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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.
Nothing can ever beat that cartoon.
I swear I read that as "The production has struggled recently with issues with Unicorns, and a fire."
Let's wait until there actually is an agreement made before we start celebrating. This thing has been "real close" to taking the next step too many times now.
I don't know why but I think I laughed for a few minutes when I read "The production has struggled recently with issues with Unions, and a fire." Is that so wrong?
I do look forward to the hobbit, one of the few books I ever read..
Fugga Wugga
With the producers, director, actors, production crews, and distributors facing off in a lawsuit -- a great Battle of Five Armies over a huge pile of gold.
Don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to throwing my $10 on the pile. I'm sure the film itself will be great.
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If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
ie. They're going to milk this for all it's worth.
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You know, with Duke Nukem Forever actually looking like it's going to come out, it's a shame that we're losing such a great internet meme, because I was just about to say how The Hobbit is starting to look like the Duke Nukem Forever of the film world. :(
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
The Hobbit was the most boring of the Tolkien books, but hey, I'm all for a movie!
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
They slipped a ring around all the issues they were having, and they just disappeared, later to be stabbed to death by these horsemen in black cloaks...
"The production has struggled recently with issues with Unions, and a fire." However, production has resumed smoothly following the ritualistic burning of the union leaders at the stake.
I'd almost forgotten the skateboarding elf, thanks.
Yet another opportunity to wear funny glasses for three hours and have pointy objects thrust at me repeatedly.
Maybe he'll buck the trend and NOT do it in 3D?
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
ok... I know the books are always better than the films, a film can't conceivably cover what you can cover in several hundred printed pages, but I thought the LOTR films were pretty well done.
Why the hate?
I'm in the dear god no camp... Why can't Hollywood find something original to do. I'm still waiting for the sequel to Moby Dick ;)
Two parts? Really? Oh right, forgot Hollywood credo #2: Profit.
"You killed my yogurt!" --Fred Fredburger
While it could be said that -any- movie wasn't as good as the book, I really thought that the LoTR trilogy was really, really well done. Now, if you want to see a good book series get murdered in film, look at the Narnia movies...
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It began with the forging of the Great Rings. Three were given to the artists and writers; wisest and most creative of all beings. Seven, to the union actors, great visionaries and craftsmen of the stage. And nine, nine rings were gifted to the studio execs, who above all else desire power. For within these rings was bound the strength and the will to govern over each group. But they were all of them deceived, for a new ring was made. In the land of New Zealand, in the fires of Mount Cook, the Dark Lord Peter Jackson forged in secret, a master ring, to control all others.
He left out Tom Bombadil and the ending (the scourging of the Shire, or something like that?). I would consider those things potentially worthy of hate.
I'll agree with that...
Other than about 20 seconds worth of film, I think the LOTR films were a far better adaptation of the books than I thought possible.
When I heard that the story was coming out on film, I was expecting a treatment like "I, Robot" got - schlock only vaguely related to the book. Instead, we got a movie that captured the feel of the books almost perfectly, and told the same story. The movie was better for the visuals - it fleshed the world out much better than my puny imagination had been able to do.
I've never quite understood the haters, either.
And the worms ate into his brain.
The studios pulled the infamous Hollywood Accounting scam, of trying to pretend that LOTR didn't make any money, in order to keep from paying Jackson his contractual shares of profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
I'd suspect that they must have come to some sort of an agreement with Jackson. Either setting up payment on what they owe in LOTR, or sweetening the $ from the Hobbit in some way in order to make up for it.
What's even more interesting to me, is that the article doesn't mention this at all. The article reads so much like a press release that I wonder if it's cribbed directly from a couple of different press releases.
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Neither of those chapters contribute to the story as a whole. Remember that (in the movies) Saruman died at Isengard, so the episode of the Shire wouldn't make sense. Also Tom Bombadil IMHO doesn't make sense with the darkish setting of the story.
