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On Saturday, May 18, 2019 at 8:35:19 PM UTC-5, Bill O'Meally
So ... reving a long-dead thread here (sorry!)
And not just that -- freely rearranging text to create a better flow
of the conversation (as I would have it).
Post by Bill O'MeallyI did not care for the movie.
It was a nice enough film, I suppose (despite some of the more
problematic history errors), but it was not, to my mind, a film about
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Post by Bill O'MeallyIf I did not know Tolkien and his works, I would have been
confused about a lot of the sequences where dragons, fire demons
and black horsemen appear on the battlefield.
<re-arranging>
Post by Bill O'MeallyI would have thought that Tolkien had lost his mind in the battle
of the Somme, jumping out of of a trench wrapped in a blanket,
screaming after fellow TCBS companion Geoffrey. I would have
thought there was a romantic attraction for the two.
In terms of the battlefield stuff, anyone coming to a biographical
film on Tolkien who doesn't get the battlefield dragon and all
that...well it'd be shocking to have anyone in the theater who
<snip>
So I doubt anyone would be confused by that.
You are probably right to some extent, Larry. I agree that it
probably wouldn't /confuse/ many (surely there must have been some
viewers who were not familiar with Tolkien's ouvre?).
However, I think that a majority of those going would nonetheless
misunderstand entirely. They would see Smaug and Nazgûl (the story
about the German horsemen seems rather dubious to my mind) on the
battlefield rather than the creatures that the battle of the Somme
actually /did/ inspire: the the Orcs and the semi-mechanical dragons
of the first "Fall of Gondolin".
From the perspective of the Tolkienist, my primary complaint here was
the way they try to tie the Battle of the Somme so directly to his
best known stories -- /The Hobbit/ and /The Lord of the Rings/. There
is scant evidence for most of that[*], and what evidence there is for
other inspirations (particularly the early stuff) is ignored
entirely.
I am aware (as you point out elsewhere) that they couldn't be very
direct due to restrictions from the Estate, but instead of hinting at
the existence of other stories, they opted for something that is, at
best, extemely dubious.
Overall, I found the whole battlefield thing the worst part of the
film. The backstory is presented as fevered flash-backs, so we have
an officer who is raving incoherently and deliriously around the
battlefield, but who gets these very sharp and correct flash-backs
to his pre-war life? Not particularly credible, nor did it work at
all for me as the framing device for the film's plot.
That goes for the other scenes from the battle of the Somne: they
depict Tolkien as suffering from trench fever,
<snip>
I think they did a good job at depicting a fevered mind suffering
from among things than the fever itself including a pretty serious
case of combat-induced PTSD.
Yet there is no evidence that Tolkien was delirious from trench
fever. Actually, what John Garth reports is the following:
On Wednesday 25 October Tolkien felt weak and unwell, but he
did not report sick until after the Fusiliers had been
inspected and thanked by General Gough of the Fifth Army and
by Field-Marshal Haig, the British commander-in-chief. On
Friday, a cold and showery day, he went to the medical officer
with a temperature of 103.
Garth, John. /Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-
earth/ (p. 200). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
So anyone coming out of the cinema would get the, blatantly false,
impression that Tolkien was raving around on the battlefield of the
Somme, deliriuos from (trench) fever.
Post by Bill O'MeallyI would have thought, though raised by a priest, Tolkien was not
especially religious.
I do agree that the film stayed away from all questions of
religion and faith..not just Tolkien, but throughout. After seeing
the film, I read that the director had actually crafted and filmed
scenes attempting to depict Tolkien's faith, but test audiences
did not respond well to them, so they were cut.
... and of course we're not supposed to gainsay our test audiences
...
Well, I do understand the reasoning no matter what I might think of
it :)
I general, I think that way too much is made of Tolkien's faith and
it's impact on his /work/ (as opposed to the impact on other aspects
of his life), so the absence of his faith in the film did not bother
me all that much (in some ways it was a relief), though it was, of
course, a biographical fallacy.
Post by Bill O'MeallyI would have thought he was an officer over one, and only one
soldier whose sole responsibility was to seek the location of
Geoffrey.
They depicted an officer's batman; as 2nd LT Tolkien would have a
batman, a soldier assigned to him as personal servant. John Garth
covers this in his book on Tolkien and the Great War;
The batman performed domestic chores for an officer: making
his bed, tidying and polishing, and furnishing his table with
the best. This was a practical arrangement, not just a luxury.
Officers undoubtedly led a cushier life than the other ranks,
but they had little time to spare from training, directing
working parties, and, on days off, censoring the mens
inevitable letters home (a deeply divisive and unpopular duty).
A resourceful batman could win a great deal of gratitude and
respect. Tolkien, who found it hard to warm to his fellow
officers, developed a profound admiration for the batmen he
knew. However, the batman was not primarily a servant but a
private soldier who acted as a runner for officers in action.
As such he had to be both fit and intelligent so that he did
not garble the orders or reports. Like any other private, he
also fought in the field. One of the A Company batmen,
Thomas Gaskin, a working-class Manchester man, was among the
thirty-six Fusiliers killed or missing at Ovillers. Tolkien
preserved a poignant letter from Gaskins mother asking about
her son.
Garth, John. /Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-
earth/ (p. 171). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition.
