![]() Jackson plucked it out of an exposition-heavy chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring and found a quiet moment for it, as Gandalf and Frodo rest in Moria, a lull before a major swell of action. Frodo’s lament to Gandalf about wishing he were not the one to live to see such times has become a memetic touchstone, especially during this past year of constant doom and gloom. ![]() In some cases, Boyens, Jackson, and Walsh chose quiet moments where Tolkien’s prose could breathe, and better evoke the books’ bittersweet tone. The writers overcame this challenge in a number of interesting ways, but always by showing love toward the language itself. ![]() Accordingly, a lot of great lines from the books couldn’t occur at the same point in the narrative, even if their characters didn’t get the axe (like poor Fatty Bolger). Tolkien’s books made use of few perspective characters and the occasional chapter of heavy exposition, an approach that just couldn’t work in the movies. Tricks like that highlight just how much restructuring of the story Jackson had to do as a director to keep the story in the shape of a film trilogy rather than a novel trilogy. In addition to singing Quickbeam’s song (“O rowan mine!”), Treebeard also speaks aloud some narration from Tom Bombadil’s chapter, with his line about the “destroyers and usurpers!” who go about biting, breaking, and burning the pristine wilderness. honored them by slipping their dialogue into the mouth Treebeard - another guardian of nature. Tom Bombadil, who appears early in the novel version of The Fellowship of the Ring and baffles lore experts, and one of the distinctive ents of The Two Towers, the (relatively) sprightly Quickbeam, are two characters who wound up cut from the movies. These little Easter eggs reward readers, but never leave behind those coming to the story fresh. Even scenes that were cut for time made it into the final cut through dialogue. But the adaptation worked because the trio didn’t stop at translating Tolkien’s concepts they also took his prose word for word. Of all the tasks before Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens in bringing the epic trilogy to the screen, preserving that essence may have been the most challenging. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story. ![]()
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