NEW
Promises
Kept
Not the good ones, I'm afraid. (Major spoilers for ROTK-M)
Dromonds.
Not Junks.
How small details, messed up, can have much broader significance.
(Spoilers for ROTK-M)
The
Downfallen
A storyboard sequence, doodled up and digitized, showing
how a certain major
missing SEQUENCE from ROTKM could have been handled without
too much
difficulty as far as getting in things like the desperate
state of intelligent defenders,
the massiveness of an Atlantean fortified city, the idea
that the Witch-King of
Angmar should inspire the same sort of dread that an
undead Macbeth who's also
the real Vlad Dracul, working for the Devil as
field commander, with access to
unlimited troops to use for ballista-fodder and materiel
support, would inspire - and
also, along the way, the Houses of Healing, Noble!Denethor,
and a siege-engine that
an ancient conquerer wouldn't have been ashamed of.
Missing
Scenes
from ROTK-M; sketched up in a couple hours for the heck
of it, with no real attempts
at accuracy, just impressions for how they could be blocked.
(There's also a major
continuity error in the second, due to framing the storyboard
from artists' POV first,
which would have to be corrected in filming/production;
I'll leave it to Age of Sail
enthusiasts to catch it.)
Archivist's Note: Not archived. Page contained two lost images, and nothing else.
"What
news from the North, Riders of Rohan?"
Freehand storyboard sketch: If
I were doing this for real, I'd use reference photos
and do an elevation plan to block
everything out, get the foreshortening/perspective
accurate to the map, etc; (frex
I don't know if from where the trails crossed, you
could see the Gap as I've drawn
it, or more or less of it or the Forest.) But this gives
a feel for how I'd shoot/frame/costume
the scene.
Enjoy
Your Nice Oatmeal, Kids, And Stop Whining
"Just accept it for what it is" — I do, and here's the
scorecard. Doesn't include
plotholes — I do have other things to do, after all —
and doesn't include
"Movie
Mistakes" style nitpics, which don't usually register with me:
just the
big obvious stuff like characterization and visuals.
"Helm's
Deep"
Another rough take of a scene, done straight from the
book, roughed out
as a telescript. Even with minimal cuts and very long
directorial descriptions,
it's shorter than the corresponding sequence from the
movie transcript...
and there's nothing to make military history buffs tear
their hair, either.
Irrelevant
and Anticlimactic?
The "Scouring" Considered, for Readers and Others
Broken
Promises
The (many) disappointments of TTT-M, examined briefly
(sort of).
Footnote and sarcasm warnings.
The
Battle That Ate The Film
Helm's Deep vs all other aspects of the plot in TTT-M,
with some hard
numbers (and graphs.)
Forgery
The stupidity of the re-forging of Anduril scene from
the ROTK trailer.
(What makes it worse is that they got the mechanics of
forging blades
right earlier, in Isengard, which scene is used
as the backdrop for the
menu lead-in on the Theatrical Edition DVD. Apparently
they forgot in
the past year...)
An
Alternative Outline
Not a full script, just a quick breakdown of how the
scenes in a 3-hour film
version of TTT could go - and still be faithful to the
books. After all, if the
makers of El Cid could fit in an impressive battle,
a tournament, another battle,
and a war/siege/sortie into three hours - and also
fit in two romances, several
court intrigues, treason and redemption and character
development - surely
something of the kind could have been managed
with the adaptation of this
epic story. Here's a rough sketch of how it might happen.
No
Rohan in New Zealand?
It's now being said by many posters (coming I believe
straight from the EE
DVD propaganda) that the scenes from 'The Riders of Rohan"
were moved to
a piece of volcanic terrain more resembling Iceland than
the rolling hills and
wetlands of East Emnet in the book, because there
are no plains in NZ for
them to film on. Well, there may not be much that's
flattish as compared to the
highlands and mountains - but a quick google will find
plenty of images of terrain
that looks suspiciously like the "green sea" of the fine
horse country of the Mark.
For anyone else who winced every time horses were shown
running through those
awful tufa slopes - here are links to a few examples.
"The
King of the Golden Hall"
A rough take, with as-yet minimal cuts, on how this sequence
could have been
scripted otherwise. More trimming is required; yet even
as it stands, read and
paced out, it only takes twice the length of the same
sequence in TTT-M, some
of which minutes could be removed from uncanon Osgiliath,
and others from
uncanon Rivendell, and still more from the Helm's Deep
sequence - that one
chapter doesn't really need to take up 1/4 of all the
movie screentime, does it?
(Surely something could be left for the EE-DVD,
right, for the fanboys who just
want to see hack-em-up action and don't care about coherent
plots or characterization....)
A
Canon Scene of Low Comedy for TTT
Exactly what it says.