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Nit-Pickers Guide to Deviations in Jackson's LotR
bcolflesh submits "A lengthy list of deviations to be found when comparing the text of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien and the translation of those texts to film as undertaken by Peter Jackson, et.al."
Here is another site which lists out the differences:
Linky
Links are at the bottom for differences in each of the three movies.
for a pretty funny political photoshop ;-)
(if the page is slashdotted, it is president bush wearing the ring of doom)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Lets see this guy make a list for Dune.
That should keep him busy for a few years.
I would swear that #69 for the Return of the King is incorrect and that in the movie Frodo DID tell Bilbo that he had lost the ring after Bilbo inquired about it, and Bilbo says something like "I really would have liked to touch it one more time". Can someone please correct me if I am wrong.
A Bugg
Here is another list of changes. We have had this one up for a couple years now. Some of it has not been updated in a while, but, it is rather complete.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
Celeborn was a tree-elf, not an Eldar. Hence, he should not have been allowed to travel into the West in the end.
These also include the Extended Edition DVDs, and are in handy table format.
Fellowship of the Ring
The Two Towers
Return of the King
The White council drives Sauron from Dol Guldur at the epilogue of The Hobbit. That would have been before Frodo was born.
Yeah... In the FOTR commentary, Jackson says that he thought it would be 'silly' for him to be carrying a broken blade around for two and a half movies.
Which was fine with me, until I read the book and saw that the blade was re-forged at the Council of Elrond, before the bulk of the journey began.
"But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and the glory of the part assigned to himself."
"He now wove the new thoughts into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew dispondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had first."
-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I honestly do not undestand the apolegtic attitude for Peter Jackson expressed here on Slashdot. Especially I do not understand the claim that all the changes Jackson made were neccessary for the film to be succesful. In fact I say that most of the changes were not needed: Peter Jackson just had to make the story "more American" and "more dramatic" by changing the delicate web of characters, events and themes created by J.R.R. Tolkien. It appears that Jackson thought that he could create a better LotR than Tolkien by introducing exaggerated battle scenes and gut-wrenching folk psychology -- the problem is Jackson's overgrown ego, not the structure of the book.
It is obvious that the book needed to be edited into a script, and that is OK to me. That editing, however, should have taken place by cutting away some scenes and spoken lines from the book. To corrupt the basic ideas and themes of an original work can not be forgiven. Peter Jackson made (especially in TTT) compeletely inexplicable choices, and for instance perverted Theoden's character from a great warrior king to a mindless follower of others.
Tolkien himself commented an early non-filmed script (1958) by Zimmerman in his letter to Forrest J. Ackerman. Some of his comments are very thought-provoking, and seem to be directed straight to Peter Jackson. I urge everyone to read the letter and see what Tolkien really thought about movies based on his books.
- Ismo
1. Why was Sauron visible when he wore the ring in the opening sequence of the Fellowship of the Rings?
The ring is Sauron's masterwork, and a vessel for much of his power. You think all it did was make someone invisible? Invisibility is merely the only trick we see.
Analogy: You find a system on the internet that serves up web pages on port 80. Doesn't mean it doesn't respond on port 23 with Telnet. If you know about all those other commands, you can do quite a bit of stuff to the machine. But for someone more limited, it's just a web server.
2. What is so great about the ring? Sauron wore the ring, and his hand was cut off. I think Sauron should have gotten a refund.
There's apparently a disclaimer that the One Ring shouldn't be used when the Lords of men are nearby, or something.
3. Bilbo loved the ring, and had a good time with it. It scared the beejezus out of Frodo when he wore it. Why the difference?
Remember the finger-chopping scene you mention above? Sauron went nappy-ime for quite a while. During this time, the ring was, apparently, much less actively evil.
4. If anyone deserved the ring, it was Boromir: "By the blood of our people are your lands kept free." Naw, give it to the cute little hobbits. No way.
Well, the hobbits did the job. Boromir had it it for a few moments before screwing things up. Why say more?
Oh, I think this is a very needless amount of work because it had already been done. Look at the Encyclopedia of Arda!! That already has a well compiled list of things that were differences between the books and the movies.
BTW - if you are a Tolkien fan, this site is for you. A great resource for the Tolkien books.
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
* even worse, the poster mentioned the details and circumstances of his death.
If you are really interested check out the encyclopedia of arda. It's invaluable resource, you can lose yourself for hours in that thing.
From the article: 69. Saruman enjoys the pipeweed of the Halflings (ROTK p.324). Jackson has Saruman tell Gandalf that his wits have been dulled by Halfling leaf as if he doesn't smoke it himself and, it might be added, even though there is pipeweed amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Isengard.
If I'm not mistaken, this line was actually lifted from Unfinished Tales, the rambling colletion of bits and pieces that Tokien never hammered into stories worthy of publication. I recall this line being spoken by Saruman to Gandalf in the presence of the other members of the Council of the Wise when they were meeting to discuss the matter of the Rings of Power.
From The Encyclopedia of Arda: When the Council debated the Rings of Power, Saruman claimed that his researches showed that the One Ring had been lost forever. It was later shown that he did not believe this, however, and was searching for it himself, having secretly rebelled against the Council.
Saruman was attempting to discredit Gandalf (they were in disagreement on this matter) by exposing his affinity for hobbits. The quotation was something like: "Your wits have been dulled by your love of the halflings' leaf."
I might be wrong about the timing, but I'm pretty sure I had read the line before I heard it delivered in FOTR. In the end, it ended up being one of my favourite lines :)
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
I adore Tolkein as much as the next nerd, but he really had a blind spot for female characters.
Eh? I never understood people who claimed this. What about Luthien Tinuviel? Not only was she an important character in the first age, but she was the only one to have confronted MORGOTH (yes, the Big Evil One himself), knocked him out, helped Beren steal a silmaril from his crown AND appealed to the Valar to bring them both to life again! She defeated MORGOTH, for crying out loud. Sauron was just Morgoth's flunkie, and she totally kicked his sorry ass too! If that's not a powerful female character, I don't know what else to say.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Call me a nit-picker, but Black Knight clearly states "NONE shall pass", although it's still a likely Tolkien reference. Full description of the scene is here.
For those just down off the tree, the original post talks about Monty Python's 1974 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The movie was recently mentioned by soon-to-be-nearly-knight Bill Gates as being his only source of information on how/why knighthood is given.