Random thoughts on re-rewatching Return of the King

[bunn]

1) My goodness the Rohirrim are hard.  I mean, they are quite tough in the book, but here 6,000 Rohirrim go through the Armies of Sauron, including Oliphaunts, like a knife through butter.   I think Rohirric horses may be closely related to rhinos.    I don't care though. I love the charge of the Rohirrim at the battle of the Pelennor Fields in both book and film. 

2) I wonder who lent Eowyn her nightie.  Because that does not look like an Eowyn nightie to me.  

3)  Elijah Wood has really odd lips, and his ridiculous youth is just silly. Frodo should not be that young.  Fastforwarded through the Frodo Closeup bits for this reason.  Also Frodo Closeups appear to cause Mollydog to whinge.  Whereas at the point where there was a closeup of the One Ring, Yama Bungle stood up in front of the telly and went 'Yowp!'  in the manner of a cat saying ' I want one of THOSE!'  This confirms all my worst suspicions about Yama Bungle. 

4)  Sam!  Hurray!  Let's face it, he is the real hero.  Aragorn  Hurray again!  I really can't imagine Aragorn played by anyone else now.   Arwen on the other hand.... hmph.   Eowyn would wipe the floor with her. 

5) I really hope the dwarves in the Hobbit film will have better makeup than Gimli. 

6) I wonder where the three dead rabbits strung on a frame in Mordor came from.  And what they did. 

7) Did the Mouth of Sauron have *oil* on his teeth?  I wonder how that works. 

8) I wonder if Gondor has hairdressers that specialise purely in putting in people's incredibly-neat backplaits.   Oh, and Arwen?  Very-pale-green?  REALLY? 

9) It was worth getting the extended DVD just for the proper nasturtians at the end, rather than those rather naff and obviously-grown-in-pots petunias that were in the cinema release. 

Comments

[andrewducker]

Dwarves!
http://images.hollywood.com/site/hobbitsupersize.jpg

I assumed that The Mouth Of Sauron had really bad gums, and black blood (as all of the other evil beasts had black blood).

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Ahh, but the Mouth of Sauron is human.

[andrewducker]

He certainly _was_ human - but that mouth is not something that normal humans have.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

This is a good point. He does have good strong teeth for someone whose gums are bleeding that much though.

[andrewducker]

Sauron must have an excellent dental plan :->

(I just checked, and apparently they digitally doubled the mouth size in post-production, to make him look "wrong".)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, most of those dwarves look OK, but you can't tell till you see the whole thing. At some points Gimli looked distinctly flaky.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I've only seen RotK once.

And the Rankin-Bass RotK once ...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I've seen it lots. Though nothing like as often as I've re-read the book. Perhaps I shall do that again next.

[inzilbeth-liz.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen RotK since the Albert Hall a year last September so might be due my own random thoughts post. I loved the charge of the Rohirrim too but I can't help thinking I would have been terrified that my horse would stumble!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

If you had a special Rohirric horse, it probably comes with a special anti-stumbling muscle. ;-)

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Far as I remember that charge, it was straight down a precipitous bank onto spears. Am no military historian but it looked like a demo from "how not to use cavalry" to me. Stumbling would have been the least of your worries.... :-D -N.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

That's the Two Towers charge - the one with Eomer and the Unfeasibly Steep Slope. The Return of the King one is the one that is more or less on the flat, but involves an awful lot of horses moving at speed and tightly bunched!

Mind you, in both cases they hit the spear-armed enemy with an impressive splat.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I used to worry about Eomer and the Unfeasibly Steep Slope, until I realised that his men have magic horses. At one point, it is stated that they are 300 leagues away, and yet they manage to ride all the way back a bare few days. Either we have a case of Leagues Don't Mean What You Think They Mean, or we have magic horses. I favour the magic horses, definitely. They probably grow on trees.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I don't think this is out of keeping with the book, what with Shadowfax being able to run more or less without stopping or eating all the way from Isengard to Minas Tirith. I reckon Rohirric horses are to modern horses as Oliphaunts are to elephants. And as Ents are to trees. Eagles to eagles. Aragorn to a pensioner. Etc.

Basically, I think we can apply the law 'Everything is more Epic in Middle Earth' here.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Ah, I hadn't realised they were magic horses (not having caught the "300 leagues" bit).

It's explicit in Unfinished Tales that a Middle-earth league is almost exactly* 300 miles, but this doesn't necessarily translate to the films.

*For a given value of "almost exactly", that is.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

1 league = 3 HUNDRED miles? Really? Surely that must be a miswriting?

