Sounds great in theory but the writing will need to be AAA given Tolkien wrote zero dialogue relating to any of the above. They need to just pony up the money for the Silmarillion rights at this point and go back to stories that are already fully fleshed out.
Film The Lord of the Rings (and other movies that you absolutely have to watch at least once a year)
- Thread starter Mr Pigeon
- Start date
The Children of Hurin is a sure a thing as exists from the remaining legendarium. Absolutely epic.
Recasting Aragorn would be a disaster though. Is age reducing CGI up to the task
Doubt Viggo would be up for that.
Indeed.
They should tell a totally new story in the same world with new characters. Maybe shove some version of Gandalf or Sauruman in there but leave Aragorn out of it.
why would recasting Aragorn be a disaster?
does everyone now just see Viggo as the permanent Aragorn?
I feel someone like Ben Barnes could pull off Aragorn.
he has the whole “dark Numenorean who is 120 years old but looks 28” vibe going for him too
I actually think recasting Arwen is going to be tougher. Holy shit was Liv Tyler such a perfect cast for her
he has the whole “dark Numenorean who is 120 years old but looks 28” vibe going for him too
I actually think recasting Arwen is going to be tougher. Holy shit was Liv Tyler such a perfect cast for her
Most of the fanbase are unbearable and never actually read the books. There's tons of material to exploit. Also it didn't help that the Amazon series were a complete flop in terms of storytelling, but somehow survived in terms of generating millions of viewers.
Basically the Amazon series is just a beautiful live museum to see some locations with stunning visuals, but couldn't care less about the plot tbh.
Just do the Angmar war. Justice for Glorfindel at last.
I think children of Húrins ending will be very hard to pull off mind without it being cringe.
“Ah I just learnt that I fecked and impregnated my sister, better kill myself” doesn’t pertain to good movie endings
I mean, yes.
Today's audiences just don't give recasts a chance for characters like this.
Even for the likes of Batman, James Bond, Dr Who or Superman, there's always whinging despite there already having been tons of different actors playing the roles.
Viggo is it he only Aragorn people have ever known.
You don't strike gold like they did with Viggo very often. Even Jackson only did by semi accident.
The problem is character continuity.
it’s not one guy fighting the witch king, it’s like 10 spread over hundreds of years and they all end up falling until Glorfindel drives them off with Arthedain
rings of power was a genuine feck you to Tolkien established canon which is what rubbed people off.
the only characteristics the characters shared with book was their name.
Shit like “you cannot come to the council Elrond, elf lords only” really rubbed me off. Elrond was regarded by the elves as a Demi god, child of earendil, descendant of Luthien, thingol, Melian, Turgon and Idril. The elves quite literally refer to his father as “the greatest star in the sky”. There was no way they would treat Elrond with such disrespect.
Yeah there was a lot wrong with how every character was portrayed in the rings of power. I will watch the second series so I guess I am part of the problem but it was such a let down. Completely ruined some characters.
I think children of Húrins ending will be very hard to pull off mind without it being cringe.
“Ah I just learnt that I fecked and impregnated my sister, better kill myself” doesn’t pertain to good movie endings
Disney, it ain't.Might want to spoiler that, btw!
They could bookend the film with elderly Aragorn recalling his past from the Fourth Age with Merry and Pippin. Similar to Frodo's appearance in the Hobbit movies. But someone else should definitely be cast as his younger self.
There's little faith in any new LOTR shows/movies as everything since the PJ trilogy has been garbage. No doubt a new film will have it's share of CGI elf acrobatics and cringey love stories.
I always thought Gandalf screaming "I AM GOOOOOOOOOD!" made up for that shitshow.
The "Mordor" reveal was the peak.
I didn't hate ROP anywhere near as much as I hated The Hobbit films. I guess I had zero hope ROP would be good so just enjoyed it as a very pretty visit back to middle earth.
With the Hobbit you at least expected some standards since it was Peter Jackson again. With ROP you expected D & D writing which is pretty much what we got.
These are the film i watch at least once a year :
- TLOTR, all three movies, and a lot more often than once a year.
- Rush Hours, best action comedy ever made
- Lion King, best movie ever made and now i get to watch it with my daughter
- TLOTR, all three movies, and a lot more often than once a year.
- Rush Hours, best action comedy ever made
- Lion King, best movie ever made and now i get to watch it with my daughter
I thought the subtle political comparisons to modern day Britain were spot on when they did the whole "The Elves derk our jobs! derka derka!".
Its precisely how I envisioned Numenor.