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(always wanted to do that)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Okay, but cutting short Bill the Pony's story is unforgivable.
1997 called and wants their web site back.
I always wondered if the fact that Hobbits were used to eating 'shrooms and smoking their special tobacco is what made them slightly more resilient to the promises of the ring, and therefore the ideal ring-bearers, but the movie pretty much strips out all of that without really explaining why Hobbits are better suited to carry the ring than, say, the giant eagle (who presumably could have dropped off the ring in a couple of hours and been back in time for tea).
I would have preferred he left the undead army thing from ROTK out to be honest. Kinda made the whole struggle feel pointless when there was an army with noclip and god mode fighting that comes along and defeats the bad guys with ease.
And can you imagine ROTK with the attack on the Shire? People already complained about how long the ending dragged on. :p
is why they didn't do this with LOTR, each of the books were in two parts anyway (can't remember if the hobbit was or not) and they could've had a lot more detail and content. Bombadil? The elves in the shire? The scouring of the shire?
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I would have at least filmed it to put in as a bonus feature on the DVD.
Personally, I'm glad I didn't have to watch Orlando Bloom sing "Hey Diddle Diddle" stretched out to 13 verses.
Technoli
I think this is well explained in the books and in the movie, though somewhat in the subcontext: hobbits have so little power and are so devoid of ambitions (other than living a very simple life) that the Ring doesn't have a strong effect on them. It would corrupt a powerful being such as a Maia (such as Gandalf) or a great Eagle. Moreover, that might explain why the Ring has absolutely no effect on Tom Bombadil. But maybe I'm seeing too much.
I was always under the impression that the hobbits were not so easily corrupted by the ring, because their race had never wielded rings of power nor had any made for them, unlike the elves, dwarves and men. I guess the smoking also help, because it indicates a lifestyle that's about enjoying life, not accumulating power of some kind (power over nature, metal or other beings).
That may be the result of context priming. I also read "Unicorns" and my glasses are perfect.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yqVD0swvWU
Well it's fantasy so take your pick:
1. It was guarded by the Nazgul. Only after the destruction of the ring are the eagles able to reach the mountain.
2. Their half-animal minds lack the strength of character and will to subdue the ring.
3. If the eagles could not resist using the ring near Sauron then he would sense it and send his minions.
If you look at the other members of the fellowship, they're pretty much all driven by some sort of ambition. It might be that Frodo isn't *that* special, but none of the other are really suited to the task, it would have to be another "nobody" that does not desire power. Or it might be Hobbit society, which you can see is far less war-torn than Elves or Men or Dwarfs and so instills a natural goodness in hobbits that the others don't have.
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It wasn't what was cut so much as what was changed:
Merri and Pippin weren't bumbling fools who accidentally kinna tagged along, they were dear friends who wanted to help and wouldn't let Frodo go without them.
There were no elves at Helm's Deep.
Faramir was a better man than his brother and didn't try to take Frodo or the ring back to Minas Tirith.
Shelob was a fabulous ending to the Two Towers but lost drama in the middle of RotK.
Aragon wasn't hiding from his heritage, he carried the broken blade with him as a reminder of his destiny (although he was cynical about it).
Arwen wasn't a bad-ass who could out-class the wraiths, Glorfindal was the bad-ass warrior who afforded the hobbits some protection so they could get to Rivendell.
Just a few examples off the top of my head, the main thing was how many character that were fundamentally "wrong" when compared to the books.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
I was always under the impression that the hobbits were not so easily corrupted by the ring, because their race had never wielded rings of power nor had any made for them, unlike the elves, dwarves and men.
Gollum was a Hobbit
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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.
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Not to mention that the undead army never made it to Pelannor Fields. They defeated the Corsairs of Umbar, were released from service, and the reinforcements came from the freed slaves and the now un-besieged coastal region.
