February 12, 2003

But Does It Work?
Matthew F.

"Is the film faithful to the book?"

There is more than one way to go about answering this question. You can divide and subdivide the facts of the story and compare their presentation in the two forms. Do the Orcs carrying Merry and Pippin quarrel among themselves? If so, why? Does Aragorn wield a sword? OK, what's the name of his sword? What's the name of his horse? How many Elves are at Helm's Deep? How noble is Faramir? But you can also ask more broadly if the film - while telling basically the same story as the book - leaves you with the same impression and feeling as the book does.

To me, someone who greatly enjoys the books, this second question is far more important than the first. And I thought the two films so far captured the spirit of Tolkien very well - the second more consistently than the first for me. The films FELT like Tolkien.

Why is the spirit and feel more important to me than the facts and events? Because it is the deeply felt moods of Tolkien's works that sets them apart. His characters often contain a good dose of caricature, and he uses cliched plot twists all the time. Of course, not all the character and plot development in Lord of the Rings is cliched, but to act like hints of cliche in the films are "so un-Tolkien-like" is to suffer from selective memory. I do not think the spectacle and cliche bring the books down, because Tolkien makes them WORK; he combines them into this great tapestry of emotion and mood. Many stories (and tons of films pumped out by Hollywood) contain spectacle and cliche that do not work. I walked out of the LotR films thrilled because, due to the work of Peter Jackson and his hundreds of coworkers, the spectacle and cliche worked there too. Maybe you feel differently.