A quick look at the adaptation from book to film.

Rating: 10/10 (22 May 2011)

I am a student at a community college near Redlands, CA, and I am currently attending an upper level English class, which is technically called 'The Study of Fiction,' though it may as well be called 'The Study of Tolkien.' The professor chose to study the classic genre- creating books by J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In this class I had the privilege to reread Tolkien's works and watch all of the current film adaptations of the works. I just wanted to use this forum to share some of my opinions about how the timeless stories that Tolkien wrote were treated while being adapted to film. I will first discus the animated film The Hobbit which was made in 1977 by Arthur Rankin. The animation was very appealing for its time and it was interesting to note the advances in animation that have occurred over the last 40 years. The thing that stood out the most about the animated film was the incorporation of the poems and songs of Tolkien's book into the movie. It was very interesting to see the poems come alive in action amongst Tolkien's characters. The adaptations done by New Line and directed by Peter Jackson, though they strayed at times from a direct portrayal of The Lord of the Rings, it was done with true craftsmanship and the utmost respect for the story. It takes a person who really loves Tolkien's works to fight tirelessly to get them made properly, with the grandeur, the beauty, and, ultimately, the budget needed to bring a world as vast and intricate as Tolkien's Middle-Earth to the screen. Peter Jackson was able to see that done, though it wasn't without its hiccups. Jackson, along with fellow screen writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, had a difficult task transforming a work that was over a thousand pages into three films. Though they did remove some of the most beloved portions of the book such as the hobbits time with Tom Bombadill or the retaking of the shire, they managed to give justice to the story as a whole. They took lines favorite lines that came from Tom Bombadill and paid homage to them by allowing Treebeard to utter them in Fangorn forest. Another major plot change in the book was the long developed love story between Arwen and Aragorn; a story that is only briefly developed and discussed in end of The Return of the King. Peter Jackson understood that the mind of a film audience had to be brought along in the development of two character's affections and, like in a novel, the story couldn't be understood through a few pages of text or dialogue. So Jackson made Arwen take the place of an elf warrior named Glorfindel in the Fellowship of the Ring and incorporated Arwen into the progress of the film in order to connect the audience to the story. The inspiration for this course of action was actually taken from the appendixes of The Lord of the Ring where a poem is told of a mortal man in a love affair with an elf woman. This was a masterful way of staying true to the story of Tolkien while also making the relationship between Arwen and Aragorn palatable for a theater audience. Jackson's work will undoubtedly go down as one of the best film adaptations in the history of cinema.