| Sunday, December 30, 2001 |
23:59 - A Few More LotR Thoughts
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They just keep coming...
- The first shot of Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower, is of a top-down shot of an Isengard-sized tower, orcs patrolling on the top, orcs with torches streaming around on the ground below. The viewer's impression is, "That's it?" Well, then the camera swings around to show that that tower is just a small attachment on the flank of the REAL tower, which is about twenty times as high and a city's footprint at the base. It's like, "No, that's it!" <clap> <clap> Well done, PJ.
- The scene where Bilbo's face suddenly becomes monstrous and contorted as he lunges for the Ring... masterful, but it betrays a bit of Peter Jackson's horror-movie roots. It was only hinted at metaphorically in the book, but in the movie it happens quite literally and graphically. PJ probably said "C'mon, just let me do this. It'll work. You'll see. No-- you'll see." And it did...
- One thing I felt the movie lacked was narrative tying the plot to the map. Compass directions were conspicuously absent, except in one brief scene before they enter Moria. You don't get a feeling of the Mountains being due East of the Shire, or that Anduin flows south, or where Bree is, or the direction of travel through Moria. Without these bits of narration, the plot loses some detail that comes through naturally in the book medium (you always have the map handy when you're reading), and so the narrative tends to have more of a "And then this happened, and then this happened, and then..." feel. The later books won't depend quite so much on compass directions, but this one does, a lot. So I think that could have been handled better.
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