Amazon, Warner Bros in Talks for LOTR Series Adaptation: Variety

Pettytyrant101 wrote:at least Boyens continuing would give us all a fair amount to discuss/rant about- Malick

{{OOh dont worry I'll find something to rant about I'm sure!   }}

Good point

malickfan wrote: With the rumours that Jackson/Weta/New Zealand will be involved in some form or other it will be interesting to see if the colossal success of the Jackson films will hold too big a creative shadow over the new production team...why bother expanding and reinventing Middle earth for a new generation and platform if all you are going to do is ape the decades old template by a artist working in a different creative medium?

I didn't have any real problems with the world building. Don't care a fig about grass and I can't easily imagine how they would have flimed the battle of pelenor fields on farmland; they barely made the deadline as it is. I would have preferred scaly orcs to slimy orcs, though.

But the rest looked just right. They can still tweak things, and probably have to find a new location for Meduseld and the rest of Rohan. But the towers, cities, towns looked about as right as they could be, being based on long-time Tolkien artists.

halfwise wrote:

malickfan wrote: With the rumours that Jackson/Weta/New Zealand will be involved in some form or other it will be interesting to see if the colossal success of the Jackson films will hold too big a creative shadow over the new production team...why bother expanding and reinventing Middle earth for a new generation and platform if all you are going to do is ape the decades old template by a artist working in a different creative medium?

I didn't have any real problems with the world building.  Don't care a fig about grass and I can't easily imagine how they would have flimed the battle of pelenor fields on farmland; they barely made the deadline as it is.  I would have preferred scaly orcs to slimy orcs, though.

But the rest looked just right.  They can still tweak things, and probably have to find a new location for Meduseld and the rest of Rohan.  But the towers, cities, towns looked about as right as they could be, being based on long-time Tolkien artists.

I don't give a Figg about grass either.

{{Well I bloody well do because someone round here has to have standards!!   Besides its symptomatic of bigger issues regards the visualisation of the various parts of ME- I dont like PJ's Shire its just a pub and a few houses round a shallow pool next the one marshy field they all apparently farm (yes the Bag End set interior is very nice indeed- but the outside is all wrong- why hire two gardeners if your garden is an overgrown mess?!!! What's Bilbo paying the Gamgees for, drinking on the job?   )
What we see of the landscape to Rivendell is ok bar Weathertop still having a fort on it- and then it just gets worse and worse till the films end- the Misty Mts look good sometimes and at others are really obviously a manipulated matte painting (shoot in the Alps no need for faking it!) less said about the travesty that is Rohans landscape the better, and my many issues with Minas Tirirth being a sole city ruling a kingdom of no-one else in the middle of a dust bowl with no crops or farms are well documented. 
And I haven't even mentioned the flat lighting thats the same everywhere in ME yet!!!
And that's just the aesthetic issues- let alone in terms of adaptation the poor script that misses the books point, unrecognisable characters and dumping good important material to make way for their own invented poor quality material.

Be warned Amazon the crabbit is watching and ready!!!! }}}

PettyTyrant wrote: the Misty Mts look good sometimes and at others are really obviously a manipulated matte painting (shoot in the Alps no need for faking it!)

Yeah I'm sure they need to go to Europe from New Zealand to get good mountains.

The only time we see the Misty Mountains in Lord of the Rings is the Cadrahas pass, which looked rather fake. But all the other mountains looked great. The Hobbit looked fake.

Yeah I'm sure they need to go to Europe from New Zealand to get good mountains- Forest

{{If they want good mountain ranges without the need to cgi or matte paint them in, then yes. NZ is hugely overrated as a substitute ME ( a created myth it never was a perfect choice, or anything like one it was just a solid financial decision, it was never a best solution creative decision-listen to the hype shite and you could be convinced that they wanted to shoot in NZ from the start because it has all the landscapes you need, rather than it simply being necessity of cost and many locations being merely 'closest we can find to it here, it'll have to do' compromises). Compared to the Alps yeah NZ has crap mountains and the ranges are too short- hence why the film uses so many matte paintings in the background. And the NZ mountains are smaller than the Alps (on average between 1000-2000 m smaller) plus as the Alps were what Tolkien had in mind when he wrote the Misty Mountains seems the best match for filming them (plus given distance from England the Alps are about the right place in relation to where the Shire would be- so as a bonus lighting, seasons, fauna ect is all done for you by nature! ) Shooting in NZ again will only double down on the erroneous landscapes, lighting and fauna used to represent ME- normally this would not be a huge problem but the land itself in Tolkien is so detailed, well realised, realistically and believably portrayed its often been (rightly) said to be another character in the book- if it is then shooting it as NZ makes it about as close to the book character as film Denethor is to book Denethor! And everyone knows what a terrible portrayal and awful facsimile film Denethor is of the original and correctly complain about it- the character of ME itself however most folk seem happy to let take a kicking! Well not me!!! If your going to do Tolkien right get two things right to start with- the land and the language! (PJ got neither right, the lands wrong more often than right and they cant write in Tolkien's style or use his dialogue structures ) as those two things are what psychologically underpin the fantasy elements whilst retaining the sense of reality- in short they are really important even if the effect is largely subliminal- its a crucial effect of Tolkien's work- the solidity of the world and the depth of the language structures of that world are what underpin all sense of reality in Tolkien- get them wrong and something will always seem amiss, wrong, not quite right about it, as it does in PJ's version and you'll end up with a fantasy film, but not a Tolkien film.}}

{{I like the cake metaphor Az! Also loving the avatar   }}}

arguing about mountains, instead of grass? how times change...

