The Two Towers

[gfish]

The extended version of The Two Towers is excellent. It really helps even the pace out, and the added backstory makes the whole Faramir debacle almost palatable. They even worked in a reference to Old Man Willow and Tom Bombodil, which was kind of cute.

But, while improved, it still isn't up to the standard set by Fellowship. So now I'm pondering an act of great hubris: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: The Phantom Edit.

• Get rid of the inexplicable recap by Galadriel.


• Tone down the Arwen dream sequence. There is some useful plot information in there, so I probably can't axe all of it.


• Remove the shots of Legolas skateboarding and Gimli hitting an orc's crotch.


• Remove about half of the dwarven "comic relief".


• Horizontally flip the footage at points to fix topographic errors 1 and 3.


• Tone down the comedy when Merry and Pippin find the pipeweed, possibly when they drink the entish draught as well. (These scenes are only in the extended edition, if you're confused.)


• Look at shuffling everything to match the order presented in the book. First the Rohan story, then back to the Ringbearer. This might not work in practice, but I'd like to see it.

Anyone else have some ideas? I'm mostly limited to deletions, so it would be pretty hard to make major changes. I also like the idea of making 'phantom edit' the standard term for doing things like this. I certainly have had ideas for a phantom edit of The Matrix for the last 4.5 years.

Comments

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[(Anonymous)]

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Re: i like ur journal

[jadine.livejournal.com]

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Re: i like ur journal

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Ew, automated LJ comment spam? I suppose it was inevitable. The morons couldn't even get the url in the link right. Mozilla doesn't tolerate the backslashes at all.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

Pooh, and when I saw that on my journal I was hoping I'd finally gotten my first personal out-of-the-blue spam. I mean, I'm even a pornmonger, it would be appropriate... but alas, strange hot babes I don't know never read my journal and randomly try to hook up with me!

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Wow, hubris doesn't even begin to describe that. Ahaha. I like it. :)

It might be that they didn't want to actively delete scenes from the extended TT, since that would be sort of an admission of "yeah, that was dumb". I'm not sure. Perhaps it was decided that it would be just far, far too dark without the comedy. I don't know.

Maybe you should try The Matrix first.

[kathrynt.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on some of it, but I think presenting it as two separate stories would be a shudderingly bad idea. You'd lose any care and empathy for the first set of characters; plus, you'd have the Helm's Deep climax a third of the way into the movie.

After seeing the extra footage and talking about it a lot with llachglin, I am now OK with the Faramir debacle. Phillipa Boyens makes some really good points about whey they had to change his character to keep the story whooshing along. One of the few criticisms you can really make of Tolkien is that he isn't really much for character growth, apart from Frodo and Sam. Faramir ends up the way he is in the book, he just doesn't start out that way.

[grinninfoole.livejournal.com]

The recap by Galadriel doesn't improve with extensions? Drat. I thought it was a neat idea that failed, that Galadriel and Elrond are somehow communicating across the distance via their rings. Of course, only she speaks, and he doesn't even react to her words, it's hard to be sure, and surely isn't much of an interaction.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I agree it probably wouldn't work, but I'd really like to see it to make sure.

Yes, the ideas behind the Faramir changes are pretty sound. but I'm a knee-jerk purist at heart. It's okay to have characters that don't grow. That's the kind of mindless acceptance of script formulae that gives us inappropriate comic relief.

[gement.livejournal.com]

It did lead to an awfully funny fanfiction moment (in the Ring Diaries, founder of the phrase "pervy hobbit fancier") with the ringwearers IMing each other across the continent to discuss whether or not Elrond looks good in purple.

Other than that, pretty worthless.

[(Anonymous)]

I haven't seen the extended version of the Two Towers... so I can't comment on that...

but if you're going to all the trouble anyway...

Consider replacing the Galadriel scenes in the Fellowship with anyone that can portray the beautiful and powerful Galadriel of Tolkien lore, rather than the current rather withered and monstrous menace.