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Post by number13 on Nov 14, 2017 12:11:57 GMT
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aztec
Chancellery Guard
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Post by aztec on Nov 14, 2017 13:29:59 GMT
I'm a HUGE Tolkien Geek, but honestly I'm not all that excited about this, it's very exciting that the Tolkien Estate is directly involved with this (they had no creative input in the Peter Jackson films, as the rights had been sold in 1969 before Tolkien's death-it seems they have regained the TV rights after settling that lawsuit with Middle Earth Enterprises and the Saul Zanetz company...the Tolkien Estate were always very protective and opposed to adaptions, they don't need the money so I wonder what changed their minds?) and I'm cautiously intrigued to see what (will likely be) a new art and design team will do with the Middle earth setting, but the news that it is a prequel makes me very hesitant, the worst bits of the Peter Jackson films were the created subplots or bits expanded from vague content in the LOTR Appendices writings, a TV series based on such thin material would essentially be big budget fan fiction mostly created by the screenwriters...even with the Tolkien Estate's involvement it's hard for me to detach myself from my love of the source material and give this a fair look...though some of that writing (Aragorn's younger years, the military history of Gondor etc) is very interesting, and in the right hands could be expanded into something quite different and interesting.
I think I will wait for more information before I get too interested/annoyed...
With the Tolkien Estate charging $250 million and taking direct involvement, I'm wondering if they are going to license the rights to the other books? There's some absolutely wonderful stories and world building in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth, The Children Of Hurin and the various The History of Middle Earth books, but some of that would be even moredifficult to adapt faithfully than LOTR...
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Post by fingersmash on Nov 14, 2017 14:00:51 GMT
With the Tolkien Estate charging $250 million and taking direct involvement, I'm wondering if they are going to license the rights to the other books? There's some absolutely wonderful stories and world building in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle Earth, The Children Of Hurin and the various The History of Middle Earth books, but some of that would be even moredifficult to adapt faithfully than LOTR... Honestly, I'd much rather see an "Untold Tales of Middle Earth" series based on all these than a series with all original stories. An hour and a half-episode anthology would be fantastic but Amazon's missed the forest for the trees.
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Post by muckypup on Nov 14, 2017 14:01:23 GMT
I am honestly not sure about this one......
I am a massive Tolkien fan.......you can blame jackanory and my spectrum for starting me down that road! I have 14 copies of the book in various guises!
The animated film was a big favourite of mine, endless plays first on the Betamax then on vhs recorded from TV, not perfect but a long way from the travesty some would have you believe.
Peter Jackson’s lotr was a bench mark for cinema, it did what it had to make it work on screen but the extended editions gave us the best versions. It gave us the event movie which Star Wars has now filled.
His hobbit sadly was only just ok, and here’s my worry he was given too little to work with and too much time to fill, could not really expand the tale so just stretched it.
So is tv, with all its lingering shots and extended dialogue going to do it any favours, Tolkien’s two best tales have been told there is nothing in the other works comes close. Is there really a prequel to be told.
I am excited to see what they come up with to fill the game of thrones hole, personally I would have rather seen the narnia series that was mooted a couple of years ago. But I so hope they don’t ruin it like mtv did with shannara or who ever made wizards first rule!
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Post by number13 on Nov 14, 2017 15:27:21 GMT
I too am a huge Tolkien fan (read LOTR at least 25 times and even the Lost Tales more often than Gondolin had gates) but it seems I'm much more optimistic about this idea than most. I actually found the LOTR films difficult to enjoy at times, for all their visual splendour, because of what seemed to me the unnecessary alterations and additions from the text. (I won't even start on a long, long list!) But where we have so little material to go on, this won't be a problem. If they have writers who are faithful to the characteristics of peoples and places as they were described, even briefly, then surely there are mithril-rich seams of new fiction to be mined? Just for starters: the story of Aragorn. We only have a few pointers, but we know he travelled, learned and fought as a sort of knight-errant from Eriador to far southern Harad 'where the stars are strange'. How many series is that alone? Or the long past of Gimli (and could he please be less of an idiot and more of a proper child of Aule this time?) or the youth of Boromir and Faramir? Or a glimpse of Legolas' many centuries as the shadow spread over Greenwood the Great and it gained the name of Mirkwood? The tricky bit is the hobbits, who didn't do anything much before they received 'the call' from Gandalf. They would surely want to have hobbits in the series but doing what? Frodo's youthful mushroom-scrumping exploits in Buckland are hardly the stuff of legend!
