Editing The Lord of the Rings (section)

==The Movies (and one TV show)==
===Old School===
There had been some talk about a film adaptation through the 50s through the early 70s (including with ''The Beatles'' trying to be the Hobbit quartet!), but it largely did not go anywhere. Mostly because doing it justice in live action was waaay beyond what could be reasonably done in 1960 (large-scale Medieval battles were one thing, but unless you fancy the thought of a claymation Balrog, the more fantastical elements would have never looked good).

[[Ralph Bakshi]] made an animated film based off the Fellowship of The Ring and the first half of The Two Towers, which was released in 1978. The resulting film was trippy, to say the least. It has a lot of weird animation with massive amounts of [[wikipedia:Rotoscoping|rotoscoping]], although it does work from time to time. It also decided to make adjustments and stay faithful to the text in the oddest ways. Many lines of dialogue were taken from the books word for word, with enough cut out so that you don't know what they are talking about and it does not come across as natural conversation; for example, Saruman declares himself Saruman of Many Colors without explaining the name change, but they decide to make a prince of Gondor (the largest and greatest civilization in Middle-earth at the time) dress like a Wagner opera viking. While it does have some good points here and there the end result both leaves you both weirded out and bored unless you are really into that era of animation.

It's worth noting that, despite his reputation, some of the weirdness of the movie is not actually due to Bakshi. Executive meddling was ''rampant'' during the production, one of the most infamous examples of which is with Saruman. Midway through, execs decided that Saruman sounded too much like Sauron and would confuse audiences, so they went behind Bakshi's back and had the VAs start referring to him as "Aruman" instead. [[derp|Without redubbing the lines that had already been recorded up to that point]]. Bakshi didn't find out until it was too late to fix, and as a result characters throughout the movie alternate between Saruman and Aruman. In spite of it's shortcomings it did do reasonably well at the box office ($33.7 Million at the box office for the US, UK and Canada against it's $4.5 million budget) which if nothing else got some film and tv execs to think "okay, maybe there is some money in these fairy-tales-for-grown-ups".

Rankin Bass produced a Return of the King animated film in 1980, a made for TV movie which didn't have near the budget. It traded in most of the trippiness (even if it does have Orcs transforming into Coutimundis) for being more mundanely bad and getting pushed into the animation age ghetto, since again, it was made for TV not theaters in an age when censorship ran strong. They couldn't even allow for people getting hit with swords onscreen. That's not even mentioning how much they cut, up to and including ''entire characters'' (like Legolas and Gimli), and giving Theoden one of the lamest deaths in animation movie history.

However, even though it's hard to deny the movie as a whole is objectively bad, there are a few gems in Rankin Bass's  Return of the King that rival, or are arguably even ''better'' than the Jackson movies. Sam's portrayal in particular is very good (certainly ''leagues'' better than in the Bakshi version, as low a bar as that might be), showing him as a strong and fearless friend, and one of the only people in all Middle Earth ''ever'' to hold an awakened One Ring in his hand, in Morder where it's at its most powerful, took the best shot it could hit him with, [[awesome|and told the Ring to fuck off]]. The portrayal of the Ring itself is also quite good, with it having a much more active malign influence than it does in the Jackson films. The Ring doesn't just passively corrupt people, it ''tempts'' them, feeding those who hold it visions of all the things they could do with it, all the power they could have, and it even delivers a taste of that power, with a weakened and exhausted Frodo able to stand strong and confident just by holding the Ring, enough to even scare the shit out of Gollum.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cr_rb_pitHk If you are curious about the Bakshi film and have an hour to kill, Dan Olson has a pretty good video essay on the subject]

===The Peter Jackson Trilogy===
But those two movies are footnotes compared to the ones that you have most likely seen, those being Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. By far the most financially successful and critically acclaimed fantasy films of all time, including winning Best Picture at the Academy Awards, which generally go for historical pieces and similar, not fantasy or sci-fi. It helped bring fantasy to mainstream audiences and probably why many of you are you are here now. It has massive battles made possible by groundbreaking special effects technology. The films also have incredible amounts of attention to detail to bring the world of Middle-earth to life. While some changes were made (as was inevitable in adaptation), many of them were for the better such as developing Aragorn as a character rather than just a mythic archetype, making Arwen an actual character, and having Gollum being accidentally thrown into Mount Doom fighting with Frodo over the One Ring. [[This Guy|In short what happens when you get a lot of skilled passionate people together to make something they love come to life.]] [[Skub|Though apparently Tolkien's son really hated the movies for some reason (Probably for personal reasons as the original books were written in part for him. Ostensibly it was because of the films emphasis on action setpieces etc. as opposed to the more “low-key” elements of world-building etc.)]]. Nowadays the films continue to enjoy a great reputation apart from the folks who refuse to abide even the tiniest changes made to the source material.