This is probably a controversial point, but I also thought the racial element of ROP was very frustrating.
I don't mind racial recasting and encourage it in practically anything else, but Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion should not have that element.
LOTR/Silmarillion was written because Tolkien thought that the Anglo Saxon people did not have it's mythos and legends the same way the Norse, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Romans, the Japanese, the Hindu's had their own.
It was meant to be the Iliad, the Sun WuKong, the Arjun, Ragnarok of the Anglo Saxons. It is meant to be a great epic of a specific culture of people, retrospectively invented.
Numenor is meant to represent the rise of fall of the Angelo-Saxon peoples and how they came to be on the shores of our world. So the racially ambiguous casting of Isildur, amongst others was somewhat bizarre.
Imagine watching an adaption of Journey to the West, and the Chinese Celestial Emperor is a pasty white dude? Or a retelling of Ragnarok (not Marvel superhero adaptions but a more somber telling), where Thor is a South Mediterranean guy?
It just breaks the immersion for me. This is one of the few genres imo where the racial element is actually quite important to stick to the canon.
I don't mind racial recasting and encourage it in practically anything else, but Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion should not have that element.
LOTR/Silmarillion was written because Tolkien thought that the Anglo Saxon people did not have it's mythos and legends the same way the Norse, the Greeks, the Chinese, the Romans, the Japanese, the Hindu's had their own.
It was meant to be the Iliad, the Sun WuKong, the Arjun, Ragnarok of the Anglo Saxons. It is meant to be a great epic of a specific culture of people, retrospectively invented.
Numenor is meant to represent the rise of fall of the Angelo-Saxon peoples and how they came to be on the shores of our world. So the racially ambiguous casting of Isildur, amongst others was somewhat bizarre.
Imagine watching an adaption of Journey to the West, and the Chinese Celestial Emperor is a pasty white dude? Or a retelling of Ragnarok (not Marvel superhero adaptions but a more somber telling), where Thor is a South Mediterranean guy?
It just breaks the immersion for me. This is one of the few genres imo where the racial element is actually quite important to stick to the canon.
Not really PJ's fault.
He took over an already existing project with strict deadlines.
He didn't have the opportunity to spend 2 years doing pre-production.
Cringy Love stories is fine if Tolkien's canon had cringy love stories.
Like, LOTR's love story was a bit cringe. But people loved it anyway because it was actually Tolkien realistic.
In Appendix of ROTK, Arwen literally saw Aragorn walking up the hill after not seeing him for 28 years, stared at him for a few seconds and immediately decided that he was the one and she would sacrifice her immortality for him.
In Silmarillion the cheese becomes even stronger with stuff like Thingol disappearing into the woods after getting Lost, bumps into Melian and the two of them stare at each other for over two centuries completely in a trance mesmerized.
During these 200 years of them literally staring at each other, the Teleri think their king has died and simply move on with their lives.
Honestly, plenty to pick at with the questionable quality of RoP, but whining about the racial element just seems such a petty issue. Especially as those characters were actually the better parts of the show. Bizarre that we have to keep having this discussion in the 21st century.
Adam Sandler's Murder Mystery 1 and 2 
I think some of the "diverse" actors were some of the strongest performances but I tend to agree with this thinking. There is a way to accomplish diversity like how they did it in House of the Dragon for instance - if you make an entire group of people from a certain land or family a certain complexion it actually adds something to it IMHO, not unlike how i.e. orcs in LotR look a bit different based on what part of the world their dwelling is so to speak. That kind of diversity adds to the world building imho. We re supposed to believe most of these groups have never encountered another one like them after all.
If the author is very specific about the appearance of a certain group I think that needs to be respected.
Now, having said that - I am happy to see some movies and shows based on RL historical events for instance recognize more that there was a bit more diversity in certain parts of the world than has long been portrayed (i.e. showing more of a presence of people of African descent in the Middle East, Asia and Europe in the antiquities and medieval times etc).
Numenor is straightforwardly a retelling of the Atlantis myth (culturally he directly compared them to ancient Egypt, though monotheistic). Rohan is the Anglo-Saxon analogue.
As much as anything, it just shouldn't matter. If you can accept dragons and trolls and hobbits and personifications of evil, you should be able to accept that in a landmass that he says was intended to vaguely overlay Europe from England to the Mediterranean, not everyone is going to be a pasty white person.
The "mythology for England" line that was attributed to him has grown to something way out of proportion and generally used now to justify these sorts of conclusions on race, something he barely mentioned, and when the related term "nordic" was brought up he specifically repudiated it as being associated with "racialist theories". Not to mention that his most common grievance became repeatedly telling people the work had no allegorical intention.
