MGM and Warner Near On Deal For Hobbit Films

Jamie found an NYT story that says "After months of negotiation and delay, Warner Brothers and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are on the verge of an agreement that would allow the director Peter Jackson to begin shooting a two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit early next year." The production has struggled recently with issues with unions, and a fire.

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Re:Peter jackson...

[natehoy]

What I got from both the books and the movie on that was simply that Hobbits don't really give two shits about power. Tolkien hammered on this concept until it hurt, and Jackson remained pretty true to that concept. They intentionally choose a simple life, they have little interest in controlling (or, let's be honest, even helping) anyone outside their borders, so the whole concept of a ring that gives absolute power has little meaning. The Ring can corrupt them (see Smeagol/Gollum and Frodo). Hell, even Bilbo got corrupted by it to an extent, but he managed to hold out for quite a while because he didn't know what it was.

The only people who could bear the Ring are those who could wield it (limited to a population of one, named "Sauron") and those to whom it would not occur to try.

Bilbo never had a clue what the Ring was, or what it represented. At least not until long after it was out of his hands, and I'm not sure he really knew anything other that it was a burden to Frodo, then forgot about that soon after. To him, it was a magical little shiny that allowed him to avoid unpleasant encounters and skulk around. He didn't have buttons the Ring could have pushed to seek absolute power. He didn't know about it, and didn't care, other than the small and insignificant uses he put it to. Even so, it took threats from Gandalf to get him to set it aside, and it still gnawed at him.

Frodo knew what he had from fairly early on, but lacked the sort of desire for power the Ring could leverage. Even so, the Ring did work on Frodo at the end. He was unable to cast it into the fires and actually started to try and wield it, and it fell on Gollum and a bit of clumsiness and happy chance to finally destroy the Ring.

Hobbits are also insignificant to the powerful to the point of near invisibility. Give the Ring to an Eagle, and he'd be spotted and intercepted, probably before he crossed the border into Mordor, if his own sense of power didn't turn his purposes to that of the Ring's first. No one could wield it without Sauron being aware of it (and eventually being subverted by it), and no one could openly fight past Sauron and into Mordor without wielding it. It was only through stealth that Frodo managed to get the Ring into Mordor without being immediately caught.

Remember, all of the people who understood the ring and understood power (Gandalf, Elrond, Aragorn, Faramir, Galadriel, etc) were strong enough to reject the ring but wise enough to understand that they were not strong enough to control it or even handle it. Boromir was weak enough to be unable to reject the ring, and though he managed to reject it briefly it was really only Saruman's orcs killing him off that saved him from eventually succumbing to its appeal and attempting to wield it. Denethor was weak enough that the mere concept that it slipped through Faramir's fingers was enough to drive him batshit crazy.

No one who was strong enough to understand what the Ring truly was would be strong enough to carry it for any length of time. Its power was too appealing.