If we leave aside whole One Ring and Arrows incident, how did Boromir see the world prior to his journey North?
Here is what I have so far: - fought orcs for decades - saw Ithilien fall to orcs, is sure Mordor is on the rise - competent military commander, but is clear hosts of Mordor will overrun Gondor eventually - Depressed by loss of Osgiliath. His troops were defeated by magic and not military might - Depressed by waning power of Rohan. Their support is questionable - Depressed by loss of Ithillien. He is old enough to have seen lush lands fall to dark - Perhaps wondering why Elves are fucking leaving Middle Earth when dark powers are on the rise again - Depressed due to dwindling line of Numenorians and 3000 years of Gondors history slowly fading away
I may be completely wrong about some of these, but there's a NPC character I want to shape up as this guy. I like his skills and his flaws and would like as much info on him as possible.
He's a brash hotheaded patriot but his heart was in the right place.
Levi Stewart
Something that his circumstances do not allow him to show is that he is fairly ambitious, and also not as Numenoreanly wise as Aragorn, Faramir and Denethor are. There's a part of him that just doesn't get why Denethor outright refuses to assume the mantle of king even though the throne has stood empty for nigh a thousand years.
Landon Cox
He is very much a man of his time, but not a scholar of history. If he truly knew the history of man's former greatness, it would drastically change the way he sees Gondor. To Boromir, Gondor and the men of his day are all there is, and he will defend that with all that he is. Dwarves and elves are just far off curiosities. All that matters to Boromir is Gondor and its enemies.
Jose Nguyen
...
Michael Campbell
Both of these.
Joshua Peterson
The important thing to understand about Boromir is that he is extremely privileged and has been extremely successful all his life - but that despite these blinders, he's by no means an idiot.
He's the heir to the not-technically-throne of the most powerful nation in the region, and certainly the most powerful nation that he personally knows about. He's distinguished himself leading campaigns against the orcs of Mordor for years. He's young, he's supremely confident, and he knows that Gondor is the "good guys" in this war.
And yet, he knows that these successes aren't destined to last. He's no fool; he can see that Sauron is building his might every year, assembling an ever-vaster military machine and allying with neighboring nations, while Gondor's strength is slowly but surely sapped through the attrition of constant testing raids and small-scale battles. To a peasant who's lived in Gondor their whole life, it looks like things are going fine when Boromir sets out for Rivendell, but Boromir knows that his successes are an illusion, and that a reckoning is coming sooner rather than later. Gondor's allies are largely ineffective (especially the largest nearby military force, the Rohirrim, which have basically retreated from international politics in the past few years). Something needs to change.
Then along comes Frodo and the Ring.
Owen Gray
Now, Boromir's not stupid. He knows that there's danger in using the Ring, he heard Gandalf and Elrond speak about them and doesn't dismiss their words. But he KNOWS that Gondor needs a powerful weapon to triumph when shit hits the fan, and to his mind a dangerous choice is better than thinking happy thoughts on pushing all-in on what even Gandalf later concedes is "a fool's hope."
And here's where the privilege and success blind him. He knows the ring is dangerous, but he also knows that he's FACED danger, on the regular, for many years, and has consistently emerged triumphant. Again, he's still fairly young - young enough that given his background, he still codes "dangerous" as "I'll have to work hard to win" and not as "even if I work hard I might fail."
And he's been raised from birth to take on a leadership position, and specifically for military leadership. He has more personal knowlede of the military capabilities and defenses of Mordor than anyone else at present (or at least, he believes so, and not without good reason). So when he makes the very reasonable (at least, to him) case for taking the Ring and using it despite the dangers, and is totally shut down, he doesn't take it well. At the council, everyone all but ignores his ideas, and within the Fellowship, Aragorn and Gandalf take charge of planning and direction. Nothing in Boromir's life experience has prepared him to handle being marginalized.
So, what you have is someone who feels a deep responsibility for the safety of his country, who believes in his heart of hearts (even before being tempted!) that the Ring could save his country if everyone would just LISTEN to him for one damn minute, and who's dealing with being sidelined for the first time in his life, on the most important issue of his life no less. This is the crucible of petty hubris, fear, and courage (albeit misguided) that allows the Ring to gain a hold over him to a greater extent than the other members of the Fellowship and which, more broadly, guides his thoughts and decision-making from the moment the decision is made to take the Ring to Mordor.
