Gripes about "LOTR:The Two Towers"
Monday, December 30th, 2002 23:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeOn Boxing Day afternoon, I went to the Showcase to see "The Two Towers" with my brother and my sister-in-law, who wasn't going to let being seven and a half months pregnant stop her seeing it! My brother hadn't read LOTR for years, but my sister-in-law and I had read it recently, and spent the whole of the journey home ripping the film to bits.
I also had a long discussion about it with my friend J when I went back to work today. We were both disappointed, and didn't like it half as much as FOTR. Still, we had fun moaning about the film and criticising it : )
The first part of TTT with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and the battles at Orthanc and Helm's Deep is my favourite part of LOTR. Consequently it was the bit that I was most looking forward to seeing on film, but also dreading in case it didn't live up to expectation. In FOTR various things were left out, but the changes to the story were liveable with, while in TTT, all sorts of changes had been made for no apparent reason. They didn't make the story flow better as a film, but just made people who know the book fume.
Why did they make so many changes to the character of the goodies, generally tending to make them less heroic? What was the point of making Faramir into a Boromir clone, Treebeard and the Ents into ditherers who didn't really know what Saruman had been up to, and Elrond into a total wuss?
There should have been more time spent on the Ents. If they had used subtitles during the Entmoot (as they did when Aragorn was talking to the elves), they could have made the scene last longer without being boring to watch. The Ents were smaller than I had expected and didn't sing as they marched to war, and since their attack on Orthanc was mostly shown from a distance, you didn't really get a sense of how big and powerful they really were. It ewas a lot more exciting in the book. I was also surprised that the women and children of Rohan had to walk to Helm's Deep; I expected the Riders of Rohan to have a lot more horses. Why didn't they have the Huorns raising the siege at Helm's Deep? It surely wouldn't have been too complicated a special effect, since you never really see them. One really irritating thing to do with the special effects was the way Gimli's height kept varying compared to Aragorn and Legolas. Also, in the book, I remember the winged beasts that the Nazgul rode as being described like pterodactyls, but in the film they were wyverns (two-legged dragons).
Things that I did like were: the army of elven archers, especially doing drill exactly in time; Legolas fighting, surfing down the slope and the amazing way he jumped onto the horse (well, anything he does is okay by me); Wormtongue, whose slimy quality came across very well; Gollum, especially the internal struggle between Gollum and Smeagol; the oliphants, which were so amazingly huge, that I didn't even notice that they had three pairs of tusks!; the wargs, which looked more like hyenas than wolves, reminding me of the silent version of "Nosferatu", where a hyena is used to represent the werewolf's deformed, otherworldly appearance
I also had a long discussion about it with my friend J when I went back to work today. We were both disappointed, and didn't like it half as much as FOTR. Still, we had fun moaning about the film and criticising it : )
The first part of TTT with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and the battles at Orthanc and Helm's Deep is my favourite part of LOTR. Consequently it was the bit that I was most looking forward to seeing on film, but also dreading in case it didn't live up to expectation. In FOTR various things were left out, but the changes to the story were liveable with, while in TTT, all sorts of changes had been made for no apparent reason. They didn't make the story flow better as a film, but just made people who know the book fume.
Why did they make so many changes to the character of the goodies, generally tending to make them less heroic? What was the point of making Faramir into a Boromir clone, Treebeard and the Ents into ditherers who didn't really know what Saruman had been up to, and Elrond into a total wuss?
There should have been more time spent on the Ents. If they had used subtitles during the Entmoot (as they did when Aragorn was talking to the elves), they could have made the scene last longer without being boring to watch. The Ents were smaller than I had expected and didn't sing as they marched to war, and since their attack on Orthanc was mostly shown from a distance, you didn't really get a sense of how big and powerful they really were. It ewas a lot more exciting in the book. I was also surprised that the women and children of Rohan had to walk to Helm's Deep; I expected the Riders of Rohan to have a lot more horses. Why didn't they have the Huorns raising the siege at Helm's Deep? It surely wouldn't have been too complicated a special effect, since you never really see them. One really irritating thing to do with the special effects was the way Gimli's height kept varying compared to Aragorn and Legolas. Also, in the book, I remember the winged beasts that the Nazgul rode as being described like pterodactyls, but in the film they were wyverns (two-legged dragons).
Things that I did like were: the army of elven archers, especially doing drill exactly in time; Legolas fighting, surfing down the slope and the amazing way he jumped onto the horse (well, anything he does is okay by me); Wormtongue, whose slimy quality came across very well; Gollum, especially the internal struggle between Gollum and Smeagol; the oliphants, which were so amazingly huge, that I didn't even notice that they had three pairs of tusks!; the wargs, which looked more like hyenas than wolves, reminding me of the silent version of "Nosferatu", where a hyena is used to represent the werewolf's deformed, otherworldly appearance
