Re: TTT

[Don Smith <dasmith at rotse2_physics.lsa.umich.edu>]

SPOILERS, ho!










j. marie wrote:
> the ents too.  i too missed the ent-wife laments.

Yeah, but I can see why they cut it out.  One thing that struck me as I was
mulling over the experience of watching the film is that this one is much more
plot-driven than the last one.  That is, the last one of course was largely
about getting Frodo from one place to another, but it stayed focussed on him
and the small circle of people around him.  This movie widens the canvas
considerably, and just like in astronomy, if you have a wider field of view,
you can't see as deep.  Victims of mathematics.

The Ents didn't look at all like I had imagined them, myself, but I could 
accept them.  Especially when they got all hasty at the end.  Hoom hom!

> a highlight for me was when gandalf cast out the presence of saruman.  wow.

Yeah, this scene fascinated me, because I always interpreted the "bewitching"
in the book as being more psychological -- brainwashing rather than bespelling.
But I remember lines in the book like "the lines in his face went away and did
not return" (need to go look it up to be sure), so it's possible that the
magical interpretation is there, if you look for it.  I'm looking forward to
rereading that chapter.  

> the humor was well-placed i think.

Yes!  And there was one bit that absolutely floored me: in the first movie, my
least favorite line was "no one tosses a dwarf".  It felt anachronistic and out
of place.  But in this movie, there's one point in Helm's Deep when Gimli tells
Aragorn "you'll have to toss me", and it's done with such panache, that it
*completely* redeemed that line in the first movie.  *Loved* it.  "Don't tell
the Elf."  Great stuff!

> hope of my hopes is that jackson sticks with the ending too.  no happy hollywood.
> bad happy hollywood.

Someone else (sorry, forgot who) asked what I meant by that.  What I meant was
that a big theme in the book is that some people are sometimes called upon to
sacrifice *everything* so that others can enjoy peace, security, or some other
important value.  And often those other people don't know, understand, or
appreciate what was sacrificed on their behalf.  This was very important to
Tolkien from his WWI experience, in which he was the only survivor from his
circle of friends, and came back to find his childhood forests ripped up,
rivers dammed, and new, ugly buildings going up all over the place.  He *knew*
you cannot waltz back from a war and simply pick up where you left off.  That's
why the scouring of the shire is so important.  Not just for what it shows us
about how the four hobbits have been transformed by their experiences (Merry
and Pippin as action heroes, and Frodo as the sad voice of wisdom), but because
it shows that even the shire could not remain aloof and untouched by what's
been going on.  As Saruman says in the book (I'm paraphrasing) "you little
hobbit lordlings thought that you could turn Saruman out of his home and ruin
his plans, but that when it was all over, you could just come home to your
comfortable little holes.  Well, one bad turn deserves another."  (God, I wish
I was going to be able to see Christopher Lee play that scene!!!!)  Frodo's
wound never heals.  The movie *cannot* end with a "and they all lived happily
ever after".  That would be a betrayal of the whole theme of Middle Earth, that
happiness is not "ever after" in this world, and that sacrifice has a real
cost.  Yes, the book has a sort of happy ending, in that Sam gets a family,
they rebuild the shire, and Frodo and Bilbo get to go off to Valinor, but it's
a *bittersweet* ending, because it's all about *passing*.  Frodo and Bilbo are
effectively dying when they get on that boat.  They leave all that they know
behind for a new, eternal life, free from pain and suffering.  Sounds like a
Christian description of death and heaven to me.  That which we know now,
*cannot* endure.  Even if the movie leaves out the scouring of the shire, they
*cannot* go back to the same Hobbiton we saw at the start of the first book.
It has to end wistful and sad, with a touch of hope, or it'll ruin the whole
thing.  I have faith that they'll manage it, because one of the strengths
of both films so far is that they've managed to capture exactly that wistful
sorrow with a core of hope.  So I think they'll carry it through.  Somehow.

But, blast, I want to see *these* actors play out the scouring of the shire
scenes.  In many ways, that chapter is my favorite part of the whole book.

See ya,
-- 
Don Smith                           Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu                                 http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/

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