TotR

Welcome to the special Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring post.

I recently decided to read the trilogy, and having finished the first book a week or two ago, i've decided to watch the first movie and make amazingly nerdy comments about the differences.

uw uw it's starting...

The movie assumes you haven't read the Hobbit, which is a good assumption for most movie-goers these days, so i can forgive some of the back story in the beginning.

party scene goes down quickly and in humor.

condensed time between bilbo's leaving/passing of the ring, the truth of the ring and the departure. Frodo takes no time to say goodbye. there's no arrangements to move/selling of Bagend. There's no conspiracy amongst Frodo's friends to make sure he remains safe and doesn't leave without a goodbye.

take away a lot of the mystery of the black riders.

Gandalf's being taken hostage is revealed way earlier. and the movie has saurman allying with sauran instead of trying to gather his own power.

they never meet that crazy guy in the woods who's married to the lady of the river.

the bar scene at the prancing pony isn't not as fun or interesting in the movie. i thought that part of the book would have made for really good scenes in a movie. the drinking, dancing, and character development...

Okay so some of these changes i understand. Some of them have been done in order to cut down on time and others to allow the story line to progress undamaged by the previously mentioned omissions. But when Frodo is stabbed by the wrath why did they change it from him fighting back and defending himself to him cowering in a corner. Way to destroy the main character's valor.

And then they have the elven woman find and help them. instead of having Strider finding the medicine and some other elf coming to their assistance. You know what i'm not even going to touch that shit. The whole journey from the shire to the house of elrod was fucked up. they really only left in as much as they had to. there was some really cool shit that never made it, as well as some good character development.

And the pretenses of the meeting that brought about the fellowship. happenstance in the book but in the movie it assumes they were called there for that specific purpose.

and that was just the first hour and a half...

as for the second hour and a half i became less nit-picky and tried to just enjoy the parts of the book that they did try to suggest. a lot was cut from the journey from rivendel to the parting of the fellowship, but after sitting around for three hours it starts to become clear that cuts were made for a reason.

i would have liked to see more of Lorien. They cut that part really short. Same with the boat trip down the river.

I must however say that the end, though not better, is not worse than the ending in the book. the way the book ends, though it lacks the action of the movie ending, works very well for the written word--just as the action packed ending of the movie works well for the visual medium.

Overall, though strikingly different in some ways from the book, and quite a marathon for its medium, the movie version does a good job of telling the essentials of the story with too much distortion.

But that's just one unemployed nerdy 24 year old's opinion.

I'd like to thank my brother for letting me borrow both the books and the movies.