Allowing Saruman his final chance of redemption (to wait out the war & think about why he (and other Istari) was sent to middle earth), show that even Fangorn was susceptible to Saruman's final evil skill (voice), and show the damage which can still be caused by a hollowed out "powerless" voice set loose among a good-natured group such as the Shire, cheats Gandalf and Saruman of character and Tolkien of some of his more subtle points. Not to mention cheating the Shire of it's endurance before and hard-will after the rising sparked by the returning hobbits.
Maybe if they would've hired Ivan Doroschuk for that, it would have worked. The "Safety Dance" video comes quite near to how I imagined the Tom Bombadil chapter while reading LOTR:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs
The movie was better for the visuals - it fleshed the world out much better than my puny imagination had been able to do.
Agreed, my favorite scene was Argonath, which looked way better on screen then it ever could in my head.
I think most of the appropriate criticism lies in the character depictions. I'm not sure that humanized and angry Elves or a bumbling dwarf is what Tolkien had in mind. Its hard for me to watch as Elrond gets worked up and emotional about things, or when Gimli plays a part in dick and fart jokes.
However, the films remain in my library and get watched as they are still pretty amazing. Its hard to believe that Hollywood could do any better then this.
I don't hate the movies - they definitely look cool and were cool to watch - but I strongly disagree that they captured the feel of the book. The book had completely different themes and characters that acted and felt much differently. There were some things changed just for cheap dramatic reasons - Treebeard was determined to march to Isenguard in the book, and he held an Entmoot to convince as many other Ents as possible to come along, which wasn't hard. As Treebeard explained, they all wanted to because of the terrible things Saruman had done, and the Ents felt like it was the last thing they could do for the world before they all fell into their tree-sleep. In the movie, the Ents say no, so Merry and Pippin have to resort to tricking Treebeard - supposedly the oldest and wisest guy alive - into going into a rage and unilaterally ordering the Ents to attack. That's the kind of thing that bothers people, I think. Elrond, Denethor, Faramir, and others get the same kind of treatment.
The Scouring of the Shire was a crucial part of the book. There were signs that something was amiss in The Shire from the beginning of the book, and Elrond wanted to send Merry and Pippin back from Rivendell to The Shire so that the Hobbits could be roused against the threat, and he is only convinced against his better judgment. In Lothlorien, Sam sees in Galadriel's mirror the destruction of The Shire and wants very badly to go back, but Galadriel explains that it's foolish to make decisions based on the mirror. When everyone arrives in Isenguard, they find Hobbit pipe-weed that Saruman has been importing on a large scale. At one point, Saruman warns the Hobbits that they should hurry back home, and Gandalf mentions more than once that Hobbits and The Shire, previously unknown to Sauron, are taking his full attention now. So in the end, the Hobbits and Gandalf return - but Gandalf leaves before they arrive in The Shire, because his work is done, and what remains is up to them to deal with (and Gandalf evidently knows something.) The Hobbits return to The Shire, drive out all the Men, and rebuild it as best they can - a work that is greatly aided by Galadriel's gift to Sam. But when they find out Saruman is behind it at all, Frodo forgives him and tells him to go on his way.
That's a very important part of the book. Despite everything Saruman had done, Frodo forgave him and wanted him to have another chance at redemption - and for Saruman, that was the worst fate imaginable. Of course, his chance didn't last too long since Wormtongue stabbed him in the back right afterwards. :) But The Scouring of the Shire wrapped up two big themes in the book. One, that there's a price to be paid if you go out and accomplish great things. The Hobbits as a whole saw The Shire ruined, but the fate of the whole world had rested on all the Hobbits going. If Merry had not gone, the Nazgul would have claimed many more victims. If Pippin had not looked into the Palantir, Gandalf might have been lost and Aragorn wouldn't have known he needed to lead the dead (which were harmless in the book; they could only instill great fear). If they both hadn't gone, the Ents might have been involved too late. If Sam had not gone, then Frodo would have failed. If Frodo didn't go, then, well. The Hobbits made a necessary sacrifice, even if they didn't know it at the time. This was also symbolized by Frodo's strange illnesses until he left for the West, and his inability to really enjoy life. The second one was of redemption and the growth of the Hobbits - even Saruman deserved a second chance.