Incidentally, there is, in Garth's book, no information about
Tolkien's batman at any point. Garth makes much more of the batman in
his paper 'Frodo and the Great War'[*], and his linking of Samwise to
the batmen Tolkien would have known in the war is one of the really
credible parts of that paper.
<snip>
So I would disagree that the film gives the impression that
Tolkien commanded a single soldier: we see instead his batman. Of
course, not everyone is going to know that...but does every
historical movie need to discuss every detail for the audience?
Yes, I would agree that it seems fairly clear. Even if one is
not particularly familiar with the British tradition of batmen, I
should think that the idea of a soldier assigned as a more personal
assistant to an officer should not come as a surprise to many: after
all, the concept has been shown again and again in various popular
media portrayals of armies at war.
Post by Bill O'MeallyThere were no sequences showing the hours he was putting into his
early legendarium, and the very first thing he ever wrote was "In
a hole in the ground..."
<snip>
Post by Bill O'MeallyThey did not tie Edith dancing in the field to the Luthien
legend. In fact, there was NO mention of Luthien & Beren, or the
Valar, or the Elves, or the Lamps, or the Two Trees.... And at
the end, they mention only that on their headstone were the names
of two lovers from his mythology.
So much promise, so much material to work with, and such a
disappointment .
You have valid criticisms here. Some of them the film makers
couldn't help because of copyright issues and lacking permission
from the Estate, they could not mention Luthien, Beren, any of his
works and so on. The extant of that I do not know, but given in
the final scene with what he writes on the paper lacking the word
"hobbit" it seems fairly safe to say that that legal stricture
explains the lack of references to his writings and legendarium.
Well ... I am not going to quarrel about what they /could/ have done
within the limits of the copyright (I am not sure that the Estate
could have done anything about merely mentioning the names of Beren
and Lúthien, but telling their stories, or showing the grave is
another matter altogether).
One might complain that the alternative that they often opt for is a
complete and fallacious invention of their own ...
It isn't perfect, but I enjoyed it, thought the cinematography was
top notch.
Unfortunately my viewing was on the in-flight screen on a
transatlantic flight in December, so I didn't get the full pleasure
of the photography, and I shouldn't comment on that. Other aspects
of the cinematography, script-writing in particular, however, were
not, in my view, 'top notch' in any way.
Certainly as someone knowing a bit about Tolkien, I, and the crowd
of Tolkienistas I was able to see it with, was able to pick out
where they were adapting material from Carpenter's Bio, the
Letters, and from certain Tolkien scholars. That was actually a
bit fun.
Yes, I agree that it was a bit fun to recognise some of the correct
bits and remembering where they would have gotten that from.
No, they didn't ruin it.
In some ways I think I liked the film-Edith far better than Tolkien's
wife :) Film-Edith has far more pluck and is far more self-assertive
than what we know about Tolkien's real wife, for instance.
Yes, there is much to quibble about (far less to quibble about
than a certain film maker's travesties), and some enjoy the
quibbling. But it is a good film, enjoyable, and worth seeing
whether on the big screen or wait until picked up by a streaming
service.
I have to disagree to some extent here.
Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy are, in my opinion,
actually /good/ films -- they are, however, definitely /not/ at any
level 'true' to Tolkien's book. The visualisation of Middle-earth in
the films is quite different from Tolkien's visual imagination (and
we do have some quite good illustrations from Tolkien's hand to
support our reading of the text in this), and of course the
characters and the underlying philosophical and aestic aspects of
the book are changed beyond recognition.
The new film, 'Tolkien', is, to my mind, mediocre at best. I have no
particular wish to see it again, and I wouldn't particularly
recommend anyone to see it, though I wouldn't advise them to stay
away either. It is mediocre and it is merely 'mostly harmless'.
So, I would say that, as a film in its own right, and divested from
what they actually attempt to portray, the new film is worse than
Jackson's 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy (no no-where near the
horror of his 'Hobbit' trilogy ... <shudders>), but as an adaptation
of something Tolkien it is much less bad than Jackson's works
It's good: not great, not revealing new insights, esp to those who
know stuff about Tolkien like people in this group, but not
"ruined" or even bad either. It is meant it seems to me as a labor
of love more than anything else, to pay some homage to the
development of Tolkien's life and literary output.
It doesn't reveal any new insights to anyone. If you don't know
better, and accidentally comes out of the cinema believing what's in
the film, you'll be worse off from having seen it (in terms of
knowledge of Tolkien's life), as the fallacies you will end up
believing outweigh the true information that you can gain from it --
and there is no way for any non-expert to tell the difference.
I remember from the credits that there were 3 or 4 consultants of
name. Two I do remember are John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War,
and Andy Orchard,
You might recall that a number of top-notch Tolkien scholar names
were also credited in Peter Jackson's 'The Lord of the Rings'
trilogy, and in his 'The Hobbit' trilogy. Having consulted with top
Tolkien scholars is definitely no guarantee for getting things
right.
I think that about the best I have to say about it is that it could
have been so horribly much worse that it is nearly a blessing that
they didn't do any worse than that ...
[*] I think John Garth overstretches in his paper, 'Frodo and the
Great War' in /'The Lord of the Rings' 1954-2004: Scholarship
in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder/. He tries too hard to tie
Frodo's character and character development to Tolkien's WWI
experiences, with, in my view too little consideration of the
actual strength of his evidence and other possible sources of
inspiration.
--
Troels Forchhammer
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