The other day I was watching Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on one of the Encore channels. I expected a repeat viewing of a movie I have seen so many times that I can predict what the characters are about to say. But this time around, things were different: they had added many new scenes to the movie.
The part where, at Isengard, the hobbits Merry and Pippin are reunited with the rest of the "fellowship" (sans Frodo, Sam, and Boromir) is rather puzzling in the original movie. After dominating Gandalf and terrorizing the surrounding people in the first two movies with his massive army of orcs, the wizard Saruman is reduced to residing hidden in his tower, without any real power left. That is, according to a terse statement that Gandalf makes. Then, mysteriously and without explanation, after safely in Saruman's possession within the tower for the first two movies, the black palantir (a magical psychic transmission ball) appears to Pippin at the bottom of the water just outside. I found this sequence frustrating and unsatisfactory in the original movie. But the revised version I saw the other night tied up all the loose ends and nicely cleaned up the story. I wondered to myself why they didn't include this in the original.
Other scenes were added as well: some were clearly superfluous to the story, such as the drinking contest between Legolas and Gimli. Others were important, such as what happened right after Aragorn made his enlistment pitch to the army of the dead. Or the time that Frodo and Sam were in Mordor and were forced to march for a time with Sauron's orc army. These scenes were exciting, making me wonder why they were left out of the movie.
I bought the DVD set for Lord of the Rings a few years ago and now feel a bit ripped off, knowing that I am missing all of those extra scenes. But this reinsertion of scenes into established movies has been going on for quite some time. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, The Godfather, and the Harry Potter flicks have all undergone this process, making their presentation on TV always a question of whether it's the old movie or the "new, improved" version.
What is interesting to me is that the extra scene in Return of the King with Saruman, while making the story more sensible, actually makes a complete break with J.R.R. Tolkien's writing. In the book, Saruman and Grima escape to foment trouble in the Shire, which the four returning hobbits have to deal with near the ending. In the movie, the Shire residents are blissfully ignorant of all the tumultuous events that had just transpired around them, regarding the returning hobbit heroes with apathy, even a little disdain.
I welcome the new scenes: actually, I'd like to see a whole lot more...
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From the start, I bought each of the three movies in its "extended" edition (which meant I waited a year after each movie came out, before the extended edition was available). So I've had all the extra scenes all along.
ReplyDeleteI always thought it was rather a rip-off for them to sell the theatrical version (which was edited for time — they decided on time limits, and cut scenes, sometimes even useful scenes, because they had to cut something), and then to sell the extended version later... knowing that some people would buy both. But then I figured that they weren't ripping most people off, because most who bought the first version knew there'd be an extended version coming, and made their choice when they made their purchase.
I don't think that most people knew that about upcoming extended editions, but I'm glad I finally saw one (at least for the final movie).
ReplyDeleteI'm still trying to come to grips with how Peter Jackson & Company drastically altered the plot of Tolkien's books to present what they deemed to be a better product.