LoTR Movie - Helm's Deep


Jamie123
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Am I the only person who was bothered by this? It's actually a few years since I last saw this movie (which I'm not totally 100% a fan of anyway) so I might be remembering it wrongly. But anyway...

During the siege at Helm's Deep we see a close-up of defenders on the wall. A boy pushes a bolder over the battlements, which drops down (presumably) onto the people below. But at the very instant it falls, the movie cuts to King Theoden (Bernard Hill) talking either to Gandalf or Aragorn. I always expected that bolder to come down on one of their heads - and it always bugged me when it didn't. Though it makes no sense, the continuity (is that the right word?) sets you up to expect it - and when it doesn't happen you think "what happened to that bolder?"

Am I the only one?  

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You may not be the only one but I'm not one.  Although LoTR got quite bloody it wasn't so bad that I would expect Jackson to have to follow-through a boulder dropping with crushed heads.  It was fine that the death scene is left off-screen and just understood to have happened.  It wouldn't make sense to expect the boulder to hit Aragorn's head as he wasn't below the wall.

There's this comedy movie I saw in the Philippines when I was a teen-ager with Val Kilmer on it.  It was so crazy funny.  So Val Kilmer stormed a fort and got to the very top of the parapet where he fought a soldier.  He punched the soldier, the soldier falls off the edge, and on the next cut you see the soldier falling to the ground and broke.  Like ceramic.  I found that so funny I couldn't pay attention to the following scenes I was laughing so hard.  It might have been only me.  I couldn't find that scene on youtube but I found this one - with it's funny "continuation" scenes.  Hah hah.  By the way, I don't recommend watching the movie - I saw it in the Philippines where they censor scenes that are "not appropriate" for general audiences.  It may contain highly inappropriate scenes as comedies are wont to do in the USA.

 

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17 hours ago, anatess2 said:

It wouldn't make sense to expect the boulder to hit Aragorn's head as he wasn't below the wall.

Exactly! It's just the sequence in which the images come that sets up that (quite irrational) expectation. For me anyway. (Perhaps I'm just weird.)

A couple of other things which always bugged me in Jackson's version:

  • Why is Minas Tirith surrounded by prairie? How was the city fed? Tolkien makes it quite clear that it was surrounded by an outer wall - the Rammas Echor - which enclosed the Pelennor Fields - the townlands of Minas Tirith. The account of the battle makes several references to the agricultural nature of the land.)
  • The outer wall of Isengard is an open arch with no gate. In the book, the gatehouse was fortified: it had an inner and an outer door, with a tunnel in and guardroom in between.
  • I read somewhere that the Dead Marshes scenes were filmed in a car park. I can well believe it. In the book, the "tricksy lights" (as Gollum called them) were quite subtle and genuinely spooky - Sam begins by spotting one in the corner of his eye - and then sees more and more. (It's similar to the scary scene in The Wind in the Willows where Mole is lost in the forest and starts to see "faces".) In Jackson's version they're great flaming torches! 

I've no problem with making changes to a story in order to film it: for example I'm a fan of David Lynch's Dune, despite it being quite a lot different from Herbert's novel in places. But those changes had a purpose and logic to them. But many of the changes Jackson made to LoTR were quite crass and pointless.

P.S. If you think I'm the biggest and saddest Tolkien nerd there is, I know bigger and sadder ones!

Edited by Jamie123
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21 minutes ago, Jamie123 said:

P.S. If you think I'm the biggest and saddest Tolkien nerd there is, I know bigger and sadder ones!

Nah.  There are many of them nerds in my circle.  And yes, they have differing views of Jackson's movie.  And I say the same thing to them as I'm saying to you now - when I watch a movie, I watch a movie independent of the source material.  Because, they are very different media with very different strengths and limitations.  So, I don't compare movie to books, movie to comics, movie to anime, movie to real life story... etc.  I critique movies independent of their source except for the characterizations (because if you can't get the characterizations correct, then why reference the source material - just create a new IP!).

So, in your critique for example - why was Minas Tirith surrounded by prairie and how was it fed?  It's not important in the movie because the keep was portrayed as a last stand in a war and not a kingdom - it is unoccupied otherwise.  The design of the wall doesn't need to be built to source material standards, it just needs to be built to characterization standards, doing it's purpose in the war.  Tricksy lights being true to source is immaterial to the characterization of Frodo and Sam's journey through it.  Therefore, if you can get the characterization using torches instead of spending oodles of money cgi'ing tricksy lights, you have a better chance of the movie making money than losing money.

