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The idea was to convey that the decisive element of the battle was that Aragorn showed up with some ghosts. There are many ways to express that visually, but each of them requires a different visual language to have been established. The one that was chosen was to show them winning by inflicting irresistible violence on the enemy, which has the advantage of being really easy to understand at a glance. It could have been done differently, but it would mean changing a lot of other things.
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Jun 22, 2023 18:16
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Yeah it visually told the story
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Jun 22, 2023 18:17
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i dont like them at pelennor but its pretty logical that once they went through the trouble of making a zombie ghost army, they would want their money's worth on screen. thus they expand their role to get more screentime
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Jun 22, 2023 18:25
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The other thing about it is that it's the end point of a battle scene that started out with the Charge of the Rohirrim — a scene that was this epic, turgid, immersive, ground-pounding spectacle of "battlefield realism" like nothing I had ever seen anywhere before. The battle starts out dripping in significance and poetry and tragedy and doomed heroism, where we're overwhelmed by the very weight of all those horses as though the ocean was rising up over us. And then... at the end the ghosts just sort of sweep in and do a magic MCU finishing move while the music gives a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ flourish. It just felt like the two scenes of beginning and end were from completely different movies
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Jun 22, 2023 18:57
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Again, imagine it if the whole cinematic battle is shown from Pippin's and Merry's perspectives as in the book. Aragorn just leaves through the spooky door where nobody returns. There's talk that the King returned and is already dead with his two heroic companions. Gondor fights through days without sun, and when Gandalf finally seems to be holding a close-fought thing together, and Theoden slays the serpent, and Merry and Eowyn take out the Witch King, Mordor's reinforcements arrive on the river and those victories seem undone in a second, and then the banners unfurl and they're reinforcements for Gondor after all led by a band of heroes who the other characters thought lost, and then Gimli and Legolas can explain it later. Show the important part - the emotional ebb and flow - and then tell of the dark mystery later.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:23
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CommonShore posted:Again, imagine it if the whole cinematic battle is shown from Pippin's and Merry's perspectives as in the book. Aragorn just leaves through the spooky door where nobody returns. There's talk that the King returned and is already dead with his two heroic companions. Gondor fights through days without sun, and when Gandalf finally seems to be holding a close-fought thing together, and Theoden slays the serpent, and Merry and Eowyn take out the Witch King, Mordor's reinforcements arrive on the river and those victories seem undone in a second, and then the banners unfurl and they're reinforcements for Gondor after all led by a band of heroes who the other characters thought lost, and then Gimli and Legolas can explain it later. Show the important part - the emotional ebb and flow - and then tell of the dark mystery later. Yeah, this all stems from trying to show the Army on screen. Which, to be fair, the guy who made Dead Alive was never not going to do.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:35
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sweet geek swag posted:Yeah, this all stems from trying to show the Army on screen. Which, to be fair, the guy who made Dead Alive was never not going to do. Showing the Army of the Dead at the Pellenor Fields was the right call. They could've improved it by showing the Orcs just running before the Dead even touched them, but that wouldn't have been as satisfying to audiences. The poo poo move was the giant flowing skull river carnival ride in the Paths of the Dead.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:39
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And Gimli being unnecessary comic relief for the entire paths of the dead sequence.
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Jun 23, 2023 00:46
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Arc Hammer posted:And Gimli being unnecessary comic relief for the entire I mean, let's be honest here. Kinda annoys me because when they played him actually serious it's his best moments in the films.
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Jun 23, 2023 04:42
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MadDogMike posted:I mean, let's be honest here. Kinda annoys me because when they played him actually serious it's his best moments in the films. Same. They make the dwarves big goofballs and the elves deadly serious. Basically the opposite of the source material. Flattening Elrond to that one dimension sucked although I get it with the limited screen time he had.
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Jun 23, 2023 19:21
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The Balin's tomb sequence was Gimli's greatest/maybe only good moment in the films, but for a brief moment he was so loving cool, and he got to show various emotions besides lol tossing and belching and what counts as one Let them come There is one dwarf yet in Moria who still draws breath Edgar Allen Ho fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jun 23, 2023 |
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Jun 23, 2023 20:21
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I would say that Gimli is best in Fellowship from Moria onwards. Yeah you get the Dwarf tossing joke but you also get everything in Lothlorien and the start if his friendship with Legolas as he reminisces about Galadriel.
