Slashdot Mirror
Extra Scenes in TTT Extended Edition DVD
gdr writes "USA Today have an article about the extra scenes that will be in The Two Towers Extended Edition. More ent scenes so it'll be worth watching for the special effects alone. Sadly it looks like there will be no extra gollum scenes. I can't say I'm as excited about this one as the FotR EE."
Ok ok, so I understand that some of you haven't read the books and believe that the additional scenes in FotR were trivial. But come on, leaving out the reforging of Aragorn's sword by the elves? Tolkein's poetry? Crack open the book for one minute and see how many poems you come across. This man invented (documented) 10,000 years of history, constructed a couple languages from scratch, and wrote countless songs and poems to complete the world of Lord of the Rings and Jackson all but throws it away. The extended edition of Lord of the Rings did exactly what I wanted it to, it completed the parts of the movie that I thought were missing from the book. It will be a harder challenge for TTT:EE to do the same, but I look forward to the "small" details being put back in so that the people who have read and enjoyed the books can see it in action.
Elrond and Elros are called the Half-elven, but strictly that isn't quite true. It's all rather messy and incestuous. Beren (a legendary human hero) married Luthien (daughter of an elven-king and a Maia - a minor deity like Sauron but not evil), had many adventures, died, came back to life as ordinary humans, and then died again of natural causes; their son, Dior, an elf, married Nimloth, another elf, and their daughter was Elwing.
Meanwhile, Belegund, Beren's cousin, had a daughter Rian, who married Huor, another hero; Tuor, Huor's son, went into the heroic family business; he ended up in the hidden elven-city of Gondolin and married the princess, Idril. Their son was Earendil.
Earendil married Elwing, and their sons were Elrond and Elros. Now, all this was terribly confusing, because nobody was entirely certain what species they were. So the Valar (the major gods) said that Earendil, Elwing, Elrond and Elros would each get to choose their species. Earendil and Elwing both chose to be elves, and went on to start new careers as the planets Venus and Mercury respectively. Elrond also chose to be an elf, and became the great elf-lord we know so well from Rivendell. Elros chose to be human, and was the first King of Numenor, and is an ancestor of Aragorn - which was the point of this long digression.
Aragorn's long life, then, comes from his being, in a small part, Elvish, and in an even smaller part, divine - and also from the general favour of the gods on his people. However, Elrond frowns on his plan to bring up again the whole problem of the Half-Elves. Elros' children were all human, and Elrond's children were all elves, but what happens if Elros' descendant Aragorn marries Elrond's descendant Arwen? I don't think the exact policy of the Valar was ever made explicitly, but the most likely outcome is that if Elrond sails West and Arwen stays behind and marries a human, she will become mortal as well, and will die with him in Middle-earth.
On his deathbed, Aragorn suggested that Arwen might still have the choice to follow her father Elrond to the West, and live forever there - she says that the only reason she cannot is that there are no ships to take her back, and she is stranded. But we know that Legolas sailed with Gimli into the West after the death of Aragorn, so there was at least one sailing available.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.