And that's Boromir in a nutshell. He feels - he IS - personally responsible for the war against Mordor. He knows that his people believe that, threats notwithstanding, they're holding their own, and he wants to live up to that expectation. He sees a clear and obvious opportunity to make everything work out, if people will just TRY - but nobody will listen, and instead Gondor's last, best hope is being thrown away. He thinks he knows better than everyone around him, but to be fair, the people around him are doing something even they acknowledge probably won't work. He's a tragic figure, really; if he were born in different circumstances, he could have been a hero. Instead, he's put in a leadership position that magnifies his character flaws, yet up until the moment of his death struggles to exceed himself. He's a surprisingly complex character, and that's precisely why his death resonates.
Because he may have failed, but who among us could have done better in his impossible situation?
Angel Davis
Something Tolkien himself once stated was that for all of his faults as a person Boromir was an EXTREMELY heroic individual, easily one of the greatest heroes humanity had borne in generations. Tolkien once said that the journey from Minas Tirith to Rivendell (which was a location he'd never been to personally and only knew about from half-remembered old stories) across the entire length the Fellowship would need to journey through the first two books he made by HIMSELF and lasted almost a third of a year, and the Professor said in a letter once that "the courage and hardihood required is not fully recognized in the narrative".
Gabriel Scott
>-Perhaps wondering why Elves are fucking leaving Middle Earth when dark powers are on the rise again
Actually Boromir didn't spend too much time thinking about elves I imagine, as he'd never even seen one (nor a dwarf, nor a hobbit) before he finally reached Rivendell just in time for the Council.
Angel James
OP here.
Good point. Still reading. Also much thanks to
Samuel Ramirez
>Very charming. >But easily charmed. >Like Goku great mind for battle, but not so smart otherwise. >Still also like Goku, very wise. >Stronk as fuck, true TANK >He's untouchable in CQC. >Very inspiring leader. >Selfless to a fault.
He's superman.
Ryder Parker
It's worth noting that what he lacks in Numenorean heritage/wisdom, he makes up for by I think, if my memory isn't failing me, being explicitly the mightiest of the Fellowship.
Cameron Diaz
Man, that was great. 1% of posts are as good as yours.
David Thompson
It's not explicit that he's physically stronger than Aragorn, but the two of them are clearly ahead of everyone else in the Fellowship if the portage of the Lorien boats over the Anduin rapids is anything to go by.
Kevin Morales
Posts like these are the reason I still come to Veeky Forums, bravo user, keep on keeping on.
Nathaniel Wood
This. He really was a great man, and you notice that nobody held his moral lapse against him except perhaps Sam. And I think that once Sam had worn the Ring and really been tempted by it, he probably understood Boromir's fall.
The thing is, by everything that a rational person would have seen at the time, Boromir was right. The Ring should have been used to destroy Sauron, and then they figure out how to summon the strength of will to destroy it. I think early on that was Saruman's plan as well-- a figurative equivalent of beating Morgoth's crown into the collar with which he was chained.
Now, given what we know through figures of immense wisdom like Gandalf, Galadriel, and Elrond, we the readers understand the problem with this plan. To them, the world's history is a song written by Eru where deeds of charity and goodness will overcome evil not by via a logical cause-and-effect, but because an invisible almighty God will intervene on the side of right. The Christian notion of "grace".
Gandalf knows all this first-hand because he's an angelic being himself. Galadriel knows because she dwelt among them for many ages and like Elrond has seen enough history to know the genre logic of Middle Earth. To Boromir, it's something he hears about at Church once a week and that happened a very long time ago if at all. The only supernatural HE has ever seen is Sauron, the Devil on Earth. He spent his life watching defeats and deaths of his friends and comrades, and Eru never intervened to help any of them. So why would he jump in now?
So Boromir's fall is very understandable and even before Peter Jackson crapped all over the mythos, fans tended to dismiss him unfairly.
Brayden Myers
OP here.
