Posted: March 21, 2000 at 14:32:19: by David Freitag
The discussion of the ending of the Fellowship book and movie brought up a question (another!) about the plans for the movie: I haven't seen it mentioned in the plot summaries I've seen: will Merry and Pippin's rather hurried tour of North Rohan, under the care of Ugluk's Uruk-hai touring company be in the film. It's a natural, the kind of thing Hollywood loves to do, a chance for actors to ham it up as villains, and our first close glimpse of just what kind of chaps the bad guys are. (Actually, we see more of the bad guys in Two Towers than in the other two: Ugluk, Grishnakh, Saruman, Shelob, Shagrat, Gorbag, and the sustained character study of Smeagol.)So I hope it's in there, but it does pose a problem of presentation: Tolkien does a very tricky thing, which threw me the first time I read the books: he has Aragorn and co. pursue the orcs all the way to Fangorn, leaving them with no clear idea as to what happened to the Hobbits, then, in the next chapter, shifts back in time a few days to give us the answer. The usual Hollywood cross-cutting of scenes would rob the chase of its suspense, but presenting it as Tolkien did is awkward, unless some cheesy narrative voice over says, "To find out what heppened to our two young Hobbits, let's go back four days, to that tragic morning at Parth Galen." I trust that won't be done....
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