OT: The Two Tower.

[sachmo]

Just saw it, finally. Took my breath away. I am so glad the movie is good, and hopefully doing very well at the box office. If fantasy can make it's mark with the American public, we might see some other quality stories made into movies...Like George Martin, or Robert Jordan, or Eddings. Wouldn't that be something?

[Kamog]

Originally posted by sachmo:
...Like George Martin, or Robert Jordan, or Eddings. Wouldn't that be something?

Yes, David Eddings is my favorite. I have read almost all of his books, and I re-read the Elenium and Tamuli series every year! Terry Brooks is good, too, but I like Eddings' style the best. That WOULD be something!

[Puke]

spoiley below:

i have not seen it yet, but plan to in the next couple of days. some things i hear sort of distress me, so i am going to keep my expectations low, and try to view it as its own movie unrelated to the books.

the hobbits had to beg the trees for help? in the story, the trees were pretty ready to go, they just needed to take some time to talk to each other about it. it probably just took a couple days for treebeard to explain the whole thing to the rest of the ents..

aragorn fell off a cliff? what?

faramir (spelling?) tried to steal the ring? what?

they ended it before breaking sauramans staff, and retrieveing the seeing stone?

they ended it before getting sam and frodo past the spider (and frodo appearing to be dead? that was the fricking cliff hanger!)

a winged nazgul attacked someone? huh?

there was bickering between arawyn (spelling?) and agent smith? eh?

aragorn was tempted by elowyn (spelling?)? the first thing he said to her in the book, was 'sorry, im taken.'

so, it sounds like a lot of sillyness was put in. and it sounds like they ended it VERY early. whats going to be left for the return of the king? are they going to cut out everything after the battle at the gates of morodor? they have to show everyone but Arawyn leaving on the ships.. they have to show sam settling down. they cant cut that stuff out. are they going to leave out aragorn leading the army of the dead?

its going to take at least an hour of the thrid film to catch up to where they should have been at the end of the second film, and that is leaving me with alot of doubts about how the third movie is going to be. especially with what i hear has been butchered in the second movie.

[Fyron]

Yeah... they left out at least half of the events in TTT, and changed the other half.

[jimbob]

Warning: Spoiler spoiler everywhere and not a bit of Think

I'd imagine that a lot of the TTT book was left out because The Return of the King (RoK?) is such a short book - when you remove the appendix that is I'm guessing that they wanted to split the total content of the Last two books evenly to get two movies of 3 hours, instead of TTT being 4.5 hours and RoK being only 1.5 hours long. I'm fairly certain that Shelob will have her day.

As to Frodo's little jaunt to ??? packed under Theodin's arm... I think it would be pretty anticlimatic to have the ringbearer just muck about a swamp for 30-40 minutes. And while the book can convey much more of Gollums' inner workings, to give the viewer a taste for his bitterness at the betrayal by "master" it was probably better to have Gollum tied up and carried about like cord wood for a long time. In the book, it seemed like Gollum was tied up and detained by Theodin and friends for less time than it takes to get through Canadian customs! As much as I loved the book, the sympathetic portrayal of Gollum spoke much more to me in the movie.

As to the arrows fired over the wall - English Longbowmen did not fire at a target per se when firing en mass. Rather they would fire at a likely target location and hope that someone was in that place when the arrow landed. This was necessary because the distances covered were simply to far for the type of accuracy that we can get out of a gun. From the looks of the movie, the orcs were pretty well shoulder to shoulder, so the arrows were IMHO very likely to find a target.

...er, a little edit here. the "not a bit of Think" was a bit of self-mockery. I didn't intend to imply that anyone else had posted any poorly thought out Messages or anything . Yeah, anyways...

Merry Gandalfmas and a happy New Year everyone.

-jimbob

[ December 24, 2002, 02:02: Message edited by: jimbob ]