Still reading. What I'd appreciate is Boromirs view of the world before the ring. Basically all I have is conflict with Mordor, loss of Ithillien and Osgiliath and distancing of Rohan. And perhaps "Gondor is only kingdom to oppose Mordor atm. Anything else?
Daniel Allen
>boromir >aragorn >mightier than legolas, 2,000 year old warrior prince
Lol. Just lol.
Luke Thompson
Thanks for this. Fantastic post.
Cooper Smith
You basically nailed it, because we don't have much information before that. The esteemed Professor wrote interesting and engaging characters, but usually they weren't particularly complicated or difficult to understand once you dug deeper.
This doesn't make them any less interesting though, far from it.
Jaxon Reed
They meant physically. Which they are, as explicitly shown on Caradras.
Angel Reed
He's very "practical minded". He doesn't go in for that high fallutin mysticism; Sauron is just the leader of the evil orc army that threatens to ravage his home, and could be beaten by conventional measures, if someone has the strength and the skill to take him and his goons down. The understanding/magic/insight that is associated with the numenoreans has skipped him by in large part, although not completely (he does get a prophetic dream, but not as clearly, early, or often as his brother Faramir)
I'd posit that either of them are better fighters as well; consider how Legolas is able to, in defending a fortified position, able to bring down 41 orcs at the Hornburg. Boromir is able to bring down 20 alone, effectively unaided, while being shot to ribbons from afar. Men in Tolkien are tough; at Pellenor, the three people who get exceptional mentions for valor are Eomer, Aragorn, and Imrahil, not the elf or the dwarf.
Josiah Hill
It is very weird to consider that in Tolkien's work your average orc is quite stunted and weaker than a man, barring maybe some freakish arm strength if they're twisted/deformed in the right way, whereas in Jackson's thing the orcs are equivalent and then later, much more imposing and intimidating than men are. The strength of the Uruks is not really gotten across either.
It's kinda laughable that by the hobbit the orcs are all these roided-up space marine looking motherfuckers in wearing thick metal plates and they totaled by a hobbit throwing rocks.
Justin Rogers
Indeed. Orcs are deformed elves. They should be weak, short-lived and a bit retarded.
Joshua Evans
Boromir and Aragorn aren't exactly men. They both have juiced up numenorean blood, Aragorn moreso. I don't think there are any badass lines of men left by that age that haven't mingled into numenorean or noldor bloodlines.
Lucas Rodriguez
In what sense did PJ "crap all over the mythos" in regard to Boromir?
I felt that Boromir was portrayed as a completely sympathetic character in the films who just did what he felt was right.
Cooper Rodriguez
The aforementioned Eomer, and of course you have guys like Beorn and Bard, both of whom seem to be well above the usual toughness of an ordinary dude, and might even have some sort of special bloodline; just not any known affiliation with Elven/Numenorean bloodlines.
Christian Johnson
There's this hilarious scene in the extended first movie where Aragorn and Legolas are just chilling talking and Boromir turns up and they suddenly start talking in Elvish. Now Boromir can speak Elvish, IIRC, but we never get that established in the movie so it's like they literally switch to another language just to cut him out of the conversation. Imagine having to put up with cunts like that every day, then getting offered the solution to all your problems and they're like "No, we must undertake the doomed mission instead"
Lincoln Miller
It's PJ so the default assumption is that he ruined everything forever. Something about normies get out reee or such
Adam Baker
Beorn's just cheating; he's a goddamn werebear. That's a an even more tenuous connection to humanity.
Adam Cooper
>Now Boromir can speak Elvish, IIRC, I can't think of any occasion in the books where he does. I mean, there are clearly people in Gondor who can speak Sindarin, maybe even Noldorin, but I can't think of any indication that Boromir took such lessons. He doesn't seem to go in for Elvish stuff, and he certainly seems less knowledgeable about Lothlorien than his brother is.
Alexander Diaz
You could well be right: I think Boromir and Faramir have names derived from Sindarin and some of the battlecries of Gondor are in Sindarin, but quite possibly those are just remnants. That just doubles down on that scene then.
William Gutierrez
I'm a pretty big LotR fan and I thought Peter did a fine job with LotR. Even if The Hobbit is an absolute trainwreck.