You can say just as much about the other things that were left out or changed. Even Bombadil. If you've read the background materials on Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, you know that Tolkien wrote, rewrote, rewrote, and rewrote every story he wrote, including Lord of the Rings, which took him over ten years to finish, and was only a side-story to his
Wow... Hobbits little.
Gandalf big. Magic.
Ring..... ooooohhh.
Must pet my precious.... yes pet it... pet it good.
Oooohhh.... sticky.
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I've never quite understood the haters, either.
Dwarf tossing? Skateboarding elves...? Ick.
(But yeah, it's a pretty damn good representation of the book even if it isn't true to the details)
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I don't know how I stumbled across this but here is an interesting theory about Tom Bombadil being Sauron. It's from a Usenet posting circa 1996.
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And did he use it to seek power? No. He crawled into a hole in the earth and ate cave fish.
two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit early next year
The Hobbit was the shortest book in the series. It was a much easier read then the actual Lord of the Rings series. Why does it need to be TWO movies? I bet I could read The Hobbit in less time then it'll take to watch this movie!
I'm getting so sick of Jackson's super-extended movies that I think I'm just going to pass on this one. I don't need to watch Bilbo fly on the back of a bird for 20 minutes because Jackson just can't bear to cut any frames out.
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The basic premise is that lesser races (from a magic affinity perspective) have less power over the rings(ie - Elrond's ring in the hands of a human would be probably 1/5th as effective) and if you go far enough down the line, you get to Hobbits and the like, which are about as magical as a doorstop. But that's good as well, since they are less likely to be corrupted by them. It's the classic story of the everyman outwitting the elite and powerful. Just a thousand pages or so long ;)
As for the movie's visually, I was also amazed at how close to the book they came. I'd say that 75% of it was spot-on with what I had imagined when I first read the series.
The lesser Rings weren't (exactly) related. It was apparently an innate property of Hobbits - even Gollum should have faded away a long time before the story began. Speculations on why the Hobbits should have such a property I think everyone else in this thread explained better than I could.
The Rings for the other races are an interesting question, though. The Elves alone made their three rings, so it's understandable they wouldn't corrupt the Elves, and there's no reason why the Ring of Power wouldn't corrupt Elves, especially High Elves like Galadriel. Men need no explanation. But Dwarves...we learn in the Lord of the Rings that Dwarves could not be corrupted by the rings Sauron gave them, and they would not fade away. The only thing Sauron could get them to do was inflame the Dwarves' natural greed for wealth, which Sauron could then manipulate (if he was lucky) to bring about their demise. But as far as we are told, it's a perfectly natural Dwarven greed, not the evil corrupting greed we would expect. So to what degree would Dwarves be affected by the One Ring, anyway? Unlike Elves and Men, Dwarves were designed by their creator Aule to specifically have a lot of endurance and incorruptibility. So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
I've never know why people complain about Tom Bombadil being left out. It was IDIOTIC, and complete jarring to the flow of the story. As the the scourging of the shire, after ALL that happened, it was very anticlimactic. The only good thing about it is that it should how much the four hobbits had grown in experience and confidence.
Maybe that's the version you need.
Some of us like the fact that instead of trying to stuff the entirety of the Lord of the Rings into a single movie, or two movies, or even three short movies, Jackson went all the way and immersed us in Middle Earth for several hours. I dislike that Saruman's demise was altered, and the departure at the end of RotK went on too long, but I am happy that Jackson gave us a full, meaty interpretation of the books.
The Hobbit is a shorter work, but it's easy to envision it as a two-part film. An awful lot happens to Bilbo & Co. on the way to Lake Town. The time in Mirkwood alone could be fertile ground for some great visual storytelling. The second part of the book would work nicely as a second film. Lake Town gets torched, Smaug needs to be dealt with, and everyone wants in on the game.