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Post by muckypup on Nov 14, 2017 16:08:13 GMT
I too am a huge Tolkien fan (read LOTR at least 25 times and even the Lost Tales more often than Gondolin had gates) but it seems I'm much more optimistic about this idea than most. I actually found the LOTR films difficult to enjoy at times, for all their visual splendour, because of what seemed to me the unnecessary alterations and additions from the text. (I won't even start on a long, long list!) But where we have so little material to go on, this won't be a problem. If they have writers who are faithful to the characteristics of peoples and places as they were described, even briefly, then surely there are mithril-rich seams of new fiction to be mined? Just for starters: the story of Aragorn. We only have a few pointers, but we know he travelled, learned and fought as a sort of knight-errant from Eriador to far southern Harad 'where the stars are strange'. How many series is that alone? Or the long past of Gimli (and could he please be less of an idiot and more of a proper child of Aule this time?) or the youth of Boromir and Faramir? Or a glimpse of Legolas' many centuries as the shadow spread over Greenwood the Great and it gained the name of Mirkwood? The tricky bit is the hobbits, who didn't do anything much before they received 'the call' from Gandalf. They would surely want to have hobbits in the series but doing what? Frodo's youthful mushroom-scrumping exploits in Buckland are hardly the stuff of legend! please start on that long long list i genuinely would love to see it, as i though many of the deviations from the book were well done, often needed and aided the cinematic storytelling
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Post by mrperson on Nov 14, 2017 17:05:50 GMT
I think I'll stick to rereading Hobbit/Silmarillion/LOTR/unifinshed tales/lost tales/etc every several years or so...
I haven't liked a single change made in adaptations of written works. The LOTR movies were visually stunning, but also weren't actually LOTR. It was as if Jackson made an outline of the books with multiple levels of detail, erased the most detailed parts of the outline, and then filled it back in as he saw fit. The general shape of the plot was largely followed (with omissions, of course), but everything happened a bit differently than it did in the books, sometimes drastically so. I was left wondering what the point could possibly have been. Some omissions made sense in terms of timing/pacing, but the changes they made simply didn't make sense.
This series will have to be even more removed from the works, if the idea is to fill in plot lines that are simply alluded to. It'll be fanfic based on Tolkein and I'm not sure I'm interested.
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Post by Ela on Nov 14, 2017 18:15:42 GMT
I don't even go as far as you, mrperson. I've read the Hobbit/Silmarillion, LOTR many times and consider myself a huge Tolkien fan. The whole Tolkien thing started to lose me with the publication of "unfinished tales" and the rest, which weren't that interesting and just seem to me like a way to make more money on back of the success of Tolkien's original published work (published by him, not published posthumously). As far as the Amazon announcement goes, I have to echo my daughter, whose response to this news was, "Why?"
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aztec
Chancellery Guard
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Post by aztec on Nov 14, 2017 18:48:07 GMT
I too am a huge Tolkien fan (read LOTR at least 25 times and even the Lost Tales more often than Gondolin had gates) but it seems I'm much more optimistic about this idea than most. I actually found the LOTR films difficult to enjoy at times, for all their visual splendour, because of what seemed to me the unnecessary alterations and additions from the text. (I won't even start on a long, long list!)
Agreed...I watched and loved the films before I actually read the book, but the more I read the original story the less fond I became of the films, as I grew older and re-watched the trilogy with a critical eye the films don't stand up quite as well as I remembered, with some baffling alterations and additions to the narrative which all too often derailed or stretched out an already complex story and some of the things that so harmed the Hobbit films (excessive CGI, over the top action scenes, cheesy melodramatic subplots that stretched out for no reason) were already increasingly prevalent in that first trilogy... I haven't watched the films in several years, but several things still stand out as completely unnecessary or annoying (Faramir being completely rewritten into a rude, callous stupid idiot with serious daddy issues for most of the Two Towers only to having a sudden convenient change of heart at the end of the film merely to add unnecessary drama, the Hobbits being sidelined in their own story (which goes for both film trilogies) Aragorn doubting his destiny for the whole trilogy and falling off that cliff in such a cheesy manner, ''Go home Sam!'' er what? are we expected to just accept Frodo and Sam would be stupid enough to separate like that in the midst of Mordor? The Elves at Helm's Deep, Arwen not having a consistent character, Gimli being reduced to a joke character, lots of cheesy action, the Deux ex machina invincible Ghost Army that Aragorn decides to let go for no apparent reason etc (in the book the Ghosts are merely spectres of fear, I don't think they could even physically harm their enemies), the increasing focus on violence and action sequences at the expense of world building etc).