Camden Hernandez
also keep in mind all the pre-Numenor motherfuckers who fought with the elves against Morgoth.
Joshua Green
To make a crude analogy, Boromir is kinda similar to a foreign perception of Americans. Doesn't see the world outside his homeland and his enemies, eagre to use any means to defeat that enemy and ignorant of the reprecussions this would bring. However he always tries to do what is right, is passionate about doing so and will put himself in danger to do so.
Logan Taylor
I fail to see how it is. He's a human with some skin-changing powers; he's certainly not an elf or a wizard or a dwarf. I'm not sure where this "humans are shit in Tolkien" comes from, but it's not really very well supported by the text.
Not him, and I generally enjoyed the movies, but they're very clearly "inspired by" one off things. He tries to tie everything together in a way that Tolkien clearly did not want to do, with the Lorien contingent at Helms deep probably being the most egregious example of wanting to portray a movie of How the Good Guys Get Together to Fight the Bad Guys.
Adrian Barnes
Did you read the recent release of the Beren and Luthien stuff? One of the lays has Beren beating Sauron up when he's a brigand on the run. I was thinking of mentioning it, but the first age stuff is weird, and often portrayed in a way that makes it unclear whether it happened the way it's described even if the individual story is canonical, which is not always clear.
Jacob Carter
Humans are full of awesomeness back in Morgoth's times. It's just everyone sucks more by the time of LotR. The Noldor realized they fucked up and left, men got their reward for being badasses with numenor then screwed that up, it's just overall an age of decline.
Oliver Taylor
Sure, but it's an adaptation. You can't fit the complexity of several large novels into a set of longish movies. To make a good movie out of a good book, you have to come up with clever ways of rearranging things to be more convenient, and you'll inevitably have to either simplify or remove many aspects of the source material.
If everything had to play out exactly like in the books, not only would the movies have to be at least four times as long - they would also be very boring movies.
I honestly think, given the nature of adaptation from long-form novel, to a movie short enough to play widely in movie theatres, that saying his adaptation was anything less than stellar (both audio-visually but most importantly also from a writing/directing standpoint) is dishonest because it seems to imply a unreasonably high bar for when something can be a good adaptation.
What other examples are there of good adaptations then? None? What were their original page counts vs. their running times in minutes?
Juan Edwards
>Sure, but it's an adaptation. You can't fit the complexity of several large novels into a set of longish movies. But that doesn't excuse all changes; only a subset of ones that would be affected by the medium.
Putting the Elves at Helms Deep doesn't let you see something that you couldn't see in a movie that you could in a book; it changes a very fundamental theme, that the Elves are NOT rising to the the challenge, they're failing and fleeing to the west, which is why it's going to be men that take over and run things afterwards.
That's different than other, far more sensible changes, like turning a faceless horde of orc mooks into Lurtz to kill Boromir, or clamping down on some of the travelogue, or eliminating the weirdness that is Bombadil.
I don't mind PJ changing presentation to fit with a new medium, but he's also changing the core message/plot, which is far less forgivable.
>What other examples are there of good adaptations then? None? What were their original page counts vs. their running times in minutes? Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather both immediately spring to mind.
Jason Rogers
>Silence of the Lambs and The Godfather I can't help but notice you picked two movies consistently rated among the 20 best movies of all time for your example of what it would take to simply be a good adaptation. Essentially backing up my point that you are setting the bar unreasonably high.
Anyway, Good, now that you've come this far; what is their page count compared to their adaptation's length in minutes? Then compare them to the LotR books and movies at your leisure.
>Elves at the battle of Hornburg It's probably my biggest annoyance too. I certainly can't think of anything worse that was done, though it was perhaps put somewhat into perspective by the appearance of Shai-hulud in The Hobbit movies (in the sense that it seems we could have gotten much worse, such as perhaps an appearance of Godzilla or The Blob?) but I don't think putting elves of Lorien at the battle of Hornburg is enough to make it a bad adaptation necessarily. The point that the elves are in decline (which is also hinted with the funeral for the elven dead after the battle) and that at least some of them are clearly leaving, still comes across.
