[Just your average movie goer]

It was supposed to be one of the most incredible scenes on film. It was the most frightening and exciting climactic moment of the books... Frodo and Sam's confrontation with the ancient creature Shelob in the mountains above Minas Morgul.

Yet, this scene did nothing for me in Peter Jackson's Return of the King. It was so built up, we missed it at the end of The Two Towers, having to wait another year to see it and therefore building the tension up even more....

Why was it so mediocre?

I want to know why it didn't work and what could have made it work - and I'm wondering if anyone else would like to discuss it as well.

I am just taking stabs in the dark here but I think that there were several problems with the scene in the film -

It was very quick.

The tunnel in which Frodo encountered her was small. And in addition to this, it was fairly bright. He certainly didn't need the elvish light - everything was perfectly visible anyway.

Shelob herself seemed small and I know it sounds strange, but she seemed too nimble. I thought she was meant to be incredibly large, fat, ugly, smelly... horrible. But she seemed like a conventional spider to me... and the confrontation looked like it could have just as easily come from Honey, I shrunk the kids.

We didn't have to wait long to find out that Frodo wasn't dead. Does anyone remember how that was handled in the book? When I read the book, I remember really believing that Frodo was dead and it was a much heavier moment than it was in the film. Can anyone remember how this was done?

Lastly, it looks hilarious when Sam is holding back her pincers and they sound like small pieces of timber hitting against each other. Also, the fact that Sam can hold her pincers back when she is so much larger than him made her look kind of weak.

Okay, not lastly... one more thing... sort of going into the territory of what happened afterwards now. But I wish Shelob had bled.... I wanted to see a trail of thick, gooey spider blood in a trail along the ground. And I wanted the orcs to get a fright, realising that someone had stuck a blade in Shelob.

I wanted that one to be how it was in the book. They were happy that someone had stuck Shelob because they hated her - and they were worried that there was some invisible elvern warrior on the loose. That would have been brilliant in the film.

Okay, anyone interested in sharing their own views on the subject?

[Laura]

I didn't think Shelob was that scary in the book, actually.

[Just your average movie goer]

But they may have been because you were just reading it. If you took what you read and put it on the screen as described in the book, I think that tunnel would have been a lot creepier and the scene would have been a lot more sinister.

But that's just me.

[civilian_number_two]

I think the Shelob sequence was long enough. What you're suggesting involves making it longer, and thereby making it even more central to the narrative, when they had all sorts of other moment they needed to cover. Sure it's an important moment, and hey, they coould have cut the beacons of Gondor bit, but I think we got enough of Shelob.

I will never, in any film, ever think a giant spider is scary, no matter how well the director works the shots or the composer palys up the pitchy chords. It's a big spider: I pick them up when I find them in my house, and I put them in my garden where they will eat more annoying bugs.

The whole "giant common earth critter" business is based on finding something people already find scary and then making it really big. I don't find spiders scary. Now if Sam and Frodo had to square off against some giant version of a certain ex-girlfriend of mine, then look out!

[Just your average movie goer]

Fair enough. I shall also stay clear if I ever see a thirty-foot woman, in case it turns out to be that giant version of your ex-girlfriend.... although, it's probably a safe policy to steer clear of any thirty-foot woman, regardless of who they are.

I did have another thought about the Shelob sequence though. If they hadn't mucked around so much with the time-wasting stuff in The Two Towers, it probably could have appeared there instead.

That may not have helped the sequence itself in any way... although a benefit of doing that would be that it would allow for more of Frodo and Sam travelling through Mordor in Return of the King - not the Mordor in three minutes tour they went on.

[Vwing]

That's funny, Shelob was one of the few sequences in the movie I thought was executed extremely well, and I enjoyed it. I agree, it was nowhere near as suspenseful as the book, where you really do think Frodo is dead and that Sam is going to have to carry the burden all by himself. But I didn't have too many complaints about it, other than, as Civ said, the concept of a giant spider.

[Just your average movie goer]

Yeah, I just thought that Shelob was supposed to be something more than a giant spider. She was an ancient and powerful creature, the last surviving child of a similar creature that inflicted a hell of an injury on Sauron's boss Morgoth in the first age of Middle Earth.

I agree - a giant spider in itself is not that scary.

Actually, if she was a giant spider, then she was a bit anatomically incorrect as well, waving that wasp sting around the place.

[Despondent]

The most powerful part of the Shelob storyline in the books is how the reader is left to conclude what has happened. The films removed that feature, so the sequence was not as effective.

When TT came out, I was like WTF? The Book has a loose thread similar to end of FOTR. But a non-reader picked up on gollum's comment- take them to HER (or whatever the line was) so that was encouraging. It just left more to handle in ROTK, which seemed to have enough material without the missing segments. The books were great in that there was genuine suspense about Frodo and Sam. The film's take was just different.

Interesting that they take the longest book, add a chapter to it. The shorter middle book- Take AWAY chapters, the third they extend and delete portions. Maybe ROTK was the shortest. Whatever. Tackling Tolkien is a daunting task, and the story arcs worked reasonably well on film. Rightfully high expectations were not met perhaps in every case.