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aztec
Chancellery Guard
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Post by aztec on Nov 14, 2017 19:09:25 GMT
I don't even go as far as you, mrperson . I've read the Hobbit/Silmarillion, LOTR many times and consider myself a huge Tolkien fan. The whole Tolkien thing started to lose me with the publication of "unfinished tales" and the rest, which weren't that interesting and just seem to me like a way to make more money on back of the success of Tolkien's original published work (published by him, not published posthumously). As far as the Amazon announcement goes, I have to echo my daughter, whose response to this news was, "Why?" To be fair, JRR Tolkien gave his son explicit and complete permission (paraphrased) to edit, alter, rewrite, destroy or publish any of his unpublished writings in the manner he deemed most appropriate although I'd agree the amount of posthumous publications is a little excessive (even now, 40+ years after Tolkien's death they are still publishing 'new' books. which strikes me as a little morally dubious...) most of these books haven't been unfairly marketed as complete stories, if the Tolkien family was just after money they would have written spin-off novels or something. Most of these posthumous books compile background essays, incomplete stories or alternate/early drafts of the stories and are aimed to hardcore fans, not the average reader-I've read most of these books and have found it fascinating to read a comma by comma evolution of the stories as they developed (i.e in early drafts of LOTR Aragorn was a Hobbit with wooden feet named Trotter) but I can see it wouldn't appeal to everyone. I thought Unfinished Tales was a fascinating book, packed with lots of interesting gems (the history of Numenor, more info about Thorin's backstory and motivations, The Identity of the other wizards, Aaragorn's long journey tracking down Gollum and the history of Galadriel and Celeborn etc) and some of Tolkien's finest pieces of writing ( Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, and Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife were sadly quickly abandoned by Tolkien, but the bits we do have show a writer at the very top of his game, rivalling LOTR for evocative prose and engrossing narrativei.m.o) but I won't deny it's something of a frustrating read if you just want some narrative based escapism. Tolkien developed and reworked his stories for almost 60 years, it continually expanded in new directions but was never entirely fleshed out or finished, as mixed as my feelings are on this Tv series, it will be interesting to see a new set of writers/directors adapt and expand on the writing of such a rich fantasy world...
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Post by Ela on Nov 14, 2017 21:03:28 GMT
My daughter bought Unfinished Tales, and I dipped into her copy, but the writing was too dry to hold my attention for long.
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Post by acousticwolf on Nov 14, 2017 21:31:12 GMT
I'm torn by this. While part of me melts at the thought of immersing myself in more Middle Earth, the rest of me worries I will lose my fondness for it.
I have no (well, little) problem with the LOTR trilogy of films (Extended Editions). I can forgive the omissions and yes, even the additions providing I haven’t read the books recently (any time in the last year or so). I think I love the films and the books equally (there's cognitive dissenance for you). The Hobbit films are a completely different kettle of fish and I can't relate them to the book at all. For me, this Amazon prequel series is pretty much what the Hobbit films were (and they shouldn't have been made).
Give me a Silmarillion film, or series but it would have to be DONE WELL! On reflection perhaps it is better to just have the books...
Cheers
Tony
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Post by coffeeaddict on Nov 14, 2017 21:46:32 GMT
Love the book, enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies but the Hobbit was ruined as a movie - whole bunch of extra crap added just so they could string a 280 page book into multiple movies. As for this - stop the insanity. I would have thought his estate was raking in enough off the few billion different versions of the books that are still being published.
I'll take a pass.
