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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I agree. The movies don't show Gandalf casting a spell on the door in Moria and the counter spell being cast by Durin's Bane. Nor Glorfindel helping Frodo escape the Ringwraiths or Gandalf repelling the wraiths alone on Weathertop. Those would have been cool to include.

As sacrilegious as this sounds to the majority of the fanbase, I hold hope that the trilogy will be rebooted by another director. Not necessarily as a way to create a superior product, but to compare how two studios have approached the story.

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> Nor Glorfindel helping Frodo escape the Ringwraiths

They replaced Glorfindel with another character that makes just as much sense and made it so the movie was not even more male dominate then it already was. It also improved the romantic relationship considerably. In some ways its actually an improvement from the books.

Overall I think that is just complaining on an incredibly high level. Sure, lets make a new set of Lord of the Rings movies every 5 years, I'm in. But given the history of Fantasy in Movies, LotR pulls of the nearly impossible.

Yeah, it's at the level of calling for a re-adaptation of The Godfather or 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Almost all the comments that are unhappy with the LoTR trilogy are upset that they didn't add every single thing from the book. Tom Bombadil adds nothing to the story. Glorfindel can and was easily swapped. I believe the books have ~160 different characters with speaking roles. If they were accurate with the books it would cost way too much and they would need 30 hrs of runtime.

> Tom Bombadil adds nothing to the story

He does. He's the only character on which the Ring has no effect.

> If they were accurate with the books it would cost way too much and they would need 30 hrs of runtime

Even by keeping it at the same length, it could have been way more faithful. Faramir is portrayed as an asshole in the movie while in the books he understands that his brother was mistaken and does not make the same decision with the hobbits. Going to Osgiliath made absolutely no sense at all.

Such changes were NOT needed.

Faramir is not just an asshole, they show him as conflicted. They show how his father is talking down to him and you can understand his motivation. And in the end he makes the same choice. And that makes it more impactful when his father gets angry and sends him back to Osgiliath.

At also made showing the taking of Osgiliath more natural in the movie.

> At also made showing the taking of Osgiliath more natural in the movie.

I have only one thing to add: Sam, who apparently knows the book, says:

> "We should not even be here"

Hear hear.

I've read the hobbit but never the LOTR, but in the making of LOTR videos they point out (a few times I think) that Tolkein's writing style was highly unusual and extremely difficult to adapt to a screenplay. It's been awhile since I saw them but one comment they made was that Tolkein seemed to just keep the story elements flowing on and on almost like he was writing more of a historical account rather than a novel with a classic arc. What we got on film was the classic arc more or less, meaning they had to twist and bend the source material somehow. They basically thought that a faithful adaption would not have found wide audience appeal because Tolkien broke too many rules of writing novels.

I wonder though..

I had read the LOTR several times, but it wasn't until I listened to it as an audiobook did it click for me just how much of the spoken dialog in the movies is pretty much word-for-word from the books. I get what you and others are saying about Tolkiens narrative style, but a lot of the dialog transitioned well to the big screen.

And it's mixed up with awfully bad Hollywood lines such as "Because I believe there is still Good in this world". Such a poor written next to Tolkien's.

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