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Jun 23, 2023 20:34
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:The Balin's tomb sequence was Gimli's greatest/maybe only good moment in the films, but for a brief moment he was so loving cool, and he got to show various emotions besides lol tossing and belching and what counts as one I think one thing to note is most of the comic relief is after this. To a non book reader, they get introduced to this badass dwarf who tried to just cut the Ring in 2, bravely stands his ground in the tomb, and is clearly a warrior equivalent to aragorn or legolas. He still is shown to be awesome in Helms Deep during the contest with Legolas, and i don't thing the "tossing" sequence is insulting to Gimli really. Yeah it's a joke but he also then stomps a bunch of uruks. The oversized mail is a much worse and unneeded joke imo, along with the nervous system line. The drinking contest is silly but again I don't think it cheapens him at all and it is a very dwarfy thing to do. He is definitely done dirty in the paths of the dead though. in general I think I have to concede to Jackson that the treatment of him worked. among the casual viewers I know everyone loves Gimli and no one thinks of him as some lame or silly character.
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Jun 23, 2023 21:03
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Gimli getting to blow the horn of Helm Hammerhand (the physics of which make no sense) barely makes up for his absolute gushing about the Glittering Caves while in the midst of battle. I get the need for the abridging, but having Gimli going O_____O about how awesome the caves are always makes me laugh.
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Jun 23, 2023 21:41
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Make a series about Gimli and Legolas’ road trip post-RotK
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Jun 23, 2023 21:50
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Sorry, best I can do is a questionably animated CGI anime about Helm Hammerhand. Has there been any news about War of the Rohirrim since it was announced?
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Jun 23, 2023 21:58
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sweet geek swag posted:Yeah, this all stems from trying to show the Army on screen. Which, to be fair, the guy who made Dead Alive was never not going to do. It's more The Frighteners though. Dead Alive was the orcs throwing guts around.
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Jun 23, 2023 22:03
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WoodrowSkillson posted:. The drinking contest is silly but again I don't think it cheapens him at all and it is a very dwarfy thing to do. He is definitely done dirty in the paths of the dead though. The drinking contrest is dumb because elves absolutely can get shitfaced drunk, especially wooldand elves like Legolas. jeeves posted:Gimli getting to blow the horn of Helm Hammerhand (the physics of which make no sense) Really? That is the moment you want to complain about bad physics in the LotR movies?
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Jun 24, 2023 07:40
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Honestly, while Two Towers has a lot of comic moments for Gimli he gets consistent love as well. Return of the King is where the balance shifts too far to comedy, but that's the case for a lot of things in the trilogy. I think that's partly because they had the least prep time to reign in those tendencies, which seemed to happen a lot in the first two movies - they'd come up with a scenario, then have enough time to come back to it and hone it and it would inevitably end up looking more like the books. By the time they got to the third movie, there wasn't that extra time. It wasn't as bad as the hobbit where they were basically writing as they filmed from what I heard, but it wasn't Fellowship where they had so long to get ready.
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Jun 24, 2023 10:15
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Cavelcade posted:Honestly, while Two Towers has a lot of comic moments for Gimli he gets consistent love as well. Return of the King is where the balance shifts too far to comedy, but that's the case for a lot of things in the trilogy. "That still only count as one" being good is a hill I'm willing to die on though. It comes at a point where the movie has become so heavy (people has died, Gondor is almost lost and Faramir is almost burned at the pyre) that some levity was needed.
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Jun 24, 2023 11:07
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It's kind of wild to me that the Hot Shots style death tally schtick is not only present in the text, it's in much the same comedic style as preserved and extrapolated in the movies. The tone of Legolas sliding down the stairs on his shield going "43... 44... 45" is right in line with what I imagine Tolkien was going for, and was one of my biggest LOLs watching the films for the first time. Thinking of Tolkien the language nerd doing that kind of dark battlefield slapstick and injecting comedy into his grim battle scenes, like ending a scene with "But my count is now two dozen. It has been knife-work up here  ” is kind of hilarious on a conceptual level
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Jun 24, 2023 16:25
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Data Graham posted:"But my count is now two dozen. It has been knife-work up here The dude survived WW1. Can you imagine the loving grim poo poo that people enduring it made gallows humor with during that?