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Post by Ela on Nov 14, 2017 21:47:29 GMT
I'm torn by this. While part of me melts at the thought of immersing myself in more Middle Earth, the rest of me worries I will lose my fondness for it. I have no (well, little) problem with the LOTR trilogy of films (Extended Editions). I can forgive the omissions and yes, even the additions providing I haven’t read the books recently (any time in the last year or so). I think I love the films and the books equally (there's cognitive dissenance for you). The Hobbit films are a completely different kettle of fish and I can't relate them to the book at all. For me, this Amazon prequel series is pretty much what the Hobbit films were (and they shouldn't have been made). Give me a Silmarillion film, or series but it would have to be DONE WELL! On reflection perhaps it is better to just have the books... Cheers Tony I enjoyed the LOTR films, even though I have quibbles with the changes. I've read LOTR so many times that I was very aware of the differences. I enjoyed the Hobbit movies well enough, even though I thought it was ridiculous that they stretched one little book out to be three movies. And I have to admit I never got around to watching the last movie. I'd be nervous about a Silmarillion film or series. They're sure to ruin it.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Nov 14, 2017 21:51:33 GMT
Could be cool - but I don't get the negativity. Honestly I have such a bad taste for Middle Earth on screen after the Hobbit (you know, where the title character was mostly written out of the finale of his own trilogy?) that I don't think we've got anything to lose here. What's the worst that can happen? More bad drama you don't need to watch. It doesn't taint the book, the Jackson LOTR or the Bakshi version.
I'm more excited we're finally getting the Fourth Narnia film, The Silver Chair though.
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Post by Timelord007 on Nov 15, 2017 6:54:28 GMT
Why? Do we need a prequel? Just go play Shadow Of Mordor instead.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 15, 2017 10:49:50 GMT
Come on Timelord - you go pay to see Transformers movies and every bad Hollywood blockbuster going, you should know when something really isn't needed. None of this stuff is "needed" - but it's entertainment. That's the need. If it works - there's another good thing going. If it doesn't....well, we move on. I was reticent about a Blade Runner sequel - turned out to be one of the movies of the year. There was no "need" for that either but if someone has an idea and there's a story worth telling then why not?
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Post by mrperson on Nov 15, 2017 19:15:34 GMT
I thought Unfinished Tales was a fascinating book, packed with lots of interesting gems (the history of Numenor, more info about Thorin's backstory and motivations, The Identity of the other wizards, Aaragorn's long journey tracking down Gollum and the history of Galadriel and Celeborn etc) and some of Tolkien's finest pieces of writing ( Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, and Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife were sadly quickly abandoned by Tolkien, but the bits we do have show a writer at the very top of his game, rivalling LOTR for evocative prose and engrossing narrativei.m.o) but I won't deny it's something of a frustrating read if you just want some narrative based escapism. Tolkien developed and reworked his stories for almost 60 years, it continually expanded in new directions but was never entirely fleshed out or finished, as mixed as my feelings are on this Tv series, it will be interesting to see a new set of writers/directors adapt and expand on the writing of such a rich fantasy world... And don't forget "Narn I Hin Hurin"
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Post by mrperson on Nov 15, 2017 19:27:56 GMT
Could be cool - but I don't get the negativity. Honestly I have such a bad taste for Middle Earth on screen after the Hobbit (you know, where the title character was mostly written out of the finale of his own trilogy?) that I don't think we've got anything to lose here. What's the worst that can happen? More bad drama you don't need to watch. It doesn't taint the book, the Jackson LOTR or the Bakshi version. I'm more excited we're finally getting the Fourth Narnia film, The Silver Chair though. It's relatively simple for me. None of the adaptations managed to improve on the original, since it' virtually impossible to improve upon a masterpiece. So there's the track record. I also generally prefer books over TV and movies. I tend not to have much tolerance for anything but the best movies, shows, books. I'm also quite sick of seeing endless prequels/sequels that are largely there just to capitalize on the success of an earlier work. If they're going to get my attention, they've got to come up with something new, not just rehash their betters' work. This sounds less like an adaptation and more like fan-fiction inspired by the original works. I'm just not interested in someone else playing at being Tolkein, not any more than I'd want to read/watch A Farewell to Arms: the Sequel, or a prequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They're completed works. Even if something tacked on is good, it's not really it. I feel quite differently about Who. It's a completely different general story. It's always had tons of contributing writers, directors, what have you. It's designed to be a work in progress.
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Post by muckypup on Nov 15, 2017 19:35:05 GMT
Why? Do we need a prequel? Just go play Shadow Of Mordor instead. just not shadows of war unless you got an extra £100 to pay for the DLC.
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