{{I'm going up in the world! }}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{Well I bloody well do because someone round here has to have standards!!   Besides its symptomatic of bigger issues regards the visualisation of the various parts of ME- I dont like PJ's Shire its just a pub and a few houses round a shallow pool next the one marshy field they all apparently farm (yes the Bag End set interior is very nice indeed- but the outside is all wrong- why hire two gardeners if your garden is an overgrown mess?!!! What's Bilbo paying the Gamgees for, drinking on the job?   )
What we see of the landscape to Rivendell is ok bar Weathertop still having a fort on it- and then it just gets worse and worse till the films end- the Misty Mts look good sometimes and at others are really obviously a manipulated matte painting (shoot in the Alps no need for faking it!) less said about the travesty that is Rohans landscape the better, and my many issues with Minas Tirirth being a sole city ruling a kingdom of no-one else in the middle of a dust bowl with no crops or farms are well documented. 
And I haven't even mentioned the flat lighting thats the same everywhere in ME yet!!!
And that's just the aesthetic issues- let alone in terms of adaptation the poor script that misses the books point, unrecognisable characters and dumping good important material to make way for their own invented poor quality material.

Be warned Amazon the crabbit is watching and ready!!!! }}}

*They're

halfwise wrote:
I didn't have any real problems with the world building.  Don't care a fig about grass and I can't easily imagine how they would have flimed the battle of pelenor fields on farmland; they barely made the deadline as it is.  I would have preferred scaly orcs to slimy orcs,

Both the battle and the build up could have been realised in a much better way.

1. Scenes like the muster of the Rohhirrim. Armies and generals arriving from other parts... make Gondor feel like a country.
2. Some scenes in the dark showing the Pelennor and outer defences being taken (some fires starting... fire arrows... people with torches moving about
3. No army of the dead.

I need to read the battle again really!

Amazon has selected its showrunners for its Lord of the Rings show

Amazon’s big Middle-earth-set show based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien is slowly moving forward. During this week’s Television Critics Association press tour, the company says that it has brought on two writers, JD Payne and Patrick McKay to write and develop the series.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/29/17627056/amazon-lord-of-the-rings-middle-earth-jrr-tolkien-jd-payne-patrick-mckay-writers

'The two writers are relative newcomers: both worked on the original script for Star Trek: Beyond and were part of the writer’s room for Godzilla vs. Kong, and are writing the upcoming sequel to Star Trek: Beyond'


{{Haven't seen Godzilla v Kong but St Beyond was an immense pile of utter shite- terrible characterisations, a terrible re-adaption of the Khan storyline, a plot riddled with holes, gaps, and made no sense whatsoever and introduced elements into the St universe that were so badly thought out they actually break it.

Not hopeful. }}}

Lancebloke wrote:
Both the battle and the build up could have been realised in a much better way.

1. Scenes like the muster of the Rohhirrim. Armies and generals arriving from other parts... make Gondor feel like a country.
2. Some scenes in the dark showing the Pelennor and outer defences being taken (some fires starting... fire arrows... people with torches moving about
3. No army of the dead.

I need to read the battle again really!

I've always admired the realism of Gandalf's arrival at the wall of the Pelennor with a half-asleep Pippin. It's like waking up as a passenger during a night trip in a car; somebody conversing with the driver, things going on outside you dimly grasp, then off again. I can understand such things being cut from the script for pacing reasons, but it definitely would have made the world feel more real.

Not hopeful at all, the types of movies they've written for... Well, they're not very Tolkien, are they?

First season is to be young Aragorn. Only the first?

"Peter Jackson's version of Middle Earth is the most iconic and the most well-known."
"...part of Peter Jackson's world..."

Fuck that nooooooise.

{{So to sum up we are getting a Tolkien based series, based on nothing more than a few notes in the Tale of Years and some of the appendix - we have almost no Tolkien dialogue and very little even in the way of descriptive writing on any of the events or what occurred. They want it to fit in with PJ's abomination despite the fact everything about Aragorn in PJ's contradicts everything Tolkien wrote abut Aragorn and the major places the important events take place in -Rohan and Gondor, are in PJ's nothing like the book places and totally inappropriate to set Tolkien's version of Aragorn's early journeys in content, visually and character wise.
And now we find its been given to a couple of hacks whose past work would seem to make them as suitable to write the subtle and linguistic based storytelling of Tolkien as I am suitable to lead the AA!

I dont think the question for this tv series will be does it suck? So much as how much will it suck? }}}

My fear is they will end up giving the word ‘suck’ a bad name...

"And now we find its been given to a couple of hacks whose past work would seem to make them as suitable to write the subtle and linguistic based storytelling of Tolkien as I am suitable to lead the AA! "-Petty