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Jun 24, 2023 16:50
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Alhazred posted:The drinking contrest is dumb because elves absolutely can get shitfaced drunk, especially wooldand elves like Legolas. yeah but thats not the discussion, Gimili himself is not presented poorly there. Its silly, but so is plenty of stuff in tolkien, its not somehow going against tone.
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Jun 24, 2023 18:22
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Data Graham posted:It's kind of wild to me that the Hot Shots style death tally schtick is not only present in the text, it's in much the same comedic style as preserved and extrapolated in the movies. The tone of Legolas sliding down the stairs on his shield going "43... 44... 45" is right in line with what I imagine Tolkien was going for, and was one of my biggest LOLs watching the films for the first time. Kind of, but for Tolkien the killing isn’t so funny. It’s described tersely and without a bunch of effect to make you think “wow, badass”. As Legolas himself says, it’s work. The intended humor (and badassery) comes from the contrast between these guys with their backs to the wall desperately fighting for their lives, and their nonchalance in the face of their likely imminent deaths. Not that its not amusing to watch Gimli nut-shot an orc, but it’s the difference between a guy whose frame of reference comes from action movies and a guy whose frame of reference comes from the Somme.
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Jun 24, 2023 18:53
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True. Incidentally I'm listening to the old Unfinished Tales episodes of Olsen's podcast where he is currently going over how compared to writers like GRRM and Jordan, Tolkien is almost completely uninterested in actual battle tactics, and instead presents his battle scenes as series of moods and morale shifts. His later stories (the stuff that is actually covered in Unfinished Tales itself), which he wrote many years after LotR, goes into some detail about orc-hosts that advance in crescents that turn into encirclements and Isildur's men forming a thaingail into a dírnaith and talking about the specific kinds of weapons and other survival gear that soldiers carried; but that seems to have been a deliberate, self-conscious shift. Whether it's because his own focus of interest was changing or because he thought that aspect of it was lacking beforehand is now something I'm wondering about, since the later authors clearly saw that as something of a lack as well. e: also the thing Olsen keeps alluding to about his comparison between the Silmarillion's treatment of Isildur's death at the Gladden Fields and the Unfinished Tales version of it, but never really stating outright, is that Tolkien seems compelled to hagiographize his heroes with later reframings. Isildur goes from "craven and greedy weakling who tried to seize the Ring and sneak away from his camp when they all got ambushed because of his terrible tactics, only to be betrayed by the Ring and shot like a fish in a barrel by those same Orcs as he flailed around sinking in his armor" to "heroic and humble leader charged by those in his command with a holy quest to preserve the Ring at all costs, who made it to the river which itself is a superhuman feat and almost made it across only to stand up like a mountain with shining eyes and the orcs fled in terror and loosed arrows as they ran, only hitting him by pure bad luck, and he fell back into the water to the sound of keening horns and trumpets" Like... if you mean propaganda just say propaganda lol But Tolkien seems like he couldn't help himself and kept making his heroic figures seem cooler and more honorable and awesome the more he revisited them. Galadriel too Data Graham fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jun 24, 2023 |
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Jun 24, 2023 19:04
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People love the movies so I think they probably got the level of comedic relief correct A lot of the “bad” comedy is in the EE anyway
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Jun 24, 2023 20:36
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Data Graham posted:e: also the thing Olsen keeps alluding to about his comparison between the Silmarillion's treatment of Isildur's death at the Gladden Fields and the Unfinished Tales version of it, but never really stating outright, is that Tolkien seems compelled to hagiographize his heroes with later reframings. Isildur goes from "craven and greedy weakling who tried to seize the Ring and sneak away from his camp when they all got ambushed because of his terrible tactics, only to be betrayed by the Ring and shot like a fish in a barrel by those same Orcs as he flailed around sinking in his armor" to "heroic and humble leader charged by those in his command with a holy quest to preserve the Ring at all costs, who made it to the river which itself is a superhuman feat and almost made it across only to stand up like a mountain with shining eyes and the orcs fled in terror and loosed arrows as they ran, only hitting him by pure bad luck, and he fell back into the water to the sound of keening horns and trumpets" “Disaster of the Gladden” is written from the perspective of post-restoration Telcontari historian, which is why Tolkien goes to the trouble of establishing the reliability of the fictional transmission of information. This is made explicit by the inclusion of stuff about Elessar in the postscript. Conversely “Of the Rings of Power” is a bit harder to judge the motives behind, but it’s definitely not human in perspective. It’s the elvish end of history, sticks close to Elrond (and Gandalf) and shows a view of Isildur definitely based on Elrond’s experience. Re: power creep, you forgot the best example of all. The Ring itself. From highly convenient magical frippery to root of all evil
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Jun 24, 2023 22:49
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He's twitchin' because he's got my axe in his nervous system is incredible in just how far of a deviation it is from book Gimli and the tone of the source material in general. *pushes glasses up nose, gets pushed into a locker*
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Jun 24, 2023 23:18
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euphronius posted:People love the movies so I think they probably got the level of comedic relief correct I think the success of the movies gets understated a good amount. There’s plenty I can quibble with regarding Jackson’s treatment of the text, but to get enough non-dorks to sit through those 3+ hour films to gross billions, obviously Jackson was doing most things right.
