Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Xantalos]

Having just read the Silmarillion, I can tell you dwarves are stated to be resistant to heat, more than elves or men. Or atleast their armor. In any case, magma-surfing etc., 100% faithful to Tolkien, totally.

Eh, Silmarillon is basically the part of the LOTR thing where things were some arcane mix of DBZ and the Elder Scrolls series.
Good book, though.

[SalmonGod]

I have no idea what you just said.

The Silmarillion is Tolkien's true magnus opus.  He spent his entire life developing it.  The Hobbit/LotR were basically commercial side projects for him.  They're what he's best known for because he wrote them to be more pop culture friendly, and because he actually finished them.  The Silmarillion began with the tale of Beren and Luthien when he was still a young man fighting in the trenches in WW1, and many things were still incomplete or pending revision when he died.  Which is understandable, since his goal was to create a mythology, not write a book.

And if Peter Jackson ever makes any motions on Silmarillion material, I will definitely be raising a ruckus.

[Xantalos]

By 'LOTR thing' I meant the universe as a whole, but yeah it was good stuff. Really good stuff.

Too good to be accurately captured by film today.

[Bauglir]

I actually think the Silmarillion is probably the best-suited to the current style of adaptation because it contains heroic warriors in giant battles with fantastic monsters, and it's so large that you could do adaptations of those individual stories fairly well without needing to involve the overall message* of the work that all that epic violence never got the job done. Which, of course, is a message that will never make it into the current popular fantasy climate. Obviously, it'd be a pretty bad adaptation for that reason, but you could get some pretty fantastic movies using it as source material. I'd pay to see them, anyway.

*One of several

EDIT: Of course, my username would become even more frequently claimed than it already is, so perhaps it's for the best.

[Xantalos]

Smaug's pretty badass in it is all you need to know. The only major gripe we all had was that he wasn't badass enough for us hardcore dorfs.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Uh, no, my major gripe is that the point of Smaug's character is destroyed by the film.

[Xantalos]

Yeah, I've been trying to parse that meaning into phrases that the kids'll understand.
Dang movie markets wanting their protagonists able to fight back against a threat rumble grumble

[SalmonGod]

I actually think the Silmarillion is probably the best-suited to the current style of adaptation because it contains heroic warriors in giant battles with fantastic monsters, and it's so large that you could do adaptations of those individual stories fairly well without needing to involve the overall message* of the work that all that epic violence never got the job done. Which, of course, is a message that will never make it into the current popular fantasy climate. Obviously, it'd be a pretty bad adaptation for that reason, but you could get some pretty fantastic movies using it as source material. I'd pay to see them, anyway.

*One of several

EDIT: Of course, my username would become even more frequently claimed than it already is, so perhaps it's for the best.

I would agree, if not for all the trends on Tolkien adaptation so far. 

It doesn't seem to matter if the source material has lots of great action scene opportunities already there.  There are multiple examples already where they have ignored or marginalized such, only to substitute their own original action scenes that have no purpose in the story.

And there are many individual stories that would be great for singling out into film, but so was The Hobbit.  They couldn't resist the lure of expansion into backstory from the appendices, because it offered opportunities for LotR tie-ins.  That was more important to them than retaining the milder tone of the book they're supposed to be adapting.  So if they decided to adapt Children of Hurin, for example, I'd fully expect them to work in yet another Gandalf-bridge-showdown scene opposite Glaurung at Nargothrond for absolutely no reason.  The other major problem is thus far, Jackson has been completely incapable of dealing with the passage of time, insisting on presenting plots that took place over the course of several months as instead taking place over the course of a couple weeks.  I can't imagine what he'd do with any of the stories in The Simarillion, which all take place over dozens, if not hundreds of years.

You'd get some pretty fantastic movies in the sense that there's lots more potential excuses for Legolas-proxies to shield-surf down Glaurung's back while chaingunning arrows, but absolutely nothing good would come of it that has any relation to the qualities of Tolkien's work.

[Bauglir]

Y'know, for once, I've been convinced on this argument. You're right, they have discarded perfectly good action sequences for bullshit. My thinking was that since you could conceivably do an entire movie about, say, just the Fall of Gondolin, you could expect something reasonable to happen, but I think you're right. They'd insist on going way beyond the premise to do tie-ins (god help us, Galadriel was alive for the entire damn thing, not to mention Elrond's presence at the tail-end), cutting down what they could have done right, if the Hobbit is any indication. If they just did it in the style of the LotR we wound up with, that would be one thing, but Jackson seems to be going a bit George Lucasy when it comes to tie-ins to the original trilogy.

So... argument retracted.

[SalmonGod]

Did... did I just win at nerd rage?

[Bauglir]

Yes, apparently by convincing me that Peter Jackson is the Second Coming of Lucas.

[SalmonGod]

Yes, apparently by convincing me that Peter Jackson is the Second Coming of Lucas.

It is an apt comparison.  I hadn't thought of it before.

[nenjin]

When he starts describing his own work as poetry, let me know.

[XXSockXX]

I wouldn't worry about Silmarillion movies anytime soon. Only LOTR and Hobbit movie rights have been sold (relatively cheap back when Tolkien was still alive) and since Christopher Tolkien doesn't like the movies and doesn't want to sell rights to other works, there won't be any other movies as long as he is alive, and depending who ends up controlling the Tolkien Estate, even longer than that.

Also the problem with Silmarillion movies would be that while at least some of the stories would make great movies (Children of Hurin, Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien, I don't think they would try to make a movie without humans, so no earlier stories probably), they are all tragedys without real happy end plus they lack hobbits (audience surrogate + comic relief). Tonally they would be too dark to fit with the Jackson movies so far, maybe even to the point where they wouldn't be commercially viable, because the Jackson movies are aimed at a relatively broad audience.

[Antioch]

I saw the movie a few weeks ago and at first I was quite content about it. But after some time it started to all look quite bland, mostly the action scenes did not feel immersing at all. And while I have no objection with changing aspects for movie adaption, almost all derivations from the book resulted in a worse story.


The movie probably mostly looks good because of the low amount of films with triple A production standards being released in the genre.