Foo. This cannot be born.

Rating: Null/10 (6 May 2003)

These films are little more than eye (lesser eye) candy. There are hideous omissions by Jackson. `A director ought to know better" Jackson DID know better. There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men bad enough for such treachery. Down with Jackson's and his movie!' - Book II, paraphrase. How many people will NOT read Tolkien because of this 3 part film fiasco? Jackson could have stayed close to the text. The first glaring departure from it was when Gandalf did not use his staff to create a flash when Bilbo put on the Ring at the party. This allowed for many sins. There are worse faux pa, but I shall not mention them here, except for one other particularly nasty flaw... the mis-attribution of lines both to and by movie chaarcters. This is unforgivable. Here's a bad one- Wormtongue: `Ah, but you are alone. Who knows what you have spoken to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all your life seems to shrink, the walls of your bower closing in about you, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in? So fair, yet so cold like a morning of pale Spring still clinging to Winter.' I mean really, what have we here? Wormtongue the White? Grima the Poet? Gandalf said these words to Eomer. And there is worse to come. Alas that Peter Jackson does not drink from the chalice of misattribution folly and horror as we who have read Tolkien well! In sum, this quotation from Denethor II will suffice: `Have I not tasted it (the vileness of his straying from the written word) now many nights upon my tongue foreboding that worse yet lay in the dregs? As now indeed I find. Would it were not so!' I even fell asleep during the second flick...in the heat of the Battle at Helm's Deep. I do not think I care to see the third installation. One's imagination is brought to life by the words of J.R.R. Tolkien and said images are precious to me. Jackson's works are a denigration -- not an enhancement for me. I do not need my mind's eye disturbed so.
Foo.
Sincerely,
Dr. Prevarite