Middle-Earth: Lord of the Mods (Private Beta I)

[Mirc]

I think he should`ve let Ridley Scott direct the battles, tho

I want to murder the guy in the desert..

You also?

 

[kairob]

what guy in the desert?

 

[Mirc]

Watch the videos in the previous page...

 

[Plotinus]

Verdict on clips: Jack Black very good, Hobbits to Isengard (original) quite funny, rest worthless.

I suppose the fact that there are so many spoofs like that just shows the degree to which Jackson's films have permeated through popular culture - like all the Star Wars spoofs on YouTube and suchlike (Chad Vader is by far the best!).

 

[kairob]

Chad vader is so taken from Eddie Izzard...

 

[Mithadan]

Why do you hate him? I think he did a much better job that many directors would have done, you just have to watch the spoof documentry on Lucas making it to work that out

Fair enough about Lucas, but Jackson made many needless and counterproductive alterations to the story, in my opinion. Bad scholarship, often. But whatever, it did okay.

 

[Plotinus]

The story's fiction. You can change it as much as you want, and doing so isn't "bad scholarship", it's good film-making. Personally I think that virtually all of Jackson's changes to it were necessary or greatly desirable from the point of view of filming it; only one or two seemed to me to be gratuitous or not to work quite properly. The fact is that a film is a very different thing from a book and the same story will not work for both; a film has to be extremely tightly structured or it is virtually unwatchable no matter how good the other elements may be.

Some changes were improvements to the original story even without the filming aspect. For example, Jackson's beginning section - with Gandalf actually acting upon his suspicions and hurrying back to get Frodo to move the Ring pronto - makes far more sense than the original, in which Gandalf says to himself, "Hmm, looks like the Ring of Power," then waits fifteen years or something equally ludicrous before suggesting to Frodo that he take it somewhere else, and then Frodo hangs about for months on end before getting around to it. Ridiculous! And I've never heard any of the Tolkien purists complain about that.

 

[I_am_sin7]

Well....he wasn't SURE it was the ring of power. and announcing it too early could have put others on the scent. Aside from that, the council of the wise was assured, (by saruman, of course), that the ring was lost, that it had rolled into the sea from isildur's corpse. So Gandalf, who still trusts Saruman, would naturally assume that it was simply one of the minor rings made by the elves in their early experiments in the art of ring making. Luckily for middle earth, he's a suspicious old coot So him and aragorn go off to see if they cant find out what the story is, and the rest is history! I'm done!

39 posts in four years! lurker status acheived. especially as I check the website every day

 

[Mithadan]

Of course you've got to make changes to a book to bring it to the screen. But that doesn't mean "you can change it as much as you want"! ("Can" being read as "may".) I referred to "needless" and "counterproductive" changes, note. By "bad scholarship" I mean things like getting the Haradrim & Easterlings mixed up, making the Uruk-hai an exclusively Saruman production, yadda yadda -- the usual things movie-fed fans will find absent in the mod. I wouldn't go so far as to call the replacement of Glorfindel with Arwen, the preponderance of plate armour or giving Hobbits pointy ears bad scholarship, for instance.

 

[Plotinus]

I don't see what's wrong with assigning the Uruk-hai to Saruman alone - it kind of gives him an edge and an added point of interest (given that he's obviously less powerful than Sauron otherwise). I'm pretty sure that, in the book, the Uruk-hai were at the very least Saruman's innovation.

I have to say that removing the totally uninteresting Glorfindel and replacing him with Arwen was one of the more sensible ideas to declutter the story. Armour and ears are of course not described in the book so they're anyone's guess really...

Nevertheless, I fear we're heading off-topic here.

 

[kairob]

I mean things like getting the Haradrim & Easterlings mixed up, making the Uruk-hai an exclusively Saruman production, yadda yadda

Actually the film did show Uruk-hai in Mordor as well as some tention between them and the newer orcs, they just didnt have the same armour that Saruman made. Also I agree with Plotinus that I think they were Sarumans invention and as such they play a larger part of sarumans army than Saurons.

 

[Mithadan]

Nevertheless, I fear we're heading off-topic here.

I'd be a-disagreeing with you re: uruk-hai & arwen, but I'll take the hint and do my part to stop the tangential discussion.

 

[againsttheflow]

I'm done!

39 posts in four years! lurker status acheived. especially as I check the website every day

Sounds like he's saying goodbye. Poor chap.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

I have sequels to the catapult thingy - but they all have lots of f-words.

 

[kairob]

put them in spoilers then

 

[Heretic_Cata]

put them in spoilers then

Heh, i think that's how they were when they were posted in Humour&Jokes where they were removed for that.

 

[kairob]

Yeah but Plotinus is cool...

 

[Mirc]

^ So true.

But PM is always a solution.

 

[Plotinus]

No, the rules apply even to spoilers.

 

[kairob]

Could you PM it to me?

And could there be an exception for a limited time, like a week, if enough people wanted it and they put a warning above the spoiler?