PJ followed this up with a series on ''[[The Hobbit]]'', which we handle in its own [[skub|totally unbiased and sober]] page [[The Hobbit|here]].

===Amazon's Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power===
{{Fail}}{{HurfDurf}}

{{Topquote|There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of man for this treachery.|Tolkien fans}}

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{{Topquote|There can be no trust between hammer and rock. Eventually, one or the other must surely break.|Durin, accurately describing the relationship between Amazon and the fans}}
{{Topquote|Give me the meat, and give it to me raw!|Durin, speaking to Elrond once he got away from his wife}}

'''TL;DR:''' Amazon's made a new show that, due to their own actions and statements, basically killed any goodwill long-time fans may have had towards it before before the first episode aired. It's been to ''Lord of the Rings'' what ''Netflix's Cowboy Bebop'' was to ''Cowboy Bebop.''

'''ABANDON ALL HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE'''
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Half a decade after ''The Hobbit'' trilogy's derpy conclusion, Amazon announced, with much fanfare, that they were going to make a streaming series based on Tolkien's Legendarium. Given the unreadable and generally obscure nature of the subject to mainstream audiences (moviegoers), fans reacted with wary interest and curiosity. The Second Age, while at least being somewhat familiar as the backstory to LOTR and given five minutes of depiction in the film's prologue, only takes up two chapters in the Silmarillion. That excitement quickly devolved into seething irritation and [[Rage|rage]].  This began at the first major warning sign; the firing of Amazon's resident Tolkien consultant Tom Shippey (a British medievalist who has written six books and several academic papers on Tolkien's work, who even met and worked with Tolkien himself at the same university) and his subsequent replacement by someone far less qualified, far less experienced and heavily invested in [[SJW|modern identity politics]].  Given this happening shortly after the death of Christopher Tolkien - the one person in the Tolkien estate protective of his father's work - it was clear there was an agenda.  Then it came out that Amazon '''didn't actually have the rights to any of the Legendarium works'''.  They had spent several hundred million dollars only buying rights to the names, people, and events named in the Appendices, and are unable to reference anything else. 

Worse, the showrunners had no screenwriting or directing credits to their name, only being hired after J.J. Abrams vouched for them. Their most famous work was uncredited rewrites to "punch up" the script of ''[[Star Trek|Star Trek: Into Darkness]]''. Even if they were willing to write whatever Amazon demanded of them, it was seen as bizarre for Amazon to risk their literally billion-dollar investment on completely amateur leaders.  One can only assume it was done to spite the showrunners originally attached to the project, who had been fired by Amazon Studio head Jennifer Salke and went on to produce the critically acclaimed ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire|House of the Dragon]]''.  Several of the main actors themselves were either inexperienced or complete newcomers, most noticeable with the actress playing Galadriel.  Supposedly, ''The Rings of Power'' was the product of Jeff Bezos wanting to have his own ''Game of Thrones'' for Prime Streaming. There were rumors that the show would be incredibly violent and gratuitously sexual (early in production people spotted a job posting for an intimacy coordinator, and there's only one reason why you'd hire such a person), in stark contrast to Tolkien's works, and many expected the worst. Another popular theory is that Amazon simply bought the rights so that no one else can have them, and then spend the minimum effort required to fulfill their contractual obligations to the Tolkien Estate. 

The final nail in the coffin were Amazon's announcements that they wanted to "adapt" and [[SJW|˝modernize˝]] Tolkien's work for the present-day.  This proved that the ''Rings of Power'' was a prestige product for some studio suits and ideologues rather than a passionate or faithful adaptation of Tolkien's work.  [[Skub|They revealed black elves, black/brown Numenoreans]], black and [[Derp|'''beardless''']] dwarf women, and even [[What|multi-hued hobbits]] that weren't even supposed to exist in the Second Age. Worse, it all looked cheap and lazy and was promoted by paid actors pretending to be "superfans" of Tolkien who could only speak diversity, equity, and inclusion catchphrases. The backlash to the "superfans" trailers (they made multiple trailers for multiple regions in different languages with different actors all speaking from the same general script) was so bad that Amazon chose to unlist the videos from Youtube and Prime.

