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Thanks to TNT, I have now seen the entire LotR* movie series, and all I can say is that it’s damned lucky that FotR was the only one I ever saw with human company, and that I watched the other two in the privacy of my own home, with only Nigel and the neighbors to worry about disturbing with my outbursts.

I mean, they’re visually stunning movies. The casting was largely excellent** — honestly, I’ll watch Ian McKellen in damned near anything — the effects generally outstanding, the performances usually quite moving — if you discount your inner cynic’s knee-jerk laughter response to the endless “Frodo fall down, go boom!” sequences. For instance, I’m watching the Shelob scene as I type this particular section, and what with my latent phobia of tarantulas, it was all I could do not to squeal like an idiot when she came on the scene. (I’m only a smidge better than Ron Weasley when it comes to big hulking spiders.) Happily, my feet were already tucked up on the futon, so I didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of moving them out of reach of any spider monsters that might be hiding under the mattress ready to grab them.

On the other hand, again taking the Shelob scene as an example, it did not freakin’ well happen that way. There was no such nonsense about Smeagol/Gollum framing Sam for devouring the last of the lembas and trying to steal the ring. I’ll admit to being less strong on the whole Aragorn storyline (boring, compared to the hobbits), but I swear I don’t remember him going over a cliff, ever. And why did they fuck around with the Entmoot and its aftermath, changing it so that the Ents were basically manipulated into sacrificing themselves, rather than going into battle against Isengard freely, of their own choice? Bah.

I watched FotR in the theatre with my parents, who were up here for a visit; when we walked out, my mom said that if she’d realized when I was 10 that the books were that violent, she wouldn’t have let me read them when I was 10. The books, however, weren’t all that violent: there were lots of battles, true, but if you have the sort of mind that I have that is easily bored by Manly Men Swinging Swords That Go “Ting!” and Wearing Helmets That Make Them Go Crosseyed, the battles are just sort of background noise that you have to get through to get to the interesting drama. The boring battle bits are less easy to evade, though, in the movies.

Anyway, seeing FotR in the theatre and realizing how many liberties they’d taken with a story I grew up holding nigh unto sacred made me sure that I should never, ever see the other two movies in company. Indeed, there have been many times Saturday night and tonight that I’ve been moved to shout, “It did not [insert swear words of your choice, preferably alliterative] happen that way!” or “That did not [colorful expletive] happen!” at my hapless television.

Why does it bother me so much with this series, though, when the changes to, for instance, Stardust and the Harry Potter movies don’t so much? I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I’ve come up with a twofold theory. (Or perhaps a Penfold theory, but that’s another story entirely.) Fury at “creative” rewriting of movie scripts depends on (1) how sacred the original books are to me, and (2) the involvement of the original author. If the creator of that universe is not involved and it happens to be a particularly dear universe to me, I will heap everlasting scorn and vitriol upon any movie that dares to stray from verbatim canon text, even while appreciating its pretty cinematography, costuming, and performaces.

(This also explains why I loved the Hitchhiker’s movie, despite the facts that it strayed rather wildly from the book canon and that the books were holy enough to me that I wore my “Don’t Panic” button on my patched denim jacket for years, and even today the name “Eddy” still reminds me inexorably of the feeder line, “Eddies in the space-time continuum,” and the response, “Ah, is he? Is he.” Douglas Adams was involved in the early versions of the script before his untimely and tragic death, and thus the whole project bore his glowing stamp of approval. Thus, I was free to enjoy the movie as another adaptation in the HGttG series, which has changed in each new medium it’s tried; without it, not even Stephen Fry’s delightful narration would have been enough to stop me from screaming, “Heresy! That never happened in the book! Burn the heretics! Burn them!“)

As for LotR, I appreciate the amount of work that went into the details; they even got the inscription right on Balin’s tomb. However, I just cannot get over how much they played with the vital story lines (did I completely miss the Entdraught sequence? and the whole Arwen deal was largely extra-canon extrapolation; I don’t care about Arwen, don’t particularly care about Aragorn, so shut up about it already — and why does Elrond look so creepy?).

I know I should appreciate it as a separate work, but it’s really hard when it’s something that was so dear to me for so many years — and now a whole bunch of people who’ve never read the books, who’ve never seen how glorious the real thing is, see the freakin’ movies a time or two and fancy themselves Middle Earth geeks without the hassle of reading the source books, like the stupid woman a few years ago on “Fear Factor” who bragged that her wedding took place in a replica of — and I quote — “Hobbitsville.”

Hobbitsville. I ask you, is that blatant stupidity alone not enough to justify my ire?

*** *** ***

*Note for Mark, my parents, and others less overtly in touch with their geeky sides: LotR = Lord of the Rings; FotR = Fellowship of the Ring (1st installment); TTT = The Two Towers (2nd); TRotK = The Return of the King (3rd installment).

**My only major complaint is that the Elves just looked like pretty humans with pointy ears. I still think they should’ve looked like a separate but parallel lineage, which is what they were. They should’ve looked way more exotic, and I still firmly believe that Björk should have played Galadriel.