The Two Towers, Abridg'd

[bunsen_h]

Gimli: 'I don't wish to meet that old man at unawares without an argument ready to hand, that's all.  Let's go!'

Does that look wrong?  Or more precisely, sound wrong?

I enjoyed the audio book version of The Fellowship of the Ring quite a lot.  Reader Rob Inglis has a reasonable range of voices -- nowhere near Luke Daniels, who reads Kevin Hearne's Iron Druid Chronicles, but that's a very high bar.  So I expected to like his reading of The Two Towers.

But I keep getting thrown out of the story.  He keeps altering the text, including the dialogue, by using contractions.  Frequently.

By some lights I'm something of a purist with regard to Tolkien, no question.  I was lukewarm on Jackson's version of FotR, disliked TTT, and have seen only a few minutes of his RotK -- which was enough to confirm my decision to give it a miss.  I've seen most of the first Hobbit movie, at home for free while I was working on something, so it wasn't completely lost time.  That convinced me that Jackson has no sense with regard to sacrificing plot in favour of ludicrous action sequences.  I saw a few bits of the second Hobbit movie a couple of days ago, and that was enough; I was shrieking in laughter at the fight sequence with the Dwarves barrelling down the river, and the melting of the "gold" in Moria.  I don't know what that stuff was, but it wasn't gold.  Negligible specific heat and heat of fusion; low melting point.

But this audio book's problem is subtler... "just" contractions.  But Tolkien was very careful about character voice.  Some characters speak casually, some always formally, and some change their style of speech depending on circumstance.  To chuck that out is wrong; it significantly affects the characterization.  For Gimli to say "That's all.  Let's go!" just knots up my neck and shoulder muscles.  It's fingernails-on-blackboard stuff, full-on "uncanny valley", who-are-you-and-where-is-the-real-Gimli material.

*sigh*
 

Comments

[batyatoon]

"Jackson has no sense with regard to sacrificing plot in favour of ludicrous action sequences" -- I liked the Jackson adaptations, but you're not wrong. I remember I couldn't figure out why some of his sequences were so lacking in subtlety when I thought he'd done such a good job with others, and then I realized that he's actually lacking in subtlety throughout; it's just that he's very good with fine detail, which can fool you into thinking that he knows how to be subtle.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I recently read As You Wish, Cary Elwes's recounting of the making of the movie The Princess Bride. It's a charming book; I recommend it.

A large portion of the book is about Elwes and Mandy Patinkin's preparation for the fencing fight between Inigo Montoya and "The Man in Black". They started with a couple of solid months of training before filming started, and then every time either of them wasn't actually needed for filming, even for a few minutes, they'd be back to training. That fight scene was left to the very end of the filming so the actors would have as much time as possible to become the best swordsmen they could be. At the end of that, they were good enough to go through the entire carefully-choreographed sequence in a single take. The choreography let good swordsmen appear to do "the Greatest Sword Fight in Modern Times". It looked real because in large part, it was real.

And then I saw that bit of the Hobbit movie in which the dwarves were bouncing down the river in barrels, fighting orcs, while an elf was literally dancing on the tops of the dwarves' heads shooting the orcs with arrows. One dwarf would toss an axe to another; the latter would turn and pluck it out of the air, with no call from the first to the second and with nary a miss. It was like a single mind controlling all the bodies, with perfect knowledge of how the barrels would move in the river. At the end, of course, all of the orcs were dead and none of the dwarves were so much as scratched.

It was preposterous. It was far too close to perfect to have been filmed at all for real. At best, it would have been filmed in tiny bits, a few seconds long, which would then have been spliced together with CGI. It was like a bakery cake fallen terribly flat and then "restored" with buckets of icing. I know that few movies can afford to have actors spend so much time in training as The Princess Bride, but there are limits. ("Yes, there are limits, don't pretend things are fine...")