New Hope for Jackson Hobbit Film?

DrJimbo writes "Just in time for the 70th Anniversary of the Hobbit (published September 21, 1937) Entertainment Weekly has a 5-page article on a possible reconciliation between Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema that may pave the way for the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy to return and helm the filming of The Hobbit. It was previously reported here that Jackson would not be making the Hobbit film. The EW article says that Jackson wants to make two films: first the Hobbit in its entirety and then another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately Jackson already has a lot on his plate with filming of The Lovely Bones scheduled to start this month and a live action Tintin film in the works."

Comments

Not public domain

[speaker of the truth]

70 years on and The Hobbit isn't in the public domain. It truly is a shame to see our constitution thwarted in this manner.

Er, what?

[meringuoid]

another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings

What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period? Bilbo uses the Ring a few times to avoid the Sackville-Bagginses. Writes memoirs. Lends mithril armour to the Michel Delving Mathom-house. Wow, riveting stuff.

In the wider world, Sauron has returned to Mordor and is rebuilding Barad-dur. Three hours on an Orcish construction site, then?

The only excitement you might get is following Aragorn incognito in the guard of Minas Tirith. But to what end?

Re:Er, what?

[LDoggg_]

Agreed.
Dwarves, Elves, and Humans were already fighting Suaron on their own fronts by the time they talked about it at Elrond's Rivendell council in Fellowship. Plenty of elaborate battle scenes for Jackson to film. If they can get at least a handful of the same actors from the other movies, they'll do fine.

Re:Er, what?

[Shining Celebi]

Wait...what? Of all the things, the Ents were pretty damn close to how JRR Tolkien wrote them; very deliberate to the point where they appeared slow and oafish, but terrible when roused, and pretty out-of-touch with the world in any case. If anything, Tolkien's Treebeard was sillier than Jackson's.

Treebeard was not by any means out-of-touch with the world. He was fully aware of what was going on, as he had had many sources of information -- Gandalf and and even Saruman had once spoken often with him, because they knew him to be wise and knowledgeable. Over and over again, Treebeard is described as extremely intelligent and has an uncanny knowledge of events. Merry and Pippin did not need to rouse the Ents to action in the book, because Treebeard was already concerned about what was going on, and Merry and Pippin were just another further motivator for him. The only concern he had was convincing all the other Ents to rouse themselves, which he and a few other activist Ents (many had been severely wounded or lost many of their trees to Saruman) succeeded in doing. In the movie, Treebeard is reasonably kind, but an idiot.

In the book, Treebeard uses the Hobbits as an aid in convincing the other Ents to act. He's the master of the situation, fully aware, cognizant, and active. In the movie, he's an oaf that decides to do nothing until he actually sees what's going on -- like he wouldn't have before? Huh? And suddenly the democratic Entmoot is canceled out just because Treebeard got angry? It really doesn't make much sense, compared with the book, but I suppose it's more dramatic. I think that's the kind of changes the GP is talking about, and there indeed a lot of them -- scenes and events changed to become more dramatic instead of logical.

Someone smack New Line with a cluestick?

[jollyreaper]

Let's see, Jackson only made them what, $3 billion dollars? I think each movie was directly good for around a billion, plus or minus $100 million, and this is talking straight box office, not even considering DVD's, TV rights, moichandizin', etc. I would be no way surprised in hearing the total take is up to $5 billion at this point, and a project like this is going to be like Star Wars or the goddamn Beatles catalog, a fat stream of recurring revenue for decades to come. And this is off an initial investment of $300 million for the whole trilogy? Do they think they could have pulled it together without someone like Peter Jackson at the helm? By all rights, the trilogy should have flopped -- Hollywood can't do quality. LOTR being brilliant is about as long of odds as Babylon 5 finishing its entire five year run and only sucking in the last season.

So New Line realizes they could stop buggering the goose that laid the golden egg and make another fat pile of shiny if they treat it nice? DUUUH, but still a bit of cluefulness not expected from Hollywood. Now go make the movie!

Re:Would it really be so bad if he didn't direct i

[Fred_A]

Am I the only one who felt the LOTR movies were not especially good and that Jackson's eccentric style may not have been the best fit for the book? When I think how incredibly bad it could have been, I'm really glad Jackson delivered a decent adaptation. It may not be not insanely great, but it's fair, and given the complexity of the task that's already quite something IMO.

Re:You are taking the piss, right?

[hey!]

There were significant 'invented' plot lines, and a number of characters had their personalities seriously warped. Jackson couldn't have even read JRRT's complaints about plans made in his lifetime because he repeated many of the same mistakes.

While not entirely successful, changes were necessary to make it possible to make a poetic work function dramatically.

Dramatic storytelling is fundamentally unrealistic, because it overemphasizes the power of an individual's ability to control situations through their decisions. LotR doesn't believe the fundamental model. In LotR, no individual is capable of achieving success. While individuals may fail through their own actions, they cannot succeed. This is a profoundly un-dramatic viewpoint; the rules of drama say that the protagonist must overcome adversity through his own virtues. In LotR, characters may attain their ends, but they do not achieve them. It is not accidental that Frodo fails in his quest, it is a deliberate philosophical statement about the action of grace in the lives of people who at least try to be virtuous.

In Tolkien's world view, the agency of individuals even in their own decisions is limited. People roll along in the grooves that their habitual actions have worn in their character. We are carefully presented with pairs of characters in which the practice or non practice of the Christian virtues of faith, hope and love play out in their destinies: Frodo/Gollum, Theoden/Denethor, Faramir/Boromir. The idea that a character's destiny is part of a larger process than the events of the story is also anti-dramatic.

It is inevitable that changes are made to make the movie work dramatically -- at the very least the elaborate parallelism of Tolkien would have doubled the length of the movies. This is not heresy, Tolkien himself was the kind of author who never stopped changing a manuscript until it was torn from his hands. Some of the movie changes work, some of them don't.

The changes that don't work fail because the story is simply too complex already for them to be developed adequately. As it is, considerable familiarity with the story is needed to follow the movies. The story changes work to the degree their ends are consistent with time available. The changes in Faramir, for example, simply don't ring true, because there isn't enough time to show him making a believable "change of heart" decision. Rewriting Theoden's death scene to be played with Eowyn was not only time efficient, it heightened the emotional impact of the scene. It also brings the somewhat brash screen Theoden back to Tolkien's Theoden, whose saving grace was humility.

Many changes were done to preserve pieces of poetry in the original; Eomer's words are put in Theoden's mouth; the words of the unnamed narrator are put in Gandalf's mouth. By in large these are to the benefit of the movies in that they preserve some of the beauty of the original.

I was watching the DVD of Return of the King recently, and I was particularly struck by the Rohirrim in the Battle of Pelennor Fields. This was of course altered to fit the needs of dramatization, but I believe Tolkien would have been thrilled. It shows how Jackson understands the heroic values of Lord of the Rings, even if he is not 100% successful in translating those values to the screen: heroism is not conferred by victory, but by acting courageously when reason tells you victory is impossible.