I assign myself a lot of weird little goals in life (maybe because I'm horrible at assigning priority to matters of genuine real-life importance)—"bucket list" items, I guess you could call them. they're things I feel like I "need" to do, for my own personal satisfaction. Some are more or less impossible: "learn all human languages," for example, or "learn how to bake almond crescent cookies to the exact same perfection of texture that I remember from childhood".
There's one particular job that feels like it should be achievable somehow, even though our brain rebels at the thought of it. It's a simple thing: surely it should be possible for us to figure out why people like those Peter Jackson movies of The Lord of the Rings, movies which (at the moment) inspire me only to ecstasies of dismay and loathing.
How do you learn to unhate something?
The Peter Jackson LOTR films are unique in this regard. I've been irritated by clumsy and cack-handed film adaptations of books, but only Peter Jackson's LOTR really gets me fulminating. I've been daydreaming for a couple of decades about some day going back to the movies and rereading the books and spewing out a massive photo essay about just why the Peter Jackson movies are such dreadful adaptations of The Lord of the Rings.
But why should I want to do that? Obviously it says something about how Tolkien's LOTR ended up fitting into our childhood. The Fellowship of the Ring was one of the first books I can remember reading, and when I finally got round to reading the complete story in middle school, I was blown away, entranced beyond all reason. No other book fills quite the same formative role in our life—heck, considering where "our life" ended up, maybe our RL mother was correct about The Lord of the Rings. (She thought it was junk that would ruin us.) The LOTR books pointed the way towards a good number of our future interests and influences; I'll even credit Tolkien's fiction for giving us some early, rudimentary notions of ethics and righteous conduct. Hence The Lord of the Rings has a unique place in our mental library, and thus I was uniquely incensed to see its transformation into a trio of noisy and formulaic Hollywood action movies, starring characters who have the same names as Tolkien's characters and who do some of the same things, but who otherwise don't seem like the same people at all—characters who seem rewritten to fit Hollywood screenwriting tropes.
And I couldn't understand—I still can't understand—what people see in the things. I know I'm not the only person who thinks that the Peter Jackson LOTR movies spoiled the spirit of the text, but mostly I've run into people who adore the films and reject any criticisms of them. I'll be honest about my cynical assumptions: I surmise that the Peter Jackson movies appeal to the sort of person who either hasn't read Tolkien or who thinks of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is full of "boring" and skippable chapters that get in the way of cool fantasy action. But that's a large assumption to make.
I find myself thinking that even if the Peter Jackson LOTR movies are what I say they are—loud empty spectacle, full of inexplicable misuses and abuses of the source text, padded out with desperately incompetent new writing (much of it dreary exposition), garnished with some clichés from the Hollywoodized "Hero's Journey" and then costumed and marketed as though it were J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings—then I should be able to enjoy the Peter Jackson movies as spectacle. So what if Jackson's Return of the King is rewritten to the approximate level of quality of Flash Gordon? I like Flash Gordon! And maybe I'm wrong anyway.
There's one little experiment I've thought of conducting on myself. You see...I haven't ever watched Peter Jackson's Hobbit movies, which are almost universally detested. So is there something genuinely bad about those movies that's not bad about Jackson's LOTR movies? Do they actually represent a decline in Jackson's cinematic powers...
...or are they really about the same? Because I have a feeling they're really just about as bad as his LOTR movies, but those were the ones that got the special dispensation from fans. I think people were so ecstatic at the idea of The Lord of the Rings being given serious Hollywood treatment—big name actors, huge budgets, Hollywood publicity and Hollywood acclaim such as no fantasy movie had ever gotten before—that they were willing to accept almost any slop that Peter Jackson threw up on screen, so long as it was a rollicking entertainment. I don't think The Hobbit inspired such feelings. Instead I remember a lot of "huh? three movies out of The Hobbit? seriously?"
~Chara of Pnictogen
