The Best Book-to-Film Adaption is not the Most Faithful

Rating: Null/10 (30 December 2001)

Let's face it: The Lord of the Rings is one of the world's sacred texts. It has probably enjoyed a more attentive, faithful, and glad readership than readers of the Bible, the Koran, you name it, since it's publication. The numbers of people who have read it speaks for itself. You don't hear too many readers of Tolkien disparage his works in any fundamental way. People not only like these books, in the way they might like Harry Potter. They take Tolkien pretty seriously. Is this despite, or because of, the huge amounts of whimsy and lightness Tolkien padded his very dark tales with?
Now in putting this epic onscreen the makers were doing something on the order of filming the New Testament with hearty helpings of the Old thrown in for exposition. To accomplish such a thing in any watchable form is a work of great magnitude, to make a good film of it is genius. The movie is far from perfect but that in itself seems part of it's mission: In its imperfection it simply makes one turn to the books with refreshened reverence. Personally I never thought Tolkien had it completely right to begin with, but they are an astonishing accomplishment, themselves corralling vast amounts of pre-existing material. Tolkien himself was editing and reshaping source material for the eyes of a new century. To fault Jackson for doing the same is senseless. It is merely necessary to realize that Lord of the Rings the movies are not synonymous with Lord of the Rings the books. The places, characters, and events are not the same. They should not be, either, because an exact transliteration would be both unwatchable, and more likely to supplant the imagination of the diehards who could sit through it.
The Ralph Bakshi LOTR was among the first films I ever saw, and I saw it, and the other cartoons, before I ever read the book. Plus I heard the book discussed by the adults in my family. When I finally read the novels in my adolescence, I discovered that I had many misconceptions about the way the story played out. But this did nothing to diminish my enjoyment of the novels and in fact surely strengthened it. If the new movies are thin in spots and apocryphal in others, so much the better for that watcher's future career as a reader or re-reader.