Oh, horror of horrors - it's Shelob! What went wrong?
#1
Posted 16 June 2004 - 06:32 AM
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?
#4
Posted 16 June 2004 - 09:53 AM
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!
#5
Posted 16 June 2004 - 10:15 AM
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.
#6
Posted 16 June 2004 - 05:19 PM
#7
Posted 17 June 2004 - 06:21 AM
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.
#8
Posted 17 June 2004 - 08:37 AM
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.
#9
Posted 17 June 2004 - 09:40 AM
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.)
#10
Posted 17 June 2004 - 09:42 AM
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.
#11
Posted 17 June 2004 - 10:50 AM
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...
#12
Posted 20 June 2004 - 08:01 AM
And the extended version of ROTK isn't out yet, right? So you can't really make a judgment on that one.
#13
Posted 20 June 2004 - 09:35 AM
JM's official press secretary, scientific advisor, diplomat and apparent antagonist?
#14
Posted 20 June 2004 - 05:46 PM
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.
Jimbo: We had to kill them to keep them from going extinct.
#15
Posted 21 June 2004 - 12:24 AM
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.