''Rings of Power'' launched in direct competition with ''House of the Dragon'' and initial audience reception was not good. Despite '''literally paying''' for millions of premiere viewers by virtue of paying movie theaters to play episodes 1 and 2 for free, viewer numbers entered freefall with subsequent episodes and reviews were consistently, though not universally, negative among the audience. Critics were more favorably disposed to it, though even they were not particularly flattering unless they were reviewing for dedicated entertainment sites like IGN, in which case the show could do no wrong. Many of the initial reviews focused on the leaden acting and terrible writing, grave sins for anyone who'd watched Peter Jackson's trilogy or the original books (though perhaps it suited material allegedly based on ''The Silmarillion'') and the show's absolutely obvious cheapness; despite spending a rumored $60 million per episode, sets were often empty of crowds, costumes were noticeably bad, and CGI was glaringly obvious.

The most significant fan complaints were: 
* The show is as full of "memberberries" as a plum pudding is full of figs. Despite being enjoined from referencing Peter Jackson's films because they don't have the rights to them, Amazon lifted a surprising amount of content directly from those films rather than from anything Tolkien wrote, especially in terms of visual design, dialogue, and shots. Galadriel's monologue when confronted with the One Ring, Gandalf being thrown around by an evil wizard using their staff, and the injection of the <s>hobbits</s> HARFOOTS were all largely seen as callbacks to the far more well-received films.
*Lots of the show actually end up being shockingly boring. There are large swaths of the plot where just nothing of any significance happens. One moment aside (the time Disa sings to the rock in a religious ceremony, which is admittedly a really cool scene and the only time the show manages to grasp an inkling of Tolkiens magic), a lot of time is spent on following up on the mystery boxes, intercut with action setpieces that at best have minimal stakes and at worst are completely nonsensical. Given how much of the dyanmics that are supposed to be established here end up going nowhere and/or are outright ignored/contradicted by the time of the finale, one has to wonder why the showrunners even spent time on these plotlines. 
* Any character actually named after one of Tolkien's characters is unrecognizable in the show. The most prominent example is Galadriel, transformed from a wise and regal queen of unearthly power to a bloodthirsty, rude warrior maiden who only cares about hunting down Sauron, only to be seduced by his comely human disguise instead.  She also never gives a mention or thought to her conspicuously absent husband Celeborn when starting to yield to "Halbrand's" charm.  Elendil the Tall and his sons are not spared, being depicted as incompetent and cowardly men who only succeed through the intervention of powerful women. And so on.
** Some see Galadriel as emblematic of the problems with ''Rings of Power'', especially after a finale where she is arguably to blame for Sauron falling BACK into evil and allowing him to flee to Mordor to forge the One Ring; a finale where Galadriel comes up with the idea of Three Elven Rings (and only Elven, the lesser races don't deserve them); and a finale where Galadriel nearly kills Celebrimbor rather than Sauron because she cannot stand to have her mistakes thrown in her face. None of the majesty or wisdom supposedly held by Galadriel as the greatest of the Noldor in Middle-Earth is evident.
** Speaking of Galadriel, there was also a problem that complicated a lot of the cinematography; Galadriel is in the books one of the tallest people in middle-earth, whereas Morfydd Clark, Show-Galadriels actress is only 5 foot 3. The direction tries its best to make her seem much taller than she actually is, but it makes many scenes look and feel cumbersome and the more you watch it, you can see how often shots involving Galadriel only depict her. 
* Amazon's pre-release media blitz had also contained the uncomfortable reveal that, rather than attempt to adapt centuries of conflict between the corruption and fall of Numenor and the Last Alliance, Amazon had decided to create a story that would encompass the broad themes of the Second Age while taking place over a recognizably human lifespan so that they wouldn't need to cast new actors every season. This Amazon-original plot, being led by inexperienced and bottom-barrel showrunners, would bastardize Tolkien's stories in stupendously stupid ways. 
** The elves of Middle-Earth, or at least the Noldor, and all their works are being corrupted and worn down by a dark entropy, the product of "light of Valar" deficiency. Without the "light," the elves are no longer immortal, immune to disease and the ravages of age, and all they have touched can be worn away by time and biology. There is only one cure: Mithril, the fossilized fallout of a battle between an Elflord and Durin's Bane where the Elf channeled all the "light" within his being into one of the Silmarils that was hidden in a tree that Durin's Bane really wanted to burn down with the flame of Udun. As they poured their energies into the tree, a lightning bolt struck and caused the Silmaril to explode. That explosion turned the tree's roots into mithril; a substance "[[Derp|as pure and light as good and as strong and unyielding as evil]]." Somehow, Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor not only know that the dwarves of Moria have discovered and started mining mithril, they also know it's the only thing that can give the elves their immortality back if they don't want to go back to Valinor. And they better get the dwarves to mine it as quick as they can; without it, they'll all be consumed by the darkness.
** The Downfall of Numenor is supposed to be one of the major stories of the Second Age and the archetypical mythic tragedy; the show drastically rewrites this story, in part because of the time compression, but also they manage to inject some modern politics into it as well and strip out much of the nuances that it had, as well as making the Kings Men’s motivations and actions more confusing. What’s supposed to happen is that the Kings of Numenor slowly get corrupted over the course of centuries by greed and pride and turn into warmongering Imperialists, and they are jealous of the elves’ immortality; this would lead them to becoming tyrants and eventually falling for Sauron’s deceptions. Instead, we have an isolationist kingdom with no army, who hate elves because they TURK OUR JERBS and a made-up prophecy about an elf causing the downfall of their kingdom (instead of the literal human sacrifice and enslavement). They only started returning to middle earth because Galadriel told them to go save an inconsequential human village that maybe had Sauron there. And there’s no explanation as to why they turned out this way since none of the original motivations are present.
** In the finale, Celebrimbor is incapable of doing anything with the mithril (about a fistfuls-worth) until Sauron tells him to "seduce" the ore with lesser, gentler metals and alloys. Once Sauron's love confession is rejected by Galadriel, she comes up with the brilliant idea to forge 3 rings so that all elves could partake of mithril's effects without falling under their dominion.
* Albino, white-robed orcs enslaving and oppressing a black elf and black/brown humans, though they also enslave white elves and humans, but unlike elves and humans there are no black/brown orcs. Also the humans that end up siding with Adar really don't like elves and even use slurs like "knife-ear." Real subtle.
* Writing-related complaints range from the very recognizable Bad Robot disregard for realistic timetables (remember how people seemed to just teleport everywhere at will in ''Into Darkness'' or in ''The Last Jedi''?) to bad pacing and completely incongruous scene length (the forging of the rings is less than a minute long, while hobbits get an entire quarter of the episode for a single scene) to audience whiplash as characters shift and change personalities and motivations multiple times within the same episode.
** Even worse, the dialogue lacks any of the poetry of Tolkien's prose unless it's plagiarizing his work. When left to the writer's room, it ranges from clunky and serviceable to laughably bad. The worst offender in this regard is the very un-subtle moment where some Numenorean men complain that, thanks to the <s>Elves</s> '''knife-ears''' being immortal, [[/pol/|"they took our darn jobs!"]] 
**While we weren't expecting the most tightly written story given how light the source material is, its clear that the showrunners didn't grasp the most important aspect in Tolkein's writing; the use of theme and how every detail builds up huge core ideas in the narrative. Instead, everything that happens happens because the plot demands it, even at the expense of previous characterization. One easy example is the Harfoots, who we're told all support one another, but because we have to create drama for the harfoot plotline, are constantly leaving people on their own to die anytime they run into trouble. It's ironic that they were included solely because the showrunners thought that the were the heart and soul of Middle Earth, when audiences have largely rejected the Harfoots as bunch of [[Kender|filthy little psychopaths]].
* Production-related complaints largely focus on the cheapness of the show despite its astonishing budget. It seemed that there was little effort in reshooting or editing anything that should have otherwise gone in a blooper reel (chainmail t-shirts were the cause of several wardrobe malfunctions in the last half of the show) or that looked incredibly awkward once CGI backgrounds and lighting were applied. Cast sizes in scenes was noticeably small, and battles were never well-done or lasted long. It doesn't help that ''House of the Dragon'' manages to feel greater in scope and scale but with a third of Amazon's reported budget and that the costume lead-designer reportedly designed the armour around wanting to challenge cosplayers (as if to make his own incompetency any less obvious). 

