[barend]

was... cool.


i have to say that orcs are the reamains of tortiured elves... with that in mind.. they would have a very random appearance.

although Gothy looked like he suffered some sort of drowning torture

[Despondent]

I'd like to see a Keebler Orc. or a Santa's Orc. Or a Chef Orc for that matter.

Seriously- what is the actual Tolkien canon on the lineage/creation of orcs? I thought it was mating elves with men or something like that. but born of the muck? what gives?

[Just your average movie goer]

The bit about them pulling the orcs out of the mud was just something Peter Jackson and his crew made up for the movies. It wasn't ever in the books but I heard Mr Jackson say quite slyly that the books never said it didn't happen.

As for the origin of the orcs, it went something like this....

A long time ago, Sauron's boss Morgoth (the uber lord of evil and gratuitous carnage) captured elves during various wars. He tortured and mutiliated them and the orcs are descended from these creatures. I don't think Tolkien was greatly concerned with the workings of genetics when he wrote this stuff (hmmm, I wonder when exactly did the wider population begin to have a basic understanding of genetics). But I don't think it matters.

What matters is.... Gothmog in the movie is so stupid!!!

[Rory]

"What matters is.... Gothmog in the movie is so stupid!!!"
No he is not.

Well, I believe it was the Urakai (or however its spelled) that were born of the muk in the movie. I think this was a pretty cool way to do it. As I recall, all Tolkien really said was that the Urakai were bread from orcs and men from the north or something, so he had a lot of room for interpretation.

[Just your average movie goer]

Listen Rory, I'm going to get really schoolboyish about this Gothmog not being stupid idea of yours....

Yes, he is!

There. That amazingly in-depth argument ought to settle the debate.

No - no offence taken by your different opinion. It's cool. Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. It's only when people start defending truly horrible films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that I draw the line and ridicule those people. So you should be perfectly safe.

[Satanis]

did anyone notice how absent "The Mouth of Sauron" was from the movie? Funyy that he was in the game that was based on the movie...

[SimeSublime]

I was actually disapointed with the orcs in the first movie, with the exception of Lurtz. I always thought of orcs from a Warcraft point of view, and the LotR orcs seemed more like goblins to me.

[Slade]

Were all the impressive and intimidating orcs killed off in that battle, leaving only their inbred cousins to breed?

I mean, obviously...

[Rory]

The weird thing about orcs is that Tolkien refers to them as goblins more than once (frequently in the Hobbit, I believe). It really confused me at first, because I'm used to d&d where goblins are these gross ugly little weak creatures, and orcs are these gross ugly unintelligent shallow thinking masses of muscle and hate. But really, I think orcs in Lord of the Rings are just sort of somewhere in between. They're sort of like normal people, only a bit more reckless I guess. Which probably means that, if you know what you're doing, you can take out dozens of them. But if you're a drivelling little soldier boy, they'll send you home in a very bloody body bag.

It appears that the guys in the movie were confused too, because they had those weird little creatures creeping down to surround the characters in the first movie, right before that damned balrog came in and ruined everyones fun. And then they never showed them again. Its fucked up, is what it is.

[A Mighty Pirate]

How dare you talk down to Mad Max.

[Just your average movie goer]

It appears that the guys in the movie were confused too, because they had those weird little creatures creeping down to surround the characters in the first movie, right before that damned balrog came in and ruined everyones fun. And then they never showed them again. Its fucked up, is what it is.

Tell me about it. And for ages, they showed footage of those same orcs running across open plains - and that footage never turned up.

It wasn't in the theatrical edition and it failed to make the Extended Edition too. What the hell happened to it?

My theory is that it was originally intended to have these orcs take part in the attack on the fellowship at the end of the movie. But then after getting all these guys dressed up and filming them running across the plains, they changed their mind.

That's probably the biggest problem with the Lord of the Rings movies, great though they still are - so many decisions that should have been made at the script level were made on the cutting room floor.

Think about Arwen and how it was originally intended for her to fight at Helm's Deep. That original intention must have lead to her replacing Glorfindel as the character who rescues Frodo from the ringwraiths.

And yet, even after the first movie has been released in the cinema with Arwen portrayed as a warrior princess, they changed their minds and turned her into the completely different character we see in The Two Towers.