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Um, would you believe I meant to type "3" ?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Can't trust numbers. They are sneaky little buggers. :-D

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

The charge at Helm's Deep should never have worked, the slope was too steep for any sort of movement, never mind a charge. The disordering effect of the dawn on the uruks would have compensated for the problems of charging into a spearwall, to be fair - though one does wonder why the Uruks weren't aware that dawn might be coming. After all, it's probably the favourite time to launch any sort of operation, so they should have been ready.

At Pelennor Fields, one can't help thinking that perhaps the bit where the Rohirrim say "Hello! We've surprised you in the flank! Yes, us, over here! If you don't get a minute or two to regroup we're going to massacre you without warning! Now, if you could just hold still for a bit while we have a rousing speech..." is a bit of a shame ;-)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Re: Pelennor Fields : I think Theoden has to do that because his men are hugely outnumbered and terrified. He has to pause and get them into death or glory mode, or they wouldn't have been able to do the charge at all. I think he's also waiting for the sunrise.

Most of the Uruks are only weeks old, the poor loves, so it's kind of understandable that their strategic thinking might be a bit lacking.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Maybe once upon a time, all Bungles were peaceful, pleasant riverbank-dwelling creatures, but one day Yama and his friend went fishing...

I very much like the opening stages charge of the Rohirrim, which makes me cry every time. I don't like it as much once they start impacting with things, though, since it all gets a bit silly and implausible.

Must watch that film again. I watched all 3 back-to-back a couple of years ago, when Pellinor was away at Summerfest, and must do the same again soon. It made for a very long day, though!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

There must be some explanation for the Evil of Bungles. They are, after all, the product of bizarre breeding practices, like orcs bred from elves...

I watched all 3 this week while I was fiddling with photos and boring bits of code, but they are a bit too interesting to allow your surface mind to float along on while doing other stuff. Too interesting. Distracting. I thought it would be OK as I've seen it several times, but ...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

That yellow goo that oozes out of Yama's nose...? Are you sure it isn't ichor? ("It was considered to be golden in color," quoth the great sage Wikipedius.)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm *not* sure it isn't ichor. Frankly, nothing would surprise me when it comes to Yama Bungle.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I really do dread to think what Yama Bungle would be like with a ring ...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Our only hope would be to overthrow him while he's having a nap. Not exactly a Lidless Eye, our Yama.

[thecatsamuel.livejournal.com]

I have just been watching the Two Towers and agree that Sam is v.heroic. But so is Faramir and much more so in the book than the film and that could have come out much more clearly than in the adaptation.

Neither Eowyn nor Arwen are getting their mitts on Aragorn. He is All Mine.

Stefan snored all the way through. He is too idle to manage world domination.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't care much for the Faramir diversion in Osgiliath either. It all seems a bit pointless: Faramir comes over as unnecessarily violent and not thoughtful enough (and there are too many shots of Frodo's lips writhing like angry earthworms). Faramir is better in Return of the King though.

I suppose Faramir is a casualty of the desire to build up questions about whether Gollum is redeemable, which is interesting...

Oddly, Yama Bungle does *look* rather like Gollum, with his huge eyes, skinny body, snub nose, and facial expressions that are a bit cute but also undeniably rather evil. :-D

[huinare.livejournal.com]

Point #3 amused me.

Sadly, I find it difficult to watch the films these days due to drastic character butchery cinematic license taken with many of my favorite characters. Fellowship is the only one I can sit through without swearing colorfully at it. A bit of a shame, since the music and aesthetics of the films still make me happy.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not too fussed. There were bound to be other sources with different views on the characters & alternative tellings to the Red Book of Westmarch, I'm just assuming they are working with some of those. :-)

The setting is very beautifully done, I can watch the films just for that. I've even got over the annoying maize field in Fellowship of the Ring and the fact that Rohan's soil looks thin and stony rather than rich and loamy, and the bad artificial leaves you can see occasionally around the Ents. I'm glad they replaced the petunias though. (Films seen through a gardener's eye are odd things :-D )

[andrewducker]

Ooh - annoying maize field?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Right at the start of their journey, Frodo and Sam are walking through a field of maize when Sam loses sight of Frodo - then Merry and Pippin appear through the maize running from Farmer Maggot.

Now, OK, hobbits grow potatoes, which are also a South American plant - but there is a horticultural explanation given for the Gaffer's 'taters' in the Appendices: 'potatoes' is being used as a translation from the Westron word for another starchy root vegetable, a type of yam which holds a similar position in Hobbit culture. And we never actually *see* the potatoes, which helps.

