aefenglommung (aefenglommung) wrote,
aefenglommung
aefenglommung

It's the words, stupid

Just saw the trailer for The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug. Visually stunning, as you might expect, but the characters are all wrong. Legolas and Arwen intrude weirdly, but that's not what I mean. I mean, everybody talks like they talk in all the other movies these days: a sort of combination Anime - Star Trek - Wrestlemania - Buddy movie - TV thriller series - Comic book scriptese. It's dreadful.

Tolkien makes his characters talk in all kinds of ways in order to achieve particular effects. Everybody in these movies talks like bad Batman villains. But that's what you get when mediocre talents re-write masterpieces for the screen. Think Brad Pitt in Troy; or, for those of you with a bit of age on you, Marlon Brando and Jason Robards in Julius Caesar. At least in the latter, they did the dialogue straight, however inadequate method acting turned out to be for Shakespeare.
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