The one major hiccup in this flow is, surprisingly, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum. In the release-to-theater version, their scenes balance very neatly with the other scenes. In the extended version, Sam, Frodo, and Gollum practically disappear from the first half of the movie (while taking over the second half; yes, I know, Jackson is following the actual chronology of the book--which just proves that he did a great job in his cut of the release-to-theater version).

Although this unevenness surprised me, it did help explain The Hobbit!

Richard Armitage as Thorin

As stated above, I enjoyed The Hobbit (Part 1); however, it is NOT for purists. Rather than a tale of lovable Bilbo, Jackson is using other Tolkien material to provide us with pre-LOTR events; it IS Tolkien material, but it is not always specific to The Hobbit. Consequently, the character who moves to the forefront is the Aragorn-type character: the king figure, Thorin.

Martin Freeman as Bilbo

Considering that Thorin is played by Richard Armitage, I have no complaints. And Martin Freeman (Bilbo) is in the movie enough to make me happy. But it does indicate that in his heart, Jackson seems to find returning monarchs slightly more interesting than good-natured hobbits (or simply easier to film).

This is comparative, of course. It isn't that Jackson doesn't do the hobbits justice--in LOTR, every scene with Sam, Frodo, and Gollum is lovingly and skillfully rendered; it's just that the king matters slightly more.

And, of course, The Return of the King is Aragorn's movie: the return of this particular king and what that means to Middle-Earth and to Minis Tirith specifically.

REBUTTLING A COMMON CRITICISM

At this point, I have to comment on a common criticism of Tolkien's work--that his evil is too blatantly evil: all the orcs are ugly; Sauron is merely a big evil eye, etc. This criticism is sort of true, but I think Tolkien deserves major kudos for his profoundly ambiguous, disturbed, multi-layered, and difficult to categorize characters, such as Denethor (steward of Gondor). Denethor's mixture of despair, pride, vainglory, pain, plus corrupted courage and love makes him one of Tolkien's most memorable creations.

There are also characters like Theoden, Faramir, and Eowyn. These characters are lightly sketched (Tolkien was more interested in Middle-Earth,  its history/languages, than in his own action sequences) yet still uniquely motivated and personalized. Not many world fantasy writers can say the same of their characters!

Frodo at Grey Havens

In other words, sticking an elf, a dwarf, a king-to-be, and an everyman into a book does not automatically a great series make.

I was glad I watched the movie again even though it is quite sad. Here's the thing about Jackson: he knows how to deliver high heroic moments that clutch at your heart. I sobbed like a baby during, oh, the last twenty minutes (here's the other thing about Jackson: he gives you about five endings). But--and I say this as someone who usually hates sad endings--it is the perfect ending. By keeping it, Jackson's respect for Tolkien's vision comes through.

In the end, it's that respect I appreciate most.

Grey Havens