Maize is a plant with a lot of specific and important cultural associations, all of them very specifically New World. I felt that it stuck out like a sore thumb in the Shire, and the first time I saw Fellowship of the Ring it rather abruptly interrupted my belief in the setting, in the same way that it might have done if all the hobbits were dressed in Peruvian rather than English styles.

But I can't really quibble because I am the only person I have encountered who noticed or cared, so I've got over it now. :-D

[andrewducker]

Aaah, of course, that makes perfect sense. I think that I saw it as wheat, and would probably not register that it wasn't.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that was a difficult scene for the location-finder people (if they thought about the whole maize thing at all), because there really aren't that many crops that grow densely above head height without support that you *could* get lost in.

Wheat, oats and barley will grow maybe 2-3 feet tall, but I'm not sure even a hobbit could not get lost in them. Beans or raspberry canes would be tall enough, but are always grown on supports so would probably look too modern and be hard to push through (and difficult to position the cameras, perhaps). When you see the standard scene in a film where people get lost and can't find each other in a crop-field, it's *always* maize.

A 2-year-old hazel coppice-wood would have been good, but I'm guessing NZ doesn't have a lot of old, wellmaintained coppices. Or orchards of tall, old-fashioned appletrees (modern industrial apple orchards would look wrong again, I suspect).

WHY YES I seriously overanalyse plants in films. :-D

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... of course, a hazel coppice or an orchard might well register with most of the audience as just 'woods' - and since they are trying to make the point that they are still safe inside the Shire at that point, that would be the wrong impression.

So I can see why they would use maize, which at least comes across to everyone as obviously a cultivated crop.

There's a pumpkin in the pub at the end of Return of the King, which is equally transatlantic - but for some reason I found that less bothersome. Though it would have been nice to see a traditional Gigantic Onion instead, as widely grown in competitions across England for many generations.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Some grain crops (especially rye, I think) used to grow taller - one of the changes in modern cultivars has been to make them shorter, and so more easily harvested.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

There are certainly some very tall varieties of oat, some of which are grown as very lovely decorative plants. I've never had a good site for one, but Stipa Gigantea, the Golden Oat, is an *awesome* plant which will grow well above head height.

But I don't think that solves the problem for the poor location-finder who has been given the job of hiring a suitably-furnished field to film in for a couple of days. I mean, if they'd hired it for a year and planted it up with Golden Oat, I *would* be cheering, but it does seem a lot to ask.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... whereas you can go anywhere and find a field of maize, and as it's such a cheap crop I imagine it's not hard to find someone who will cheerfully sell you the right to charge about filming in it.

[andrewducker]

I just saw this, and the first point reminded me of this conversation:
http://www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com/2011/10/five-things-you-should-never-do-in-epic-fantasy/

[bunn.livejournal.com]

LOL, good article! Though I think the person who objects to Punch and Judy in Pratchett is missing the point of Pratchett somewhat!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I made the same comment on my own journal as regards the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay universe - it's at least partially satirical, so I expect realism to take a back seat to what's fun/funny some of the time.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

The live action film of 101 Dalmatians has a vat of molasses on the English farm. And a raccoon.

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

You totally are not the only person you have encoutered who noticed and cared - I guess it just hasn't come up in conversation! It really seriously bugged me too, and yes exactly that to throwing me out of the feeling that this really was the Shire (acheived excellently up till that point.) If it was an American film I would have put it down to the classic 2-nations-divided-by-a-common-language thing of not realising that your corn=maize is not the same as our corn=wheat.

I am no gardener, and can't say any other plant issues bothered me, but there are a few places where quibbling over landscape type things annoyingly intrudes into part of my brain even while the rest is happily being swept along by the sheer beauty of the thing. The 'moorland of Rohan' rather than rich fertile plains is one of them, as is the bit in the beacon sequence when I can't help questionning the idea that a couple of men could apparently live on the summit of a very pointy, high, and snow-covered mountain :-(

However, familiarity breeds, well, familiarity, so in general these things have become less bothersome :-) Well, apart from Aragorn And The Mountain of Skulls :-P

[ideserveyou.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this - so funny, and I am sure you are right about the nightie!
I am a botanist in one of my other lives and hence also over-analyse plants in films. That maize field annoys the heck out of me as well.
Is there some horticultural explanation for what Bilbo is brewing in his teapot, then, too? I guess 'tea' can be made out of all sorts of things...

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yay, *finally* someone else who noticed the maize!!!

I honestly cannot remember about the tea, but as you say, it could easily be brewed from some other herb rather than a camellia. ISTR that the pipe-weed is explicitly explained as well (not sure if that's appendices or Tolkien's 'letters' off the top of my head).

I don't really mind Tolkien messing about with European botany, but the maize in the films was so blatant! :-D