The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy Special Extended DVD Edition
My real problem with these scenes isn’t with Peter Jackson; it’s with J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the things that comes through most clearly from the extended version (along with its six extra discs of making-of hype and its, I swear, 46 full hours of audio commentary) is the fanatical reverence with which Jackson and his production team regarded their source. Whatever Tolkien wrote, they were absolutely determined to visualize. If he said Galadriel the elf queen was beautiful and terrifying, then they were going to cast Cate Blanchett and make her look like she was carved out of kryptonite. And if he called the orcs ugly, then the movie’s orcs were going to be so repulsive they’d give David Cronenberg nightmares. They look like devolved mutant gorillas who’ve been dunked in toxic waste. You can’t possibly feel anything for them but loathing–and that’s exactly what Tolkien would have wanted. He only invented the orcs in the first place so there’d be a race on Middle Earth to exterminate.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“As the Captains gazed south to the Land of Mordor, it seemed to them that, black against the pall of cloud, there rose a huge shape of shadow, impenetrable, lightning-crowned, filling all the sky. Enormous it reared above the world, and stretched out towards them a vast threatening hand, terrible but impotent; for even as it leaned over them, a great wind took it, and it was all blown away, and passed; and then a hush fell.”
Compare this nightmarish lament for the fallen to another on a similar theme, from David Jones’s extraordinary memoir In Parenthesis–which is the most vivid evocation of World War I ever written, a barrage of the sights, sounds, and smells of the front lines rendered in a charged, alliterative, complex style derived from Old English and Welsh:
Ivor Gurney stared into this wheel of fire and went insane; David Jones returned home and became a lifelong recluse. Tolkien retreated into Middle Earth.
David Jones was psychically broken by World War I, and, unlike Frodo, he didn’t get to sail for elf heaven to be healed. He dedicated In Parenthesis to the soldiers he fought beside, “to the memory of those with me in the covert and in the open from the blackwall the broadway the cut the flats the level the environs”–but he also dedicated it to “the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure.” Frodo writes his memoirs at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but there’s no such dedication to the orcs.
