Imagine a Lord of the Rings adaptation where Sauron gets the Ring in the end.

Rating: 4/10 (12 July 2013)

Imagine you're watching a lotr adaptation from a renowned director who employees actors of exceptional talent for this kind of cinema at least. It looks good although soon you start noticing slight deviations from the story you know. How slight? Let's say Gandalf is a pot- head, Bilbo a pedophile, Aragorn a narcissist, Boromir a coward, Gimli a cross-dresser and so on. You ignore it for the moment because Legolas kicks ass. On the other hand Saruman is noble, the witch-king merciful, the orcs valiant and Sauron a dreamer and an idealist. You still refuse to be bothered because..well because Legolas kicks ass. Then the truly big issues emerge, like the oppression of the giants by the greedy dwarfs, the genocide of the orcs by the racist elves, the butchery of the desperate goblins crossing from the desolation of Mordor to the fertile lands of men by the immigration police of xenophobic Gondor. Now you're getting suspicious. Legolas is tricked into killing pour orcs by the dastardly alliance of men-elves-dwarfs who have discovered oil in Mordor and want to steal even that from Sauron's people. And for that they order Legolas to kill Sauron, the world's last hope for freedom and justice. But Legolas falls in love with a female goblin and she teaches him the ideals of communism that make her people so hated by elven capitalism. In the end Legolas abandons his corrupted degenerates of companions and sacrifices himself to get the Ring to Sauron saving the world in the process. The end. I hope dear reader that by know you'd be properly infuriated. Still the Iliad Lotr is not. It is by far the most important work of literature, the core of Western civilization since it clearly shapes the ideas explored by Greek drama in the next centuries. The moral conflict taking place in Iliad is complex and subtle in a way beyond its time. It is understandable if a director is having a hard time bringing it to the screen. But to deliberately screw up something that belongs to us all just to teach us..what? that Greeks were scum?(although it is clear the Trojan War was civil war - Greek names, Greek religion, Greek customs for both sides) Or that authority is corrupt? (a safe message that hurts no one when the original explores the depths of human nature in general and the capacity of everyone for their own destruction) I am disappointed most of all because Brad Pit through sheer magnitude of performance will dissuade any future attempt. What a tremendous Achilles he would be in a decent adaptation, I shiver to think.