>>211831827
The thing about the LOTR trilogy is that its merits depend entirely on whether you evaluate it as films or as an adaptation. Because just in reference to other movies, they're fucking kino. They set a new standard that most films still fail to live up to. And you have to remember how bad things *could* have been. Jackson pitched Disney on 2 films and they told him to cram it all into one. New line bet their entire studio on it. Us getting 3 3 hour films with most of the story intact, an actual adequate budget, a fully CGI Gollum that actually worked as a character and not a single miscasting for the sake of political correctness was the best deal we could possibly hope for.
The unfortunate reality is that an actual, fully faithful adaptation would be way too fucking niche for the budget these sort of films required. Fellowship with all the Bag End scenes and Farmer Maggot and Tom Bombadil and Bill the Pony's backstory is a much weirder, way less pleb-friendly 10-hour tv series by itself and they weren't making those kinds of shows on television then. The only way to get viable 3 hour theatrical cuts was to edit the shit out of the books and leave just the essential stuff in which is mostly what they did.
My real grievance with the LOTR films isn't that they edited things out, which is just something that was always going to happen, but the parts where they substituted some new material to "modernize" the film or to condense parts. Anything that Boyens wrote instead of Tolkien is incongruous and anachronistic. Characters are misrepresented, dialogue is simplified and dumbed down. It's her doing a bad impression of Tolkien's characters or in the case of someone like Gimli just completely Flanderizing them. But, again, that's part of the devil's bargain you make once you accept anything other than a 1:1 adaptation. If Philippa Boyens was as good a fantasy writer as Tolkien she'd be writing her own popular series instead of bastardizing someone else's.
