AH Challenge: Ruin the Lord of the Rings movies
- Thread starter pompejus
- Start date
I always thought the Ents in the movie were more spirits than physical, so they 'possessed' their given tree and animated it to fight in that battle as their avatar (of course they died if that tree died as well unlike Fallen... because dramatic tension!)
As for worse, they always could have put in Poochy... er... Tom Bombadil.
One thing that could ruin the movie, but be funny as hell is if, instead of Mt. Doom being a mild mannered movie volcano and lava, have it be a real volcano with real lava... and have it go Krakatoa as the Mordor army is coming out to meet the Army of Light, thus proving the point once again that, as nifty as volcanoes are, setting up a big battle right next to one = Darwin Award.
As for worse, they always could have put in Poochy... er... Tom Bombadil.
One thing that could ruin the movie, but be funny as hell is if, instead of Mt. Doom being a mild mannered movie volcano and lava, have it be a real volcano with real lava... and have it go Krakatoa as the Mordor army is coming out to meet the Army of Light, thus proving the point once again that, as nifty as volcanoes are, setting up a big battle right next to one = Darwin Award.
Cumberbatch will only voice the Necromancer. So his physical presence ais not a given. Disembodied voice and all that...
Actually, no. The destruction is quite recent; it begins on Saruman's orders well into the film. As for Treebeard seeing it, he generally moves and thinks very slowly, and the idea is that he hasn't been to that side of the forest in a long time. In effect, that devastation would have happened in what was, to him, the blink of an eye.
I really don't understand why people would say this sequence doesn't make sense. It made sense to me; I thought Jackson did a good job of presenting a watchable version of events within the time constraints at hand.
How About Some Sequels?
“I tell ya, they made a dumb-ass mistake chopping off the series with three.
“Now here’s my idea. We take this Boromir guy. Stupid idea, by the way, killing him off so soon. Should have given him a dramatic ending in Episode Three. Bad pacing.
“He wakes up, discovers he’s a vampire! The girls go for vampires these days, ya know that.
“Then he sets out to get back at the guys who abandoned him. He gets that fairy, well maybe not the girls all love him, but surely the weird short guys, plenty of room for blood and guts there.
“Only one who can put him down for good is this Arwen chick. We got to find her a good but dumb sidekick, someone who plays a lute and stumbles over her own feet, give them something to laugh about.
“Then, they fight it out in the ruins of that Isenwhatever, where the big sorcerer bought it. Yeah, plenty of mist and fog, a bloody hand-to-hand battle. Maybe the sidekick can pin him with an arrow, like the chick in Hunger Games, before she stakes him.
“Yeah, then after the big battle the sidekick gets possessed by the old wizard. Glowing eyes, sinister laugh, all that sfx stuff. That’s what we’ll do in the next sequel.
“Next one, the little guys aren’t completely dead, they turn into zombies. That’s the ticket. I tell you, this Tolkien guy didn’t know the first thing about fantasy!”
“I tell ya, they made a dumb-ass mistake chopping off the series with three.
“Now here’s my idea. We take this Boromir guy. Stupid idea, by the way, killing him off so soon. Should have given him a dramatic ending in Episode Three. Bad pacing.
“He wakes up, discovers he’s a vampire! The girls go for vampires these days, ya know that.
“Then he sets out to get back at the guys who abandoned him. He gets that fairy, well maybe not the girls all love him, but surely the weird short guys, plenty of room for blood and guts there.
“Only one who can put him down for good is this Arwen chick. We got to find her a good but dumb sidekick, someone who plays a lute and stumbles over her own feet, give them something to laugh about.
“Then, they fight it out in the ruins of that Isenwhatever, where the big sorcerer bought it. Yeah, plenty of mist and fog, a bloody hand-to-hand battle. Maybe the sidekick can pin him with an arrow, like the chick in Hunger Games, before she stakes him.
“Yeah, then after the big battle the sidekick gets possessed by the old wizard. Glowing eyes, sinister laugh, all that sfx stuff. That’s what we’ll do in the next sequel.
“Next one, the little guys aren’t completely dead, they turn into zombies. That’s the ticket. I tell you, this Tolkien guy didn’t know the first thing about fantasy!”
-Make Frodo a woman to better appeal to the female demographic.
-Create a forbidden romance between Gandalf and the Balrog.
-Have a reveal scene where a strange song starts playing that brings five random characters together and reveals them to be the final five...nazgul.
-Make this 'Gollum' character a bit more upbeat and give him a sunnier disposition. Basically make him Jar-Jar Binks.
-Create a forbidden romance between Gandalf and the Balrog.
-Have a reveal scene where a strange song starts playing that brings five random characters together and reveals them to be the final five...nazgul.
-Make this 'Gollum' character a bit more upbeat and give him a sunnier disposition. Basically make him Jar-Jar Binks.
That sounds absolutely terrible. Tolkien geeks weep.
EDIT: And then kill the person that made that movie.
LOL! Yeah. For the love of God, will somebody please hurry up and invent mindbleach.
Lord of the Rings by George Lucas
This should sum up just how horrible the Lord of the Rings could've been.
This should sum up just how horrible the Lord of the Rings could've been.
Best way to ruin the story is Jackson does not cut a deal with New Line Cinema. Miramax cuts the whole thing down to one movie. They pick Kevin Costner to star and direct with Martin Brest as screenwriter. Britney Spears (who gets multiple musical numbers) as Eowen, who is torn between Costner's Aragorn and Keanu Reeves' Boromir. There are no hobbits, elves, or dwarves, and Gandalf is played as 'comedy' relief by Ahmed Best.
I'm pretty sure you have this opinion on everything the majority of the board thinks is great.
The only thing I dislike about the trilogy is that now when people think of the saga, they think of the movie, and the actors as the characters. I hate that about any film adaptation about something that is a saga. Before the film, there were many interpretations of what characters looked like and what buildings looked like, what races looked like, what cities looked like, and so on. And I like many of those, and those fueled the fires of fantasy imagination. Likewise, Tolkein had images done for the books back in the day. And all of those things have been replaced by what everything looked like in Peter Jackson's films. That makes me a fair bit sad, and since I do disagree with the way they had a lot of things done (I'm of the school of thought that things should have looked more medieval than they did) it also makes me sad. I remember looking at book covers and seeing art books and I know of the animated series, and much of that stuff I saw after I saw the films because I'm not old. And it makes me sad that no one is going to really ever look at the books with their minds eye again, but based on what they saw in the movies, and that even if they would not have seen the movies, the people who make the book covers and video games and whatever else are all looking at the films so that becomes the set image for LOTR regardless of you seeing the films.
And I know this same thing is coming with the Hobbit when that gets released.
It's only because Peter Jackson did such a great job that many modern non fantasy nerds have read the Lord of the Rings books at all. They are VERY long books and they are not designed for children and it's unlikely that many younger people would be paying attention to them if it hadn't been for Peter Jackson's painstaking efforts.
As others have been pointed out it could have been far, far worse.
Worrying that LOTR has been spoiled by Peter Jackson's interpretation is like getting upset that Sean Connery ruined the James Bond character from the books or that Boris Karloff ruined Mary Shelleys' Frankenstein's monster or Johnny Weissmuller ruined Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan.
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I first read them some 35 or more years ago. (Yeah, yeah, I can do the math too.
) And as much as I've loved them ever since, I have to say: they aren't great writing on technical grounds. They can be inaccessible to some readers.I first read them some 35 or more years ago. (Yeah, yeah, I can do the math too.
I read them 20 years ago. It was almost a part time job!