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The Scourging of the Shire is a _major_ point of the LoTR story--it's not only that you must stand up against evil, but that once your innocence is lost in the fight, you can never go home again. The hobbits have been changed by their adventures and are no longer who they were when they left home, and their home has changed too... none of them (though most poignantly Frodo) can have the life they had in the way it was when they left.
Hollywood is forever getting this wrong. When I was a youngster, I walked out of a movie (Labyrinth, if anyone's seen it) at the end because after all the heroine goes through to move on beyond her childish world and take responsibility, she's allowed to go right back into the imaginary world. So what was the point of her learning maturity during her quest if she's just going to shrug it off?
I do wonder what they're teaching in the schools these days...
ack! Too late! "The Hobbit" directed by Guillermo Del Toro is now the great lost films of our generation. I really hope there's a chance of re-attaching him to the project. His lightness of touch with fantasy would have suited this material so well.
Last time I felt like this was the canning of Darren Aronofsky's "Batman: Year One"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_Year_One#Canceled_film
which would have been pretty awesome too....
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
That is interesting. I always just thought Tom was JRR Tolkien.
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Not Sauron, but the Witch-king of Angmar, who is the leader of the Nazgul. Interesting link though, thanks.
Honestly, If you think Tom doesn't belong, that's fine. But you're missing a whole depth to the story by thinking that.
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
> two-part version of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit
Huh? He fit the Ring books into a film each, yet the Hobbit, smaller than any of them, needs two parts? Uggg.
Well in a nutshell you got the gist but not much of the details. First it is set in world of magic and fantasy. If you don't like reading or watching this genre, you'd never like it. Second, there is a longer backstory. But the basics of what you glossed over or missed: There is one major evil in this world, Sauron. Centuries ago other rings of power were made that gave their wearers some magical powers. However Sauron indirectly contributed to their making and secretly made his one ring that would control the others. The one ring contains the bulk of his magic but also is tainted by his presence. He was defeated in a great battle and lost his one ring centuries ago. He is not dead and anyone who controls the one ring controls a great deal of power. Some however realize that his taint means no one individual should ever wield that much power. Thus some characters like Boromir want to use the ring while others like the elves want to destroy the ring (and thus him).
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The Scouring of the Shire was the chapter Tolkien said he wrote first. Without it you don't have the ending of the books in the movie. It may not be important to the boring old action-adventure plot, but it's vital to tying up the underlying themes of the books.
I can sort of see skipping past Tom, since he confuses a lot of readers too. He was mostly a tie-in to earlier stories and difficult to understand in a movie setting without a lot of background info. The Barrow Downs would have been nice to see though.
There's a problem with explanation #1, though: the Nazgul weren't yet mounted on flying creatures when the Quest was planned (or if they were, the good guys didn't know about it yet). Remember that four months later, when Legolas shot down a Nazgul's mount, the Company still didn't know what it was.
Correct! It would appear that in my excitement to post something relevant I didn't let the facts get in the way. I stumbled across this link about a month ago and my awesome memory did the rest.
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The themes of the book are lost in translation.
And in place of them we get... environmentalism as the main theme. :-\
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
only #1 works, otherwise Frodo could just ride an eagle
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That is interesting. I always just thought Tom was JRR Tolkien.
No. Tom is just a doll that his children played with when they were kids. He put Tom in to amuse them. Later he denied that Tom was Eru (God) and that not everything in the LOTR should be explainable.
So would they have the same kind of Hobbit One Ring-resistance?
No. Even the lesser rings they had did corrupt them and brought Evil to the Dwarves. Sauron could not control them, the way he could Men so his plot "failed'. But research what happened to each of the 7 Ring Bearers of the Dwarves...
In Letters, JRRT says there are only a few beings in Arda that can control and use the 1 ring - pretty much Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.
