Like many fantasy fans out there, I was eager to see Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I had some misgivings, though, since he had had to condense the weighty Lord of the Rings in many ways to make it fit into three still-epic movies (which I enjoyed), and seemed to be doing the opposite with The Hobbit — a slight volume aimed at children — by expanding it into, well… three epic movies.
Posts Tagged with Peter Jackson
Middle-earth music: The Return of the King
Composer Howard Shore draws from the themes he created for previous films in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings for The Return of the King, and this score caps the trilogy off superbly.
Books to Film: The Two Towers
Time has a way of changing your perspective on things, and favourite movies and books are no exception. The article below was originally published in 2004; and since then I’ve reread The Two Towers and rewatched the movie version. So rather than just tinker with this I decided to let it stand, with some second thoughts added in.
I still like both book and movie — but they are very, very different creatures.
Director Peter Jackson had a thankless task in adapting the second part of The Lord of the Rings for the big screen.
The difficulty lies in the fact that Tolkien originally intended The Lord of the Rings to be a single volume. His publisher balked at this; it was too much of a risk for a book whose only known audience consisted of readers of The Hobbit — in many ways a vastly different book. Thus the story was published in three volumes.
Books to film: The Fellowship of the Ring
If you’ve been Puttin’ the Blog in Balrog this summer, and taking part in the group read of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, you may have been brave enough to take part in the live-tweeted movie drinkalongs organized by SJ.
Every Friday, whoever uses the hashtag #PtBiB can join in for an hour of snark (and drinking). This past Friday marked the third week, so the group is done with Peter Jackson’s version of The Fellowship of the Ring.
It’s often said by readers, “The book is always better.” But is it? Are some works of literature impossible to translate to such a visual medium as film? Or do they just need some tweaking to let their stories run free on the silver screen?
I wrote this piece some years ago; my opinion still stands, though I’m interested to hear what readers and fans of Tolkien have to say, since I’m well aware opinion is divided on what Jackson did with Tolkien’s work.
The unofficial Middle-earth soundtrack
Longtime readers of J.R.R. Tolkien know he had a deep fondness for poetry and song. Apart from his own compositions chronicling the early history of Middle-earth (such as The Lays of Beleriand), he filled both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with poetry, composed or recited, as it were, by the characters as part of the story. It added a richness and depth to the imagined peoples of his fantasy world that is rarely matched or emulated.