Logan Perez
Not him, overall I enjoyed the movies
There are some changes I liked and some I didn't, elves at helm's deep being the most obvious dislike.
Lurtz was a good addition, sarumon dying at two towers is a bit of both, I kind if miss the scouring of the white but it not being in is also fine in my books. Tom Bombadil not being in is nice though the result of no Bombadil meant that the swords given to the hobbits were just some random swords and didn't have the important background info
But overall I think the movies were a good enough adaptation
Dylan Martinez
>Anyway, Good, now that you've come this far; what is their page count compared to their adaptation's length in minutes? >Then compare them to the LotR books and movies at your leisure. You're still focusing on the wrong aspect of it. I'm not saying
>They changed it, now it sucks I'm saying that you can't use the adaptation to shield it from any criticism whatsoever of changing themes.
Take that old Troy movie, the one with Brad Pitt. Enjoyable, in a mindless actioney sort of way, but like most adaptations, they change a bit (a lot). And by building it up to be about The Big Fight between Hector and Achilles, they've fundamentally sidestepped the core conflict of the poem.
You could argue it's a good movie in spite of it (I wouldn't, I'd argue it's an okay movie), but it's certainly not a good adaptation, and that change made is one to do with vision, not because "lol the Iliad is really long and it's an epic poem and you're turning it into a movie".
Silence and Godfather are both great movies and great adaptations; they actually keep to the themes discussed in the books, and keep them through the change in medium. 1/2
Christian Walker
>I certainly can't think of anything worse that was done, The removal of the Scouring, if you view the main story is actually about the Hobbits and their growth and not about the War of the Ring. You've also got the whatever the fuck is done to Faramir in The Two Towers to turn him into a gibbering idiot, and the similar treatment that Denethor gets in RoTK; of that body, I'm not sure which is the worst offense, all of them irritate me more or less equally.
>the point that the elves are in decline (which is also hinted with the funeral for the elven dead after the battle) and that at least some of them are clearly leaving, still comes across. Except that is not the point that is getting across, or at least not the whole point. The Elves are half-assing their fight against Sauron, even in their decline, they're still quite strong. But they don't do anything except respond to attacks on their own demenses, hell, nobody in Rivendell even prepares a bit of rope for the departing fellowship, or notices they're not taking any.
The Elves are off doing their own thing, which is somewhat related but mostly separate from the War of the Ring story; the War of the Ring is itself separated but again interwoven with the "Here's the Hobbits" story. My beef with Jackson is that he wants to tie it all together. EVERYTHING has to be about the War of the Ring, and it either gets tied into it, whether or not there was a connection to start with, or it gets cut from the movie. And to me, that's a mistake, not just an adaptational change of medium, but fundamentally either misunderstanding the core of the work being adapted, or actually understanding it and deciding you know better and are going to fix it.
Caleb Butler
If they're made from elves they should be immortal though. That's an intrisic quality that Morgoth can't take away - since Tolkien stated in a letter that biologically Elves and Men must be the same species because of reproductive compatibility and half-elves actually get to choose which to be.
Shagrat and Gorbag are probably at least centuries old given that they reminisce about times without Nazgul etc. bossing them around.
Elijah Turner
A little too eager to claim power for himself in the name of good.
Joseph Reed
>There's a part of him that just doesn't get why Denethor outright refuses to assume the mantle of king Denethor notes, almost regrettably, that among a lesser people with less nostalgia for their kings of old, he would have been able to.
Grayson Torres
>you are setting the bar unreasonably high. I honestly don't think he is. A good movie should make me want to see more of it. It should stay in my mind for days, possibly months, at least after I've seen it. It should make me think. It should make me want to look up who the director is so I can see more of his movies. It should make me want to look up more movies where the actors show up. Jackson's adaptation of LotR does none of these things for me.
If the movie is worse than that, then it has to reach like Neil Breen levels of bad before it becomes interesting again.
Robert Ward
Well the ones Boromir was fighting were Uruk-Hai, which are explicitly bigger than the average orc due to breeding program shenanigans and an infusion of mannish blood into the line, unless I'm remembering everything wrong. Even disregarding Uruk-Hai, there is variation between different breeds of orc if i recall correctly.