November 1, 2004

The 'movie' Legolas
Bob Praz

I would just like to say that in my opinion there was nothing horribly wrong with either Orlando's performance or his lines.

Orlando Bloom actually delivered a pretty [darn] good Legolas in my opinion, and not the least because he had some very difficult lines to say (ex: "They run as if the very whips of their masters were behind them!" ; now that's a pretty awkward thing to say if you ask me, but Orlando said it in a way that didn't sound as if he had been reading it off a page).

As for the script itself, I can't say it was either awesome or bad. Fran, Phillipa and Peter all did a surprisingly good job at taking lines from the book and placing them in the right place at the right time or at modifying them in order to better fit in the scene. Some of their own original dialogue, however, was more modest (in my opinion), especially in ROTK.
Anyhow, to arrive slowly at my point, the reason Legolas says a lot of no-brainer things is this: it's a movie, and in a movie some of the characters have to say certain things that normal people wouldn't say in real life, because everyone in the audience has to understand what's going on. Sometimes you have to add a rather simple-minded comment to make sure the story goes smoothly for everyone, or in order to confirm what the characters are thinking, even if it sounds redundant at first thought. If you watch LOTR, you notice that certain characters tend to be the ones constantly explaining things to others. Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel are the main and the most obvious examples. But when none of these characters are present in a particular scene, the "expositional" role is passed down to others slightly less worthy. In the case of Frodo and Sam, Gollum usually explains everything. With Aragorn and his two companions, Legolas is the wiser and more perceptive one (being an elf), and thus he is the first to state the obvious as well as the less obvious.