Lord of the Rings: I Have Issues

I loved reading J.R.R. Tolkien's classic three volume fantasy series Lord of the Rings, and I also love watching the three-movie film adaptation thereof. There are however some problems I have with Lord of the Rings, mainly concerning the movies.

When I sat down to watch the first movie The Fellowship of the Ring, I was very eager to see how the movie would portray my favorite character Tom Bombadil. Who, you might say, is that? Well, if you didn't read the book you wouldn't know: director Peter Jackson and his cohorts apparently thought that THREE WHOLE CONSECUTIVE CHAPTERS of the book could be dispensed with, completely omitting any reference to this puzzling character and his interesting domain, which was located between the Shire and the town of Bree. Go figure...

Then there is the matter of the great ring itself. Whoever possessed it and kept it on their person never physically aged, as neither Gollum nor Bilbo Baggins did. Once Bilbo relinquished it to Frodo, though, he quickly aged, and by decades. But with Gollum, he was deprived of it for many years but DIDN'T AGE! H-m-m...

And what about the way the movie series treated the treacherous wizard Saruman? In the first movie, he was so powerful that he could control the weather from many miles away. But once the Ents flooded out Isengard in the second movie The Two Towers, he was just left alone in his tower without any power. In the book, he escapes with Wormtongue to stir up trouble later in the Shire, something also completely ignored in the films.

The Nazgul, or "Riders in Black", never made much sense either. In The Fellowship of the Ring, they were confined by land on horseback and allowed themselves to be swept away by an enchanted elvish river. And one man, Aragorn, was able to fight off the entire lot of them with an also-unexplained short respite of time following this feat. Later, in The Two Towers and the final book/film The Return of the King, the Nazgul return but are much more powerful and imposing, flying around on their powerful demonic dragons. Yet, in a scene at the end of the movie (but not in the book), they discover the whereabouts of the ring but retreat too easily.

There is something in the films that was a bit unsettling to me, something that I had alluded to in a much earlier blog article. Did you notice that the elves, Gandalf, and Aragorn all spoke the King's English? Other "good guys" like common hobbits and dwarfs spoke in in brogues like one would find in Scotland or Ireland. But the bad guys like Sauron or the orcs? They spoke with common Cockney-like accents. This gave an elitist, aristocratic connotation to the conflict between good and evil, and I objected to that.

Finally, I object to the way that Jackson and Co. tried to get around the aforementioned three chapters that they left out of the first movie by finally reintroducing the characters of Merry and Pippin in the most improbable setting of a maze-like cornfield miles away from Frodo and Sam's starting point for their trek. They could have done better, I think.

Still, I love Lord of the Rings and consider the film version as the best thing in cinema to come out this century so far. I wonder, though, how much they are going to alter the wonderful story The Hobbit when that movie is released. I shudder at the thought...