[Laura]

Actually, Return of the King is the shortest book by far (it looks just as long when you look at it on the shelf next to the others, but the last third or more is appendices). So I think the reasoning of adding Shelob to the third book was to even out the timing a little, and maybe start the third movie with a bit of a bang.

It is odd that they added that evil-Faramir/dragon business at the end of Two Towers, seemingly just to give Frodo and Sam something interesting to do at the end of the movie, when they cut their big action scene from the end of the same book. But the way the writers explained it in interview had to do with how the book is written more like all-of-what-Aragorn-et-al-do, then all-of-what-Sam-and-Frodo-do, instead of being very interspersed like the movie is. It turns out the Sam and Frodo are fighting Shelob simultaneously with Aragorn and his band doing something in Return of the King (possibly the beacons thing), and while the others are doing whatever it is they're doing at the end of Two Towers, Frodo and Sam are with Faramir. So they partially did it to preserve the sense of chronologicality.

(I don't know if I explained that right--it would have made more sense if I'd remembered any of the specifics. But anyone who's seen the special features on Two Towers knows what I'm talking about.)

[Jordan]

I pick them up when I find them in my house, and I put them in my garden where they will eat more annoying bugs.

I do this too. I do this for all bugs. Everyone calls me a a wierdo for it. I can't kill bugs, they are so tiny and cute.

But, if you want to be scared of spider then view it's face under a microscope. Then try pick it up after.

[Just your average movie goer]

Yeah, I can imagine. And yes, Laura, you're right about everything you said.

I was still perplexed, as you were, by that decision myself - because as they were departing from the book occasionally, the chronology could have been altered as well... and finishing The Two Towers with the orcs carrying off Frodo would have been a hell of a cliff hanger. I can't understand why they passed that up.

I loved everything they did with the adapdation of The Fellowship of the Ring. I would never have thought of anything near as good as that - it was incredible. It was perfect and could not be improved on in any way...

just the way that the theatrical version is still BETTER than the Extended Edition is good proof of this. For The Two Towers and definitely with The Return of the King, you need to actually see the Extended Editions to see the entire film.

However, given the great start that The Fellowship of the Ring gave them, I think they could have done a lot better with the other films, using some large deviations from the book in some instances, while staying true to the book in others.

What I'm thinking of will take quite a while to write up, however, so it will have to be another night. I might make a new thread for this. Stay tuned...

[Laura]

Actually, I think the theatrical version of The Two Towers is better than the extended version. The extra scenes don't add much and slow down the pacing of the movie. It's jarring to be going along watching this exciting battle stuff and this poignant Sam and Frodo travelling and hope and hopelessness and then see Merry and Pippin gooning around with some pipeweed. What?

And the extended version of ROTK isn't out yet, right? So you can't really make a judgment on that one.

[SimeSublime]

I read the novels years ago, and didn't re-read them before watching the movies. I couldn't even remember Shelob, so I'm assuming that I didn't find her that much of an important part of the books.

[Mist]

I have to wonder if it was to start the third movie with a bang, as Laura said, or if it was simply to build up your expectations, so you'd be more pumped to go see the third movie when it came out. I know that, because they did that, more people went to see the second movie two, three, four or more times trying to pick up on what Shelob would be like. I haven't seen ROTK, so I can't comment on it, but if Sam can hold her back with his hands, I'm disappointed. I don't think she was supposed to be a spider anyway. That was simply the closest thing to a recognizable creature that she resembled. She was some elemental creature, right? Didn't Sauron or his master just rip a chunk of elemental dark energy out of the initial darkness and make her with it? Maybe I'm confusing her with something else.

JYAMG: I'd have to disagree with you on FOTR, but meh. I'll just leave it at that in an attempt to try and keep this on-topic. I'm trying to stay on-topic...this should go in the record books or summat.

[Just your average movie goer]

JYAMG: I'd have to disagree with you on FOTR, but meh. I'll just leave it at that in an attempt to try and keep this on-topic.  I'm trying to stay on-topic...this should go in the record books or summat. 

Ah, it's still Lord of the Rings related.... I'd be happy enough to have a debate about The Fellowship of the Ring. What exactly would this debate be about though - whether or not it was a good movie?

Incidentally, I watched Return of the King on a big screen for the first time on the weekend. I missed it in Japan because Japan is the last place to get new movies, after Mozambique - and when I moved to Korea, it had already finished screening.

But I saw it in a DVD room which is a private viewing room, with a large screen and surround sound - and it was great. I really loved the movie and now it's my second favourite.

Seeing it properly all the way through, the way it should have been seen changed my perspective of it considerably. Also, the things that were silly about it (the army of the dead and Gollum staying on top of the invisible Frodo a tad too long) paled in comparison to the sheer weight and emotion of the rest of the film. I was really blown away.

And how does this relate to Shelob? Well, let's just say the scene looked a lot different on the big screen from the way it appeared on my laptop computer screen (my laptop is my DVD player and TV in one). It wasn't as good as it was in the book - but I was happy enough with it on the screen. So, I've changed my mind somewhat about it.

Man, I'd love to get my DVD room now. That'll be something to invest in, should I ever get rich.