Yet another Sunday night post

[learnedax]

Lots of stuff on my mind, but the only thing that wants to be a post right now is some additional thoughts on RotK after last night's second viewing.

By and large my opinion is the same as after the first viewing. I noticed a few places where I thought it could have been tightened (do we have to cut to Gandalf's concerned face in slow motion quite so many times?) but by and large it's still a pretty solid film. So, that said, here are minor quibbles I found with it.

I was wrong, Merry and Pippin haven't really gotten better since the first film. What they got was a more impressive list of accomplishments. Unfortunately they grate on me almost every time they appear, and most of their great moments try to be cute, and thus just irritate me.

The Palantír (hey, PJ, it's not a Palántir!) is nice to see in there and all, but not only does the scene last too long, Aragorn of all people shouldn't act like he's being electrocuted by it. And since when does Legolas have Sauron-detecting powers?

The mûmakil are actually not as bad as I thought on first glance, although they still remind of AT-ATs, somehow. They're too large, but for film I can see why.

What is Gandalf talking about with dying and going to the white shores and green meadows? Is he saying everyone gets to go to the undying lands? Is he just lying to make Pippin feel better? Huh? And "death is a path we all must take" only if we exclude elves. And wizards, for that matter.

Middle-earth seems far too small. Minas Morgul can be easily seen from Minas Tirith, Mordor seems to take about 2 hours to cross, and Faramir seemingly rides out to Osgiliath before Denethor even finishes his dinner. At the same time, it takes about 12 signal fires to light the way from Rohan to Gondor, when it's only a three-day ride. Dramatic, but silly.

Oh, and as tpau pointed out where did Frodo get his clothes back from, since they change out of Orc gear halfway up Mount Doom? Maybe this is explained in the extended edition. Maybe not.

Comments

[siriel.livejournal.com]

I will put on my geek hat for a moment here. Palantír is a Quenya word. The 'accent' mark does not denote stress; it denotes the length of the vowel. Helge Fauskanger, one of the leading Quenya scholars, says in his Quenya Course chapter on pronounciation:

The spelling palantír has mislead many, making them think that this word is to be accented on "tír". Here is something Ian McKellen, playing Gandalf in the Peter Jackson LotR movie trilogy, wrote as the film was being shot:

...I have to learn a new pronunciation. All this time we have being
saying "palanTÍR" instead of the Old English stress on the first syllable.
Just as the word was about to be committed to the soundtrack, a correction came from Andrew Jack, the Dialect Coach; he taught me a Norfolk accent for Restoration, and for LOTR he supervises accents, languages and all things vocal. Palantír, being strictly of elvish origin should follow Tolkien's rule that the syllable before a double consonant should be stressed – "paLANTír" making a sound which is close to "lantern"...

Andrew Jack was right. Palantír cannot be stressed on the final syllable; virtually no polysyllabic Quenya words are accented in such a way [lengthy explanation] So it is indeed "palANTír". (But in the plural form palantíri, where the long í suddenly appears in the second-to-last syllable, it does receive the accent: "palanTÍRi".)

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Bleh. I am of course familiar with Tolkien's unusual and not terribly consistent use of accent marks, so I should have used a different way of noting the different stress above. I suppose I must have gotten PalanTIR from assuming a lack of stress-shift on PalanTIRi. Oh, well.

[siriel.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wish Tolkien had chosen a different way to denote long vowels. It's unnecessarily confusing.