I truly hope there is never a Silmarillion movie, of any kind. If there is, someday, I won't watch it. I read these stories at an impressionable age, and they helped shape my imagination. I don't want the images in my head forever ruined.
Typical Hollywood movies always have some form of comic relief--usually a character who is kind of stupid or goofy. For the
Hobbit movies, apparently
Bilbo and the
dwarves didn't provide enough comic relief for Peter Jackson and he had to create additional characters to fill that role (the reprehensible Alfred).
There is NO comic relief in
the Silmarillion. None. It is a cycle of stories recounting the creation and existence of beauty beyond comprehension and its inevitable slide downward to decay and oblivion. Adding Alfred or someone/something like him to any of these stories would just make them irreparably trashy.
Further, part of the appeal and
mystery of the Silmarillion is its relative brevity in terms of dialogue, action and description. This does a couple of things:
1. The archaic writing style elevates the story and the characters. They are hard to relate to on a personal level (not a bad thing in this case). They are distant, heroic and legendary. This book really isn't a novel, or at least it doesn't come across that way. This "remoteness" enhances the "myth" element, and the dramatic is expressed by the stories themselves rather more than the intense personal struggles we typically delve into in modern
novels. The struggles of individuals in the Silmarillion are due to being caught up in vast forces largely beyond their control. A movie, to be popular and make money, will want to find a way to make the characters into people we can relate to in some way, make them more human.
2. The lack of descriptive detail of setting/character/dialogue also leave so much more room in the reader's head to imagine those details. Sometimes a character never fully seen can actually be enhanced this way. For example, in LOTR, we never REALLY see
Sauron. We never see him to the extent Jackson elects to show him in the movies. In the book, there's this undefinable but terrifying presence, with who knows how much power, always lurking. In the movies, we have a weird eye on top of a tower. Sometimes movies show too much, and the effect is, unfortunately, reductive.
No Silmarillion movie, please!