What Happened - and Why...
Many of the film threads - both those which defend and those which criticize - ask the same questions: what happened and why? However, it wasn’t until someone mentioned Jackson’s fixation with the character
Lurtz in FOTR that the answer came to me. The poster asked why Jackson put so much time and energy into the character and I realized that Lurtz was an insight into what went wrong in these films.
It is the film director’s responsibility to take the written word and translate it into a visual medium. A good director can take a fair to mediocre book and make of it a decent, even good film. And, of course, he can make a good or great book into a classic of the medium. Naturally, even the best director has his flops but there are certain qualities that a director
must possess in order to successfully translate his “book” into film.
Firstly, he must
respect his source material. A film made from a book which the director does not respect is almost immediately obvious to the audience. This sort of thing has nothing whatsoever to do with money and everything to do with imagination, “vision” and heart. How many so-called “B” movies are better cinema than huge bloated “extravaganzas” and who would not choose “Laura” over “Cleopatra” or “Treasure of the Sierra Madre” over mindless wide-screen “shoot-em-ups” with their dozens of explosions and idiotic car chases?
Secondly, the director must be willing to work within his story. This means that he must be able to determine what should be eliminated either for time consideration or because it complicates the plot to the point of chaos, what should be relegated to the background as unnecessary to the “flow” of the story and what must be highlighted in order to make the film “work”. This ability to take the written word and “see” it in film is a gift bestowed upon very few. Those who
do have it are able to “print” on our minds memories which never leave us.
However, one thing a director should
never do is attempt to become a “co-creator” with the writer(s) unless, of course, the story is his! When a director decides that his “book” needs more than translation or he gets the yen to do some “rewriting”
himself, he runs the risk of being unsuccessful not only as an author but as a director and this is what happened to Peter Jackson in LOTR. At some point in the process of bringing LOTR to the screen Mr. Jackson decided that he wanted to become a “co-creator” of the story with Professor
Tolkien and when that happened, it was the end of any hope that these films would become what Jackson himself probably wanted:
the definitive film version of the book.
For what I ask was all the “rewriting” of characters but Jackson’s attempt to co-create the story? It is one thing to delete a portion of the tale for time constraints or to “telescope” the passage of years between the time
Frodo inherits
the Ring and the beginning of the Quest or even to “combine” characters in order to avoid excessive plot complications, but when you fundamentally change the characters - who they are, what they think, their motivations, their very
essence – you no longer have “translation” but in fact, “
creation”. And nowhere is this more truly revealed than in the character of Lurtz,
Jackson’s own invention! Jackson absolutely fixates on him and does so in the
“truest” of the films - FOTR.
Now, one of the things we know from Tolkien is that the
orcs were very much anonymous – a “hive” culture very different from any of the free
peoples of
Middle-earth. Indeed, we only learn the name of a very few orcs in the entire book and interestingly enough, one of those is the leader of
Saruman’s Urak-hai:
Ugluk. Why, if Tolkien had already provided a name for Saruman’s lead
orc, was it necessary for Jackson to choose an
entirely different name? Why did Jackson simply not name
his character “Ugluk” and thereby maintain at least the
appearance of faithfulness to the book? The reason, I believe is that Jackson wanted his own character in the film rather than to simply re-develop Tolkien’s.
Consider the difference in the fate of the two orcs: Tolkien’s survives the attack at Parth Galen and leads the troop of orcs with their
hobbit captives across
Rohan where he eventually is slain by
Eomer in the battle before
Fangorn. There is nothing to suppose that Ugluk personally killed
Boromir although certainly he may have had a hand in that action. On the other hand, Lurtz not only shoots the
arrows that kill Boromir, but he engages in a battle to the death with Jackson’s “new” hero of the story,
Aragorn and almost kills him although he himself is killed in the encounter. Thus does Jackson raise Lurtz from a mere factotum of Saruman, another orc among the many being bred in
Orthanc, to almost “heroic” stature.
It is this care and excessive prominence and screen time given to a character which is purely Jackson’s invention that reinforce my belief that Jackson desired not merely to “film” J. R. R. Tolkien’s LOTR, but to in effect
write the story that appears on the screen under the rather disingenuous disclaimer that it is “based” upon the book of that title.