It is sad that they made such decisions. Another bad call was moving Gollum's backstory and the fall of Saruman to Return of the King. Gollum's backstory, while a fine opening to the movie, would have fitted in so much better with the references made to it in The Two Towers. And the end of The Two Towers would have been perfect for throwing off Saruman.

Peter Jackson said that after the battle of Helm's Deep, he "knew that people would want to finish that movie off as quickly as possible". I think he misjudged his audience greatly there. We would have loved to see the fall of Saruman there.

And this of course makes his decision to cut the scene from Return of the King so much worse. It was meant to be in The Two Towers and didn't make it there because he said he'd moved it to Return of the King. That's lying to the audience, that is. It's lucky he's such a likeable guy and I love his movies so much - otherwise he'd be in real trouble.

The second problem with cutting the Saruman scene is that Peter Jackson said he wanted to start the movie off afresh without going back to previous locales and unfinished business. Well, they still went back to Isengard. And Gandalf's line about Saruman having no power anymore was a really weak way to start the movie.

Ah yes. The problems of making decisions on the cutting room floor... decisions regarding major plot points and the overall story you tell in each movie are decisions that should be made at the script level. I must write that on a post-it note if I ever decide to make a big budget film.

And lastly, I don't think it's right to tease us with intriguing footage that we're never going to see. I sincerely hope that Peter Jackson and New Line will, somewhere down the line, release a collection of archival footage that wasn't used in the movie (with a nice Howard Shore soundtrack please ).

Here endeth the rant.

This post has been edited by Just your average movie goer: 19 July 2004 - 09:02 AM

[civilian_number_two]

Another bad call was moving Gollum's backstory and the fall of Saruman to Return of the King. Gollum's backstory, while a fine opening to the movie, would have fitted in so much better with the references made to it in The Two Towers.

You keep saying this, but I'm no really sure where you would put this backstory in THE TWO TOWERS. The back story as it is is meant to portray Gollum as a sympathetic character, a tragic casualty to the call of the ring. By the time THE RETURN OF THE KING rolled out, we had all seen the scene of Gollum talking with himself, had all heard his promise to bring Frodo to "her," So by then we knew him as a tortured wretch at war with himself. I may need to watch the film again, but I don't remember at what point the casual viewer would have concluded this. Because I tell you, you can't give Gollum's backstory until we're done being afraid of him, or you don't know horror films.

I think if we were to bring it in to TTT as well, you need to consider what a non-sequiter it is. It is a flashback, and such things are generally introduced in five common ways:

1. A character begins telling a story and we cut in. This is the most common. We see this frequently in the LOTR series, notably when Elrond speaks of Isildur and when Gandalf talks about the Balrog.
2. We get a closeup of a character's face and we cut to a backstory. The closeup shows us that they were thinking about it this backstory. Faramir does this in TTT.
3. A character falls into a dream. Aragorn does this in TTT. Strangely, so does Arwen, but instead of flashing back she flashes forward, to see the run of her life with Aragorn, concluding with how she outlives him and becomes the Woman of the Woods. This bit was unnecessary IMO, but still very nice and elegaic.
4. A narrator explains something in voice-over and we get to see it. This is pretty common as well, but not the style of LOTR. The opening of FOTR could be called that, though literally it is "setup," not flashback. Nothing that comes later has been shown yet.
5. The scene fades or match cuts to a different scene, and in many cases an title is put up to let us know when and where we are now. This is super common, but doesn;t happen anywhere in LOTR.

Noone is on hand to tell gollum's story, so the only way in the language of these films to cut in to the back story would be on a closeup of a character who knew the story, ie Gollum. He's sympathetic enough by the time we see him by the pool, and I suppose his bit with the fish would have been a good enough segue in to the fishing experience with Deagol. Maybe I need to watch the film again, but right now this is the only place I can think to put it. I just have three problems with the flashback here:

1. The backstory is 5 minutes long, and by the time we cut back to Faramir the average audience member would have been bored with it. "Where's this going?" would be the cry. "What are we doing here? We were just talking to Faramir and Frodo!"
2. The colour is so much different from one scene to the next that in FOTR it serves to show a darkening of the world since the coming of the ring. This makes it a flashback of setup like example 4 above. Introduced in TTT where I would put it, there's no question people would recognize it as a flashback, but it would lose the metaphor.
3. There is a point in the opening of ROTK where the casual observer (not the reader) realizes he's watching the introduction of Gollum. Introduced as a flashback, the scene has no "eureka" moment, and hence runs too long at the opening. This forces the filmmaker to run more empty setup in the dead marsh as a template to run the credits over.

