From: "Chad Cooper" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Killer Bs Discussion <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "'Killer Bs Discussion'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: Two Towers Extended DVD Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2003 11:20:05 -0800
> -----Original Message----- > From: Doug Pensinger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 9:00 PM > To: Killer Bs Discussion > Subject: Re: Two Towers Extended DVD > > > Reggie wrote: > > > > Quite possibly, but it depends on why that person nearly walked out. > > > > Reggie Bautista > > Details? Maru > > > You asked for it 8^). Deploy rant mode.... > > It's been almost a year since I've seen it, so I can't remember > everything, but several things stuck in my mind. The Warg > battle was not > in the book, not necessary to develop the story and didn't > add anything to > it other than another action sequence. Likewise with Aragorn > falling in > the river. Gimli as comic relief didn't work for me at all. > I thought > that the Ents were going to be cool when Pipin and Merry > first met up with > Treebeard, but the Entmoot was poorly done (were there more > than six Ents > in attendance?)
And it took more than a few hours as portrayed.
1) I believe this is longer in the extended version. They even added back
in the bit about the Ent water and mention of the Ent Wives.
2) The Gimli comic relief moments are still there, and I'm not particularly fond
of that, but we also get a lot more of Gimli kicking butt. What is still missing is
more of the Gimli/Legolas friendship.
and the result was contrary (and far inferior) to the > book.
I'll interject here and say I was disappointed in the way they portrayed the
search party finding Gandalf in the forest.
Eomer's story was inexplicably altered for the worse. > Theodin's > awakening was overdone as was his reaction to his son's death at the > funeral mounds. All the stuff with Elrond and Arwen was overdone and > stupid.
The sequence with Theodin works much better in the extended version, and his son is actually shown before the funeral mound sequence. He's shown alive but injured. And there's some other stuff added in, including more Wormtongue. The net result makes Theodin's reaction make more sense.
True.. All one really has to know is that Arwen gave up immortality for
Aragon, and Elrond was pissed. They could have illustrated why Aragon
wandered for 20+ years as a Ranger. This is more interesting to me. However,
these facts were in the appendixes of the book, and not part of the story
directly. It does not add much to the story.
I would have been interested in Aragorn's wanderings too, but I have no problem with bringing in "The Story of Arwen and Aragorn" (or is it "Aragorn and Arwen?") from the appendixes (appendices?). It adds more emotional depth to their relationship, and therefore more contrast against the budding relationship between Aragorn and... oh, god, I've forgotten her name. The strength of Arwen and Aragorn's love for each other is her prime motivator and an important motivator for him.
> > The best part of the movie was the Frodo/Sam/Gollum thread, but they > managed to screw that up at the end by changing the story again. The > ending was in the wrong place and completely ruined the story > for me. If > the movie was too long to end it in the right place, they > should have just > gotten rid of all the crap they made up and ended it in the > right place.
True, they spend far too much time building up the drama of the impending
Helm's deep war. The whole scene with Aragon and the young boy was stupid.
The place to end is that Frodo is dead, Sam is lost, orcs everywhere, and
Gollem on the loose. I mean, what a cliffhanger! Instead, Frodo will be dead
for only a few minutes screen time in the final movie.
Having the Shelob sequence in the second movie would have been too much and would have undercut the emotional impact of the victory at Helm's Deep. To me, it would have made the movie more cumbersome. But in reading the books, I always thought the Shelob sequence would have fit better into the beginning of the third book anyway. The cliffhanger in the book did nothing for me. I'm just weird that way.
> The frustrating thing is that all the elements were there to > make a great > movie - the Orcs, Orthanic, Helms Deep, Edoras, Minas Turith, > the Gates of > Mordor, the Marshes of the Dead, Fangorn, etc. etc., and the > actors were > all excellent.
What about the ending of the Helm's deep conflict. Gandalf arrives, they rush down the hill and the orcs lose. Why deviate from the real story? I would have rather seen the interpetation of the Ent's nighttime wholesale killing of the Orc army, piling up the bodies and lighting them on fire....
Instead, one gets the feeling that orcs are easily defeated if you take them
by a surprise flanking attack, instead of everyone thinking, damn, if it
wasn't for a bunch of pissed off trees, the humans would be all be dead
already. God help the humans when they meet up with the orcs again!
In the extended version, the flanking attack gets the orcs to run away,
perhaps to regroup, we don't know for sure because they run right into some
trees... [insert evil grin here] We don't get to see the specifics of what the
ents and/or trees do (that might have required a different MPAA rating), but
it's pretty obvious they are responsible for the demise of Saruman's army. It
happens very quickly, but at least it happens.
All they had to do was tell the story, but > they f**ked it > up. It was that much more disappointing after how well they > followed the > story in TFotR.
?? They left out and/or changed a *lot* in FotR. For example the whole
Tom Bombadil sequence was removed, the barrow wights were removed,
instead of having several months between the birthday and Frodo's exit
it seem like days at most, the entire character Fredegar Bolger was removed,
there were lots of changes during the Council of Elrond, there were *massive*
changes during the Moria sequence, the movie ends at a different point than
the book... I could go on but I won't because most of those cuts and changes
made sense. Pacing works entirely different for movies than it does for books,
and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy could easily have taken six long
movies to adapt. The trick is to tell the emotional core of the story, not
to stick slavishly to the details. Some things work really well on paper but not
at all on film, and vice versa. A really good example of this is the movie
_Contact_. The character Ellie's entire childhood history was re-arranged,
but it worked very well as a shorthand way to get to the same end result,
to put Ellie in more or less the same emotional place, without spending the
extra 45 minutes of screentime that would have been required otherwise.
I agree. I left the theater mad. There was no real good reason for any of the changes they made. The story is so much better than what they did portray.
I disagree. The changes shortened the story to manageable length, strengthened the characterization without resorting to cheesy voice-overs to show the thoughts of the characters, and worked as a very effective short-hand for the more complicated events of the book. The movie (the extended version, at least) tells the same emotional story as the book, but does it in a more succinct and more visually-oriented format. All IMHO, of course.
> Now they've got to spend a good bit of time finishing book > two in movie > three and I'm sure they'll have to axe a bunch of stuff out > of that to > make it short enough. No Scouring of the Shire, I'll bet, or if it's > there it will be severely truncated. >
I feel there is just too much in the last book to do in 120 minutes, especially since they have the last part of Two Towers to complete. While critics are praising the movie already, I suspect I will be disappointed.
Peter Jackson has said publicly from pretty much day one that the Scouring
of the Shire will not be included in the third movie. The only nod to Scouring
is the sequence (which I believe was in the original theatrical cut of The Two
Towers) where Pippin wants to give up and go back to the Shire, but Merry
says if we give up, or if the war is lost, there won't be a Shire to go back to.
During this conversation there are flashes of Hobbiton in flames and hobbits
wearing disheveled clothes and marching in chains.
There were no more changes in The Two Towers than there were in Fellowship, and in fact I think the extend version of Two Towers actually has fewer changes from the book than Fellowship had. But even still, the extended version of Two Towers looks and feels to me like a whole different movie. I liked the theatrical release, but I love the extended version.
YMMV, of course. If you're interested in giving it a chance, maybe you should consider renting or borrowing a copy of the extended version, so if you're still disappointed at least you won't be out thirty bucks.
Reggie Bautista
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