You had to have Great Power yourself to master the One Ring. No mortal could do it and dwarves are technically mortals.
Every one else attempting to use the Ring would eventually fail and Sauron would eventually prevail. The Ring is part of Sauron after all...
Interesting article, but how the hell did you mess up your summary? ("being Sauron.") Are you applying for a job as a /. editor?
Like all things, it's not the tool but the wielder that affects the performance. If you give me a professional $10K DSLR camera my pictures might be a little better but it's not going to be as great as a professional would have been taking the same pictures. Hobbits do not know how to use magic. This was in part why they were chosen to be ring bearers; they can't really too dangerous even if seduced by the power. The ring would have been far more dangerous in the hands of the elves or Gandalf or men. Gandalf conscientiously did not want the ring because it would have tainted him. If you have a chance to review the scenes with Gandalf and ring, he makes a conscious effort never to touch the ring. He almost picked it up when Bilbo left it on the floor but instead had Frodo pick it up later.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Exactly. It took a long time for Gollum to be corrupted, and even then the corruption wasn't absolute.
Remember that Smeagol, for a brief while, was the dominate personality. No other creature could have possessed the ring for that long and still have a portion of them free from its will. Except Tom Bombadil, over whom the ring has no power.
However, I don't agree with the GP that the Hobbit immunity is due to never having wielded rings. I think closer to the truth is that they have a natural resistance to evil.
Do they have elections for these positions? I check /. when I wake up and I was on autopilot. You should be pleased the link works ;)
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It wasn't what was cut so much as what was changed:
Exactly.
Before he did it, I would have said that the Fellowship of the Ring was un-Filmable.
I have a few nitpicks with it but it captures the flavor of the book without too many major character changes. Yes, Merry and Pippen were made comic relief along with the dwarf.
But instead of changing things whole cloth and adding stuff to make the scene "dramatically interesting", in the FOTR, he had to just cut cut cut. There was too much material there to try to film everything and condensing things like Arwen and Glorfindel made sense.
In the other movies, he started adding nonsense that wasn't in the books. This is where he went wrong. All he had to do was stick with the story and characters and CUT where needed...
The post's called "Tolkien Crackpot Thories" for a reason...
Jokes aside, i't actually pretty interesting. As a theory, that is.
1. Meh...
2. You never se him and Galadriel together, either, doesn't mean they're one and the same.
3. If the Witch-King had such fear of his master, he wouldn't be playing the whole Tom cross-dressing thing at all...
4. Maybe the glint was because he didn't like the guys, which is the same reaction of pretty much everyone else who's told of the black riders.
5. I always found this fascinating. Remember that, once someone wore the Ring, they would exist in two distinct worlds, just as the Elves. Bombadil might've simply been able to see both worlds, who knows?
6. If someone could wear the Ring without disappearing... Hell, if I knew of someone who refused the ring simply because he didn't want the damn thing, I'd no doubt be doing whatever he said, no questions asked.
I always wondered if the fact that Hobbits were used to eating 'shrooms and smoking their special tobacco
Pipeweed is not tobacco. I mean, would a wizard smoke something as bad for you as tobacco?
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>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
I think the ring's effect on an animal went unanswered. The only reason in the LOTR universe I can think of rejecting an eagle dropping it is that wizards seem to have almost complete power over animals. If Gandalf sent an eagle to drop it off in the middle of the ocean then Sauron could order it to come to him. Of course we have the scenario of Frodo riding an eagle but we have the same problem.
We can also build a powerful catapult, attach the ring to a rock, and launch it into the sea from a boat, but in a world of magic even then the bottom of the ocean isn't exactly safe. In the LOTR universe there may be creatures able to go that low and grab the ring and when they hit their maximum elevation in the ocean they hand it off to another species until there's a dolphin handing the ring off to Sauron. Actually, now that I think about it, that would make a great visual scene. Cthulu-like thing handing it to a blind octopus, octopus handing it to a lobster, lobster handing it to a catfish, etc. In other words, an excuse based on magic could dispel any obvious approaches.
