The LOTR Movie Site
December 14, 2000

Media Adaption
Emil H.

All the people who are ranting about things they find "wrong" with the few things we know about the movie are missing a fundamental point. The medium. You must have an understanding for the medium every story is told in, and that the same story can not be told in the exact same way in two different mediums.

When adapting a book to the film medium, there's going to be compromises. In a movie, you can't see what a character is thinking. A passage covering the details of a flower or a house could use up an entire page in a book, but in a film it would not be of any interest to see it for more than a few seconds at most. This leads to compromises and alternate ways of delivering to the audience what they would get from reading the written text.

And we must always remember that neither Peter Jackson nor you or me have a "correct" perception of these books, we merely have our own interpretations. In fact Tolkien, as any writer, had his own view of what he has written and there is NO CHANCE that you see everything as he did! Therefore we must accept this movie for what it will be: One man's interpretation of three books.

I to react to some of the images I see from the film, but come on! Wait until you've seen the film before you judge it and even then, remember that no-one - including Peter Jackson - has ever claimed this is anything more than an ambiguous attempt to visualize one view among a thousand others.