I personally smiled broadly when they started with Deagol in ROTK. I think it was a great move, and for me it promised that Gollum would continue to play as a tragic figure in the third film. This character element would have been played too heavy in TTT and too weakly in ROTK had Jackson moved the scene back.

Just MHO.

--------------------------

In other random opinions, I didn't miss Saruman's fall. It would have been a completely invented anyway, since he actually dies in the Shire, stabbed by Grima of all people. I really didnt want to see that, so not seeing him die at Isengard meant nothing to me.

You're right in everything you say about Glorfindel. He was shortchanged; but there is precedent. In the Ralph Bakshi cartoon it's Legolas who meets the company in the woods. And I think giving Arwen this action was fine, especially since Glorfindel in the novel is never seen again, and since we want a sense of the bond between Aragorn and Arwen. Do you think she just loves hobbits, or life itself, so much that she will risk death at the hands of the Nazgul? No my friend, she did that because it's what Aragorn would have done, had his horse been fast enough. They're cut from the same cloth in the first film in a way we don't get to see again, which is why so many of this series's female fans preferred Eowyn, and resented Arwen's hold on his heart. I like that Jackson tried to make her a more important character to the saga, so that we could appreciate Aragorn's feelings.

That said, I certainly agree It was right not to add her to TTT. That is something Tolkien should have done, not something anyone could impose on the story after the fact. The changes Jackson did make bugged us enough. Anyway, in Tolkien's defence the novels read fine, and he never did plan to make them into movies. So not following characters all the way through doesn''t matter as much as it tends to in the more plot-driven, less story-driven world of films.

[Just your average movie goer]

You raise good points there, Civilian, as always. And I don't disagree about the effectiveness of Gollum's backstory when it was placed at the start of Return of the King. However, I was thinking about the scene in The Two Towers where Gollum has that conversation with himself - and the Gollum personality calls Smeagol a murderer. As someone who had read the book, the scene made sense to me. But if a viewer was not familiar with the story, they would have been scratching their head over that one.

Having the flashback of Gollum finding the ring would have been useful here. It wouldn't have had the same dramatic effectiveness that it did at the start of Return of the King. But it would have helped the entire audience to follow the story. Even though these movies are based on books, they should still stand on their own. If we need to read the books to fill in blanks in the movies, that's a problem.

From what I have read, it seems that the backstory was originally going to be shown after that scene where Frodo called Gollum by his real name. I'm not quite sure how they would have managed it either, to be quite honest, but I think that this would have been as good a place as any to put it. I imagine that after Frodo went back to sleep, they could have shown Gollum sitting there alone still - then fade into the backstory and fade back onto him when he was finished. I don't think the full backstory would be required - just up to the point where Smeagol killed his cousin and took the ring. I don't really need to see an extreme close-up of him eating a catfish. But I digress. That would have worked beautifully - and the scene in which the murder is referenced would make a lot more sense.

However, as it is not essential to the progression of the plot, Peter Jackson's decision to move it to the start of Return of the King is not a major problem. But it is a good example of a decision being made on the cutting room floor - which was the main topic of my previous post.


Regarding Saruman's absence, nobody could convince me that keeping the defeat of a major villain off-screen is a good idea. He played such an integral role in the events of the first two films and he deserved a fitting exit from the film. Seeing an extreme long shot of him watching the ents destroying Isengard (shouting "Hey, you damn kids! Get out of my yard!) was not a fitting ending. We as the audience also need some assurance that the threat of Saruman is indeed removed.

I do not necessarily need to see him killed either. But I anticipated his confrontation with Gandalf - where Gandalf breaks his staff. And this is a very important part of Gandalf's story. He has gone full circle at this point. In the first film, they showed how Saruman defeated Gandalf and robbed him of his staff. At this point, Saruman was the more powerful of the two.

It therefore would have been wonderful to have seen Gandalf, after returning to Isengard the stronger, defeat this corrupted being who had once been the head of his order - and break his staff.

And if nothing else, Christopher Lee turned in such a wonderful performance in these films. And he definitely deserved a proper curtain call.

[civilian_number_two]

Yes, with the staff breaking. There.