If you aren't a complete hater on the show, you may consider the CGI landscapes [[Skub|beautiful, and enjoy the score that apes and imitates but never reaches the level of the score of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, and believe that the references and callbacks to actual Tolkien lore are fun to see (although many of the show's lore references are likely to confuse newbies as they're hardly explained well, and those who do know the are likely to rage due to the immense retconning). After all, when else will you hear the word Silmaril being spoken on-screen?]] Alternatively, you could also [[SJW|call anyone that dislikes the show "patently evil"]] and argue they should be disregarded. ''Rings of Power'' is contracted for multiple seasons, so it's likely to be with us for a long, long time. That being said, by the time of the finale, the ratings had dropped to catastrophic levels and even many media outlets who gave the show a chance had to admit that it was a flop. So much so that rumors abound of Amazon discreetly sidelining Payne & McKay for more competent showrunners, while desperately trying to convince audiences that season 2 will be better we promise.

Update: Some of the negative backlash seemed to have reached Amazon HQ, who responded by putting out a statement that the show would go into season 2 with an all-female directors team (direction wasn't the issue, the writing was) and Adars actor (i.e. the only guy to gave a decent performance) dropping out of the show for good. So it seems that Amazon seems to prefer to pander to progressive audiences instead of actually fixing the story, which bodes ill for the show going forward. 
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