From: mccall@Oswego.EDU (D. Todd Mccall)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien
Subject: Re: Should LOTR Movie be Made?
Date: 20 Dec 92 01:22:17 GMT
Reply-To: mccall@oswego.Oswego.EDU (D. Todd Mccall)
Organization: Instructional Computing Center, SUNY at Oswego, Oswego, NY

In article <CRV=ry@engin.umich.edu> ferret@paradox.engin.umich.edu (kenneth r lipka) writes:
>
>In article <1gqltdINN12a@uwm.edu>, paulg@csd4.csd.uwm.edu (Paul A Gunderson) writes:
>> 
>> Whenever I think of LotR being made into a movie, I think "Dune" and become
>> very, very afraid.  I have no doubt that there are many people who loved
>> that movie, but I have yet to find a die-hard fan of the Dune books who does
>> anything but shudder when the movie is mentioned.
>> 
>> 
>
>	I'll have you know that I am a die-hard fan of the entire over-blown and convoluted "Dune" series and I think the movie is a quite adequate presentation of the book.  Especially without it becoming massively overblown as the books have become.
>
>	Also, I have never had a problem with movies obliterating my viewing of characters in books.  That is because I only visulaize the voices; the pictures come from what is in the text.  This means that unless the animator is two-bit and cheap, animated ver
>sions of anything always look like the characters "should" (becuase they followed from the text as well).
>
 This may be getting of group-topic, but as an interpretation of the book, I thought
 "Dune" the movie had some _very_ serious flaws. Especially in the way some of the
 characters were protrayed(especially Baron Harkonnen and the planet of Giedi Prime)
 and then there was the shields(boxes? that seems unlikely from an energy field
 behavior standpoint), and the 'wierding' modules (the wierding way in the books
 was a form of unarmed combat, with mystical overtones, not some sort of coherent
 sound weapon), and the final scene where Paul cracks the stone with his voice..this
 was _not_ from the book... the quote about 'his word carrying death eternal to 
 those who oppose his righteous(sp?) cause", had a religous significance(like most of
 the messianic quotes about Paul), not a literal one.

 Back to topic, since in complexity and depth LOTR and Dune are similar (I'm not 
 going into which is better) I fear that a movie version of LOTR, would have as
 many serious flaws as "Dune" did. I think its better that they don't do it, 'cause
 IMHO...I don't think it will be done right.

 On the mental images, I always form my mental images based on (1) the description
 in the book, and (2) my impression of the character based on things said by and
 about the character in the book. This is why I found "Dune" to be so incredibly 
 awful..the only image that was even close to what I had formed was that of the
 planet itself.(That was actually well done...to my surprise.)

 
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|D.Todd McCall                  \  The best laid plans of mice and men       |
|---mccall@oswego.oswego.edu    \                                            |
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|State University of New York   \  are worth about the same                  |
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|College at Oswego		\  in the final analysis       		     |
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