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Jun 25, 2023 01:52
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At the time they were successful yeah and they have had huge cultural staying power. They are up there with like Star Wars
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Jun 25, 2023 01:53
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Ginette Reno posted:He's twitchin' because he's got my axe in his nervous system is incredible in just how far of a deviation it is from book Gimli and the tone of the source material in general. Orca having restaurants is canon in the source material. ‘Looks like meats back on the menu boys!’
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Jun 25, 2023 02:52
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Orthanc would probably have menus.
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Jun 25, 2023 02:52
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Pompeii had menus.
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Jun 25, 2023 02:54
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I wish Jackson had kept the Uruk-hai telling Merry and Pippin that they’re gonna get bed and breakfast. I can imagine it
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Jun 25, 2023 03:06
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Pompeii had menus. Pompeii had indoor plumbing too, after the Romans left Britian didn’t have widespread indoor plumbing again until the 1960s.
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Jun 25, 2023 03:42
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Not being a native English speaker I've always been a bit confused by that meme. Wouldn't anywhere there's a collective meal planned in advance, like in an army, have the concept of a menu, especially if they have an emphasis on industry and standardization like the Uruk-Hai are shown to have?
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Jun 25, 2023 08:43
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e: quote not edit
MrMojok fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 08:58
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You don’t really get menus in any army. Even today where there are prepackaged meals, MREs, a dozen in a box, somebody throws one at you and you eat what you got, or try to trade with other people. But much more than that, what’s wrong with it is the idea of a menu in Middle-Earth. You walk into some place like the Prancing Pony, and maybe they have porridge or some kind of meat, but you aren’t sitting down and looking at a menu like you’re in a restaurant. The whole idea of “menu” is anachronistic. Especially for the orcs, who are pretty much coded as animals and savages. I can’t quote an exact book passage at the moment, but I think there is Uruk-Hai discussion about possibly eating Merry and Pippen, and maybe more in the Shagrat/Gorbag dialogue later with regard to Frodo. These things will eat anything they can get, and there is no menu. It’s still not as bad as Gimli talking about “central nervous system” though
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Jun 25, 2023 09:04
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Shagrat and Gorbag are excellent names e: not for, like, a baby, obviously Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Jun 25, 2023 |
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Jun 25, 2023 09:06
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YaketySass posted:Not being a native English speaker I've always been a bit confused by that meme. Wouldn't anywhere there's a collective meal planned in advance, like in an army, have the concept of a menu, especially if they have an emphasis on industry and standardization like the Uruk-Hai are shown to have? In the Army of the time, there would have been the cookhouse, and a giant pot (usually containing boiled beef), and a bloke of questionable character tending it, and you would have got what you were given, and you would have complained about any of this only if you enjoyed getting taken round the back of the cookhouse by the sergeants for some percussive discipline. I would still defend this, but more on the grounds of "the orcs all represent and talk like the worst side of soldiering in 1915, and Tolkien wasn't afraid of having them say anachronistic things like "I'll have your numbers and report you", so he totally would have had them make reference to menus and nervous systems if either would have fit the moment".
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Jun 25, 2023 09:07
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