Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord of the Rings. Show all posts

Saturday, December 28, 2013

Please Stop Ruining the Hobbit

I just saw the second movie in the Hobbit "trilogy".

The movie itself is a series of pointless sword fighting and action scenes with a cast of a dozen or so flat characters whose stories go nowhere.  I guess if you like Michael Bay movies, go see the Hobbit; you'll love it.

There is precisely one interesting character in the movie, and that is Tauriel.  This is a Peter Jackson original character.  And I'm saying a lot here when I say that Bilbo, Gandalf, and Smaug, the three characters who near single-handedly enchanted my childhood, do not come across as as interesting as some random elf lady practically from legolas by laura, thrown in to appease focus groups.

I've determined that the only way to make sense of the movies is to perceive them as fan fiction.  Extremely expensive, high budget fan fiction.  Peter Jackson is telling his own made-up story using the characters and elements of Middle Earth, and it just happens to vaguely correspond somewhat to the series of events in the Hobbit.  And it's great if Peter Jackson wants to write fan fiction and spend billions turning it in to a movie, but I'm sorry to say that Peter Jackson isn't as good of an author or story teller as J.R.R. Tolkien.

So why is the cinema making the movie about Peter Jackson's fan fiction, and not about Tolkien's story, the one that sold all the millions of copies and inspired all the millions of authors?

Friday, June 29, 2012

"Magic Isn't Supposed to Make Sense!"

I wrote a post a while ago that, really, was supposed to be about the plausible impossibility of interacting with any sort of "parallel universe", if one were to exist and going there were possible.  So if you found a passage in to Narnia in some old professor's mansion, likely you'd find Narnia very much the way Digory and Polly found it - empty, lightless, and with nothing in it (not even the singing Lion).

However, while going there, I stopped to comment on fantasy fiction, which is how the thought struck me.  Parallel worlds are pretty common, after all.  Sort of in the vein if The Gods Themselves by Asimov (or more like it The Ring of Truth by Lake) I tried to think of a parallel universe that had an entirely different set of physical laws.  Where things behaved totally differently.  I guess it would have been a sort of partial ingress into Level IV multiverse theory?  I don't assert such a universe would actually exist, just that modeling one would be neat.  The goal was that the emergent behavior of these laws would make magic work.  Or something so totally different that we would see it as magic... whereas the inhabitants therein would look at a light bulb from our world and cross themselves to ward off evil spirits.

So contained therein was this idea of "hard magic", analogous to "hard science" fiction.