Anyone plan on watching the Amazon series? I was excited at first but considering the time we live in I’m wary. I have to read the rest of the Trilogy and I found the Simillarion for 1.50. I heard the show will adapt the Simillarion. I was excited about the Wheel of Time series till I heard that the idiot director has more interest in women points than adapting the story. I’m on book 11 of that series.
So is anyone giving LOTR a chance?
Well, I'm not.
The Silmarillion is my favorite book of the franchise. Frankly I agree with the conventional wisdom of the past that you simply can't adapt it for screen. Dune is hard to adapt. Silmarillion is impossible to adapt. You can't tell a third person omniscient story with gods on the screen and have it come out serious.
That's true, but even without that trying to adapt the Silmarillion would be a lost cause IMO. Its more a history/legends book rather than a straight narrative. You've got time-skips all over the place, you've got major characters dropping in and dropping out, and things just aren't fleshed out in enough detail for a film.
Take the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, for example. It's one of the most important battles in Middle Earth history, and yet the whole thing (in my paperback copy anyway) - from the planning to the last axe swing - is 9 pages. Hollywood is just incapable of dealing with that sort of thing. Peter Jackson's Hobbit treatment suggests they'll want to expand it out into a massive battle sequence there's just not enough information for that short of making it half an hour of elf on orc (and vice versa) stabbing sequences. And we saw how that panned out with tons of dwarf on orc (and vice versa) stabbing sequences.
The fact that the Hobbit movies can be condensed by a fan into a 4hr version that is literally an exact adaptation of the book, and still be coherent, shows you how good the production team was. Literally all the complaints about them can be removed without messing it up too much. It also shows how bad Hollywood is at fucking with a good thing.
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