And this is coming from someone that thought Rings of Power was shite.
But it doesn't fit the theme of the source material. It's not a petty issue in the slightest. Tolkiens work as specifically built to serve as a background to how Angelo Saxons came to be.
Tolkien's work isn't meant to be a fiction of modern style, it's meant to be like a Bible-esque mythos story of how a particular culture came to be.
Would you be happy with a tale of Ganesha and Shiva being cast as anything other than Indian?
Or biblical characters as being of Native american descent?
Casting people like Hermione as Black is absolutely fine - it reduces nothing of her character and doesn't break any immersion.
Isildur was the heir of the loyalists in Numenor - the High King of the Angelo Saxon people in Tolkiens vision. This is where immersion is broken.
Some tales are thematically about race - most are not. The ones where race has no thematic importance can have any casting direction you want - but Tolkien thematically is very specifically about the background of a race/culture.
I know the Silmarillion has some corny stuff in it, but I thought the Aragorn/Arwen stuff was well done though.Not really PJ's fault.
He took over an already existing project with strict deadlines.
He didn't have the opportunity to spend 2 years doing pre-production.
Cringy Love stories is fine if Tolkien's canon had cringy love stories.
Like, LOTR's love story was a bit cringe. But people loved it anyway because it was actually Tolkien realistic.
In Appendix of ROTK, Arwen literally saw Aragorn walking up the hill after not seeing him for 28 years, stared at him for a few seconds and immediately decided that he was the one and she would sacrifice her immortality for him.
In Silmarillion the cheese becomes even stronger with stuff like Thingol disappearing into the woods after getting Lost, bumps into Melian and the two of them stare at each other for over two centuries completely in a trance mesmerized.
During these 200 years of them literally staring at each other, the Teleri think their king has died and simply move on with their lives.
It’s the forbidden love shite in the Hobbit trilogy I was mainly referring to.
The Numenor/Atlantis thing is a comparison that's valid but where his real intentions came in were exposed in the letters to his son. He explicitly told his intention that there was no Angelo Saxon mythos and that he was determined to create it. In early drafts of Silmarillion this was way more apparent as he directly made Tirion Warwick and made constant explicit Angelo Saxon cultural references around the entire world.
I have no problem with multi-cultural, multi-racial middle earth. Just, not ret-con characters into something they are not.
He told people the work he did had no catholic allegory, not allegory in general and he was very explicit that allegory =/= myth.
This is what tolkien said:
https://www.tolkienestate.com/letters/letter-to-milton-waldman-publisher-1951/
I actually don't mind multi-racial elves for example. The character was pretty terribly constructed, and the elf-human relationship was terribly constructed, but Canon wise:
1) Avari elves were noticeably more different in appearance than Noldor/Sindarin/Teleri .
2) Elves in general did not care of mixing with other tribes / species.
3) Therefore Arondir makes sense.
Numenorean's were very picky about bloodlines and purity and they were pretty fecking racist with an oversized superiority complex, this culture spilling over into Gondor and Arnor though less intense. bloodlines were something they were heavily focused on with multiple laments about how Numeanoreans were being diluted because they were marrying none Numeanoreans.
Given that Numeanor were all descents of Elros Tar-Minyatur and the survivors of the House of Beor and the House of Hador, I just don't see a reasonable logical explanation as to how Isildur is portrayed in ROP, even if you ignore the angelo-saxon chonotations.
1) Avari elves were noticeably more different in appearance than Noldor/Sindarin/Teleri .
2) Elves in general did not care of mixing with other tribes / species.
3) Therefore Arondir makes sense.
Numenorean's were very picky about bloodlines and purity and they were pretty fecking racist with an oversized superiority complex, this culture spilling over into Gondor and Arnor though less intense. bloodlines were something they were heavily focused on with multiple laments about how Numeanoreans were being diluted because they were marrying none Numeanoreans.
Given that Numeanor were all descents of Elros Tar-Minyatur and the survivors of the House of Beor and the House of Hador, I just don't see a reasonable logical explanation as to how Isildur is portrayed in ROP, even if you ignore the angelo-saxon chonotations.
Lord of the Rings: Requiem
Middle Earth has been at peace for three thousand years after Sauron was defeated, but not everything is as it seems. Hobbits have evolved into a species taller and stronger than Man, hungry for third and fourth breakfasts and decimating the crops and tater fields across all of the realm. The Elves, led by their new King known only as Fenixx Shotgunn, have returned because of this new threat. Armed with their new laser balloons and mechanised giant walking robots, the Elvezz of F3n!xx Sh0tGunN have come to kill Hobbits and eat Lembas Bread, and they're all outta Lembas Bread.