 

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There is one IP that got transferred really well from manga to movie - Alita Battle Angel.  Yes, there are still limitations to the story because being true to the manga story will not fit in a 2-hour film.  And there are sacrifices in characters and character arcs because of the different storyline.  But otherwise, the characterizations was sufficient, many scenes where almost exact to the manga or to the anime adaptation as portrayed, etc.  It's quite impressive how they managed to closely stay true to source.  Here are a few examples of scenes in the manga/anime versus the movie:

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2 hours ago, anatess2 said:

Nah.  There are many of them nerds in my circle.  And yes, they have differing views of Jackson's movie.  And I say the same thing to them as I'm saying to you now - when I watch a movie, I watch a movie independent of the source material.  Because, they are very different media with very different strengths and limitations.  So, I don't compare movie to books, movie to comics, movie to anime, movie to real life story... etc.  I critique movies independent of their source except for the characterizations (because if you can't get the characterizations correct, then why reference the source material - just create a new IP!).

So, in your critique for example - why was Minas Tirith surrounded by prairie and how was it fed?  It's not important in the movie because the keep was portrayed as a last stand in a war and not a kingdom - it is unoccupied otherwise.  The design of the wall doesn't need to be built to source material standards, it just needs to be built to characterization standards, doing it's purpose in the war.  Tricksy lights being true to source is immaterial to the characterization of Frodo and Sam's journey through it.  Therefore, if you can get the characterization using torches instead of spending oodles of money cgi'ing tricksy lights, you have a better chance of the movie making money than losing money.

 

I hear you. I think it's perhaps because I grew up with The Lord of the Rings. I re-read it through my 20s and 30s, and it percolated into my consciousness. (Even the epigraph in the front of my PhD dissertation is from one of the songs.) So rankles me to see "Tolkien done wrong". Maybe it shouldn't, but it does!

I did enjoy the movies though, for all that!

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1 hour ago, Jamie123 said:

I hear you. I think it's perhaps because I grew up with The Lord of the Rings. I re-read it through my 20s and 30s, and it percolated into my consciousness. (Even the epigraph in the front of my PhD dissertation is from one of the songs.) So rankles me to see "Tolkien done wrong". Maybe it shouldn't, but it does!

I did enjoy the movies though, for all that!

The Hobbit trilogy is even more... well... not true to Tolkien.

I have to say, though.  There are a lot of faults in the movies (not just its comparison to the source) and is far from perfect, but man, reading Tolkien can be such a drag that I'm embarassed to admit I enjoyed the movies more than the books (my son is going to smack me for saying this - you're probably going to smack me too if I was in the UK).  I think this is about the only book adaptations that I can say that to.

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On 1/16/2020 at 8:41 AM, Jamie123 said:

Am I the only person who was bothered by this? It's actually a few years since I last saw this movie (which I'm not totally 100% a fan of anyway) so I might be remembering it wrongly. But anyway...

During the siege at Helm's Deep we see a close-up of defenders on the wall. A boy pushes a bolder over the battlements, which drops down (presumably) onto the people below. But at the very instant it falls, the movie cuts to King Theoden (Bernard Hill) talking either to Gandalf or Aragorn. I always expected that bolder to come down on one of their heads - and it always bugged me when it didn't. Though it makes no sense, the continuity (is that the right word?) sets you up to expect it - and when it doesn't happen you think "what happened to that bolder?"

Am I the only one?  

I can see what you are saying because at this point seeing a boy throwing a good size rock you kinda want to see it hit its mark. The seen is just showing how young kids were needed to assist in the battle.

At this moment, you might expect a comical big rock to nut shot as you watch the rock descend to an unexpecting enemy, crotch hit, head up "Ouch" in their language, and falls off the elevated road.

But, we don't! We see the future king waking up from the explosion -- moving on. :)

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14 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

Indeed - I only just learned about this now. Christopher Tolkien made accessible a huge body of his father's writings which might otherwise have been lost: not just stuff to do with Middle-earth, but also Norse mythology and the Arthurian cycle. There's rather a nice video about him from Men of the West here:  

 

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