Today I have seen the worst movie I will ever see in my entire life. It’s name? The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I went into it with great hope. The first movie had dragged a little, but in the end had been pretty good. I had thought, now they were in the thick of things, that the movie would be more engaging. Feel free to snort derisively at my innocent gullibility.
To say the movie was bad is an understatement. Most movies have a first act, a second act, and a third act. Most movies also have a midpoint. Even The Fellowship of the Ring had some slight semblance of an end. The makers of this movie seem to have decided to replace all of those essential items with a low point every ten minutes. (For those of you not versed in movie-speak, the low point is the part of the movie right before the third act where everything seems hopeless and the hero isn't certain he'll be able to go on.) This movie had only the vaguest hints of a plot. More than anything, it was one gigantic, plodding battle scene that refused to end.
In regards to books and movies I now hold one very strong belief. For many years it has lingered beneath the surface, but today it sprang forth with an intensity that surprised even myself. It goes as follows: “Books are books and movies are movies and never the twain should meet.” I am very tired of seeing the two cross paths--nearly always with a bad result. Novelizations of movies are the worst sort of fiction in existence, worse than even fan-fiction. So also are movies of books some of the worst movies. Both forms of expression have their own strengths and weaknesses, but when put into the other form the strengths are pushed back and the weaknesses brought to the fore.
The strength of movies is that they’re much shorter than books. The strength of books is that they’re much longer than movies. A really good movie will be cut free of all superfluities in plot and character. The characters are introduced quickly, there’s a fight in the first ten or fifteen minutes, and in the space of two hours the characters go through hell and back while they fall in love and learn valuable, moral lessons that will help them deal with problems they were facing early on in the movie. It takes very little for the viewer to care about what’s going on; just make the characters somewhat likable, play appropriate music during the kissing moments and the battle scenes and, because this is a visual medium, throw in tons of eye-popping visuals. You’ll have a kickarse movie; I guarantee it.
Movie scripts are generally around 100 or so pages long. Is it any wonder then that the story would suffer when dragged out to novel length in some half-rate movie novelization that only the weird or naive buy?
Is it also any wonder that 300, 500, or 1000 page novels would suffer when forced into 100 or even 180 pages? The beauty of novels is that they’re long. One is able to have more characters, a more complex plot, and a fuller world than a movie allows--as Tolkien did. Some of the most captivating things about The Lord of the Rings were Tolkien’s gigantic cast of characters, and the full, living world he created. In the movie this ended up being just a lot of weird names nobody could remember. In the book, however, each character was more than just an image that spoke and did things; each character had just that, a character, a personality, a history that made them who they were, and these things, if not spoken of in full, were hinted at, and the reader was given enough information that they were able to use their imagination to create the rest. In the movie, Wormtongue is just another bad guy dressed too much like a Goth, with pasty skin and oily, dirty hair. His lust for Eowyn is hardly terrifying, or even mildly disturbing, for Eowyn’s a girl whom we know less about than Wormtongue. But, in the book, his lust for her was never even remotely a plot point. Rather, it was something spoken of after Wormtongue, Eowyn, and her brother had been introduced and, in the case of the latter two, a little and, in the case of Wormtongue, much of their characters had been shown. Wormtongue’s other sins had already been revealed and this, the worst of them, was shown at the end where it had the most effect and proved him to be even more nasty than we already thought him to be. If we the readers choose, we have all the information we need to imagine the whole story of him and Eowyn and Eomer up until the point they were introduced.
But, Wormtongue in and of himself was a rather minor character. I don’t think the plot would have suffered if he had been scrapped completely. Probably the best thing to do would have been to not have King Theoden be ill at all, have Gandalf and company show up, enlist his aid, and get on with the plot without having to go into the whole little tangent about Gandalf healing him or Theoden mourning the loss of his son or any of that. The beauty of books is that an author can indulge in tangents such as that, and the reader can enjoy them. In a movie, however, they serve no purpose save to drag down the plot. What is even more odd than keeping in that section of the book was that the people who made the movie saw fit to add to it and give it even more importance than the book did. Why waste your time on frivolous things when there are so many good things already available to occupy it?
Lord of the Rings is a story about people--their strengths, their fears, and the way they deal with the circumstances they are in. It is not, so much, about the circumstances themselves, but that was all the movie turned the story into--a circumstances, an endless series of battles with little character development. The characters lost so much of their personalities in the movie; they became caricatures of what Tolkien had created them to be, and that, only if they were lucky; Aragorn and Arwen were turned into people completely different, if not almost opposite, of what they truly are.
It makes me very sad because I knew these people the way they really were, and now I see them butchered before my eyes. And I’ve seen one of the most captivating, inspiring books I have ever read turned into a three hour long battle scene.
On an even more personal level, it doesn’t offer me much hope for my own work. I’m certainly not there yet, but one day I know I will be a great writer and write books that last beyond myself. I pour myself into my writing; it is my life’s work, and I know that when I become successful people will want to turn my books into movies. Already I’ve been told that I ought to turn Tapestry of Power into a screenplay. If I wanted to make movies I would write screenplays, but I write these stories as novels because that’s the best form for them to take. I do not want to see my own work butchered and made ridiculous and boring the way Lord of the Rings has been made.
Turning books into movies is rather like forcing a person to be something they aren’t. It’s like taking a person who dresses in grey, wears their hair in a braid, paints with oil colours, and plays the guitar and telling them, “That’s amazing; you’re wonderful,” right before forcing them to dress all in black, wear their hair in a pony tail, paint in watercolours, and play the piano. Somebody who never knew the original might not think anything was wrong, but anyone who knew the original would know how poor this new person is. And, the person herself, though she might be able to emotionally touch someone and express herself and get her thoughts and feelings across somewhat, would be constantly shackled, never able to communicate the full extent of what she was created to say nor able to do so in the optimal way.
I have nothing against movies. I just wish that movie-makers would make more original movies and not constantly look to books for them to turn into movies. Movie-makers are as much artists as authors; I would think they have as much creativity. I should like to see them use that creativity instead of taking the substance of their work from others.