In article cauEb.425431$275.1301997@attbi_s53, Jackie wrote:

"Stephen Paul" wrote in message
...

I am taking the next two weeks off from work. The first thing on my list
of
things to do when nobody is looking, is to sneak off and see this movie as
a
weekday matinee.

I saw the first two of this series of movies and I must admit that I don't
get the hype... should I have read the books first?? I know they've been out
since before I was born, but I have to admit that I was not familiar with
the characters or names until the movies came out. Am I missing something by
seeing the movies without having read the books first? The movies have great
special effects, but the whole experience of viewing them left me flat in
just about every other way.

Jackie

Hey Jackie and all,

As a longtime Tolkien fan, I have a mixed review of the movies.
They're visually wonderful (I love the elephants! and Gollum!).
But I'd like to throw some brickbats at the screenwriters. It often
seemed that they kept lines from the original text just so that fans could
latch onto them, even where they didn't make much sense out of context.
Having Legolas recognize Shadowfax as one of the Mearas, for example --
so what? Or the bit about the dead going to "a land under a swift sunrise".

They've kept a lot of the books' action, and cut it in sensible ways
as if they cared about the integrity of the battle scenes, but warped
the characters; Tolkien's strong sense of the difference between
good and evil has mostly evaporated. Tolkien's good guys are marked
by the oaths they keep and the respect they grant others: imposing
their will by having Gandalf/Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli muscling into
Theoden's court, as in the 2nd film, just didn't fit.
And Sam's temptation by the Ring, where he's offered "a garden swollen
to the size of a realm", which he rejects out of his native homebound
good sense -- I was sorry to see that dropped in favor of a brief game
of keepaway with Frodo. And, of the three strong women
in the original novels (Galadriel, Arwen and Eowyn), only Galadriel
seems to have kept her dignity and strength consistently here.

Still I was impressed by *some* of the innovations they made in the story,
and the scenery, real and synthetic, is magnificent. Minas Tirith
looks perfect, better than I'd imagined it.

That funny telescope *was* cool even if we only got to see it briefly.
[See, this message isn't completely off-topic after all.]
They did clearly pay tremendous attention to detail.
And as an epic, you don't go to see it for its psychological
character development.

I'll see it again for more of those details, even with regret.
But if Middle-earth isn't a familiar world, I'm not sure what the
movies will do for you except being a high-powered action film and an
impressive demonstration of computer graphics.

Stuart Levy