But....deep in the shadows of what remains of Mount Doom... Something dark somehow returns *evil cackle at the end of the trailer* *Linkin Park song plays*
Middle Earth has been at peace for three thousand years after Sauron was defeated, but not everything is as it seems. Hobbits have evolved into a species taller and stronger than Man, hungry for third and fourth breakfasts and decimating the crops and tater fields across all of the realm. The Elves, led by their new King known only as Fenixx Shotgunn, have returned because of this new threat. Armed with their new laser balloons and mechanised giant walking robots, the Elvezz of F3n!xx Sh0tGunN have come to kill Hobbits and eat Lembas Bread, and they're all outta Lembas Bread.
But....deep in the shadows of what remains of Mount Doom... Something dark somehow returns *evil cackle at the end of the trailer* *Linkin Park song plays*
The secret of Lembas in middle earth died when Arwen passed away
Yup. That's why they're all outta Lembas Bread.The secret of Lembas in middle earth died when Arwen passed away
Lord of the Rings: Requiem for a Dream
By Darren Aronofsky
That would pique my interest....
We need a Mel Brooks parody version of Lord of the Rings:
In the quaint and quirky land of the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself unwittingly volunteered as the universe’s most unlikely hero when his Uncle Bilbo leaves him what might just be the worst inheritance ever: a seemingly innocent gold ring that actually doubles as the ultimate tool of evil and a magnet for every power-hungry maniac across Middle-earth.
Tasked with the minor inconvenience of saving the world, Frodo, along with a ragtag band of friends including an overly enthusiastic gardener, two mischievous cousins, a couple of towering human warriors who can't stop arguing about who gets to be king, an elf who’s too cool for Middle-earth school, a grumpy dwarf who loves axes and hates walking, and a wizard who can’t seem to stick to one color for his wardrobe, sets off on a road trip to end all road trips.
Their journey to destroy the Ring by tossing it into the fiery Mount Doom—a task that could have been solved by any self-respecting eagle in about five minutes—includes singing orcs, a spider with personal space issues, and a creature named Gollum who defines the term ‘split personality’. Along the way, they encounter every possible obstacle, including but not limited to: sinister innkeepers, treacherous trees, indecisive ghosts, and a kingdom that can’t decide if it's in more trouble from the orcs outside the gates or the steward’s pyromania inside.
In this comical quest, friendships are forged, kingdoms are defended, and many pints are consumed, all leading up to the climactic battle where the fate of the couch-potato hobbits hangs in the balance. Will Frodo ever get back to his beloved Shire, or will he spend eternity asking Gollum to please pass the sunscreen in the fiery pits of Mordor? Join the fellowship and find out in this hilariously epic saga where destiny meets a serious case of mistaken identity!
I love AI.
In the quaint and quirky land of the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself unwittingly volunteered as the universe’s most unlikely hero when his Uncle Bilbo leaves him what might just be the worst inheritance ever: a seemingly innocent gold ring that actually doubles as the ultimate tool of evil and a magnet for every power-hungry maniac across Middle-earth.
Tasked with the minor inconvenience of saving the world, Frodo, along with a ragtag band of friends including an overly enthusiastic gardener, two mischievous cousins, a couple of towering human warriors who can't stop arguing about who gets to be king, an elf who’s too cool for Middle-earth school, a grumpy dwarf who loves axes and hates walking, and a wizard who can’t seem to stick to one color for his wardrobe, sets off on a road trip to end all road trips.
Their journey to destroy the Ring by tossing it into the fiery Mount Doom—a task that could have been solved by any self-respecting eagle in about five minutes—includes singing orcs, a spider with personal space issues, and a creature named Gollum who defines the term ‘split personality’. Along the way, they encounter every possible obstacle, including but not limited to: sinister innkeepers, treacherous trees, indecisive ghosts, and a kingdom that can’t decide if it's in more trouble from the orcs outside the gates or the steward’s pyromania inside.
In this comical quest, friendships are forged, kingdoms are defended, and many pints are consumed, all leading up to the climactic battle where the fate of the couch-potato hobbits hangs in the balance. Will Frodo ever get back to his beloved Shire, or will he spend eternity asking Gollum to please pass the sunscreen in the fiery pits of Mordor? Join the fellowship and find out in this hilariously epic saga where destiny meets a serious case of mistaken identity!
I love AI.