A good article explaining why doesn't Frodo just ride an eagle to mount doom.
Yeah, everyone kept saying that in the movies. But the weasel and Frodo sure didn't seem very powerful to me. Even the bad guy must not have been too powerful if he lost the damn thing in the first place. I kept waiting for one of the humans, fairies, or Oompa-Loompas to ask where all this supposed power WAS anyway. Seems like Mr. Powerful Ring Bearer spent most of the movies running from shit.
Centuries ago other rings of power were made that gave their wearers some magical powers. However Sauron indirectly contributed to their making and secretly made his one ring that would control the others.
Ergo, the power was in the control of the kings of men, dwarves, and elves. The elves didn't start using their rings until Sauron lost the One Ring. Anyone could have exerted this control if they knew how, and Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel certainly knew how.
make it in 3D!
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
Now, if you want to see a good book series get murdered in film, look at the Narnia movies...
No joke. The nearly incorruptible King Caspian becomes a spoiled brat willing to consider ultimate evil. I bet he slays the dragon in the upcoming movie, and Eustace is never redeemed.
And in The Shining [1980], Kubrick left out the explosion of the boiler. God that movie sucks.
The books are good, the movie adaptations are good. The movie doesn't suck because a character that isn't integral to the plot is missing.
Yeah, you liked Tom Bombadil like a favourite uncle but he didn't contribute to the story.
What was more annoying was the Aragorn/Arwen angle that took away from the momentum of the story. Still not worth the hate.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Bad Theory. Frodo gave the ring to Bombadil to look at and Bombadil showed that he had power over the ring, something the Witch King would not have, so Bombadil is not the Witch King. If he was then he would have taken it immediately back to his master, Sauron, but he didn't, he gave it back to Frodo, something the Witch King would never have done. Elrond's refusal to let Bombadil keep the ring is more out of his understanding that Bombadil, though powerful, could not be trusted as he would just as easily misplace it as keep it safe. (An alternative no better than throwing it in the deep ocean hoping it lost forever. Elrond wanted the ring destroyed and guided the council to that purpose.)
Bombadil is an enigma that Tolkien purposefully never wanted explained. The theory I prefer is that he and Goldberry are one of the Aniur that was appointed to do a task, probably by Manwë, in that area of Middle Earth in the Third Age.
I think the Bombadil thing was explained in the book itself. Something about him being older than just about everything else...so he's beyond the ring's power. I think Tom was supposed to be a Maiar, which is a level below the Valar. Melian from the First Age was a Maiar. I think Sauron was as well. If this is the case, either Maiar can be of varying ages and powers, or Tolkien wasn't as careful with his historical organization.
IMHO the worst thing he did was cutting short the Entmoot :)
What is _NOT_ explained anywhere in tolkien literature or letters is the exact origin of the Hobbits. They just appeared out of nowhere in the Third Age. It is my belief that Hobbits were created as a counter to Sauron's, and earlier Melkor's, evil. The quiet, simple melody Ilúvatar introduced to take back control of the great song of the ainur from Melkor. They simply had a natural resistance to the power of the ring as designed by Ilúvatar.
This is from "Bored of the Rings", funny as hell parody.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
Not to mention that it turns an entire battle scene into a bloodless cakewalk. I mean, granted the books weren't gorefests but come on, a huge battle with really no casualties on either side? No one bleeds when shot with an arrow or attacked with a sword?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'm not sure that humanized and angry Elves...
After having read the silmarillion, that's precisely why I liked Tolkien's elves. They weren't protypical 'good'; they were generally good but they committed their share of atrocities...
And of course because they excised the Bombadil subplot they also cut the Barrow Blades subplot so there was no explanation for how the sword hurt the witch-king. I mean if regular swords would hurt the fucker you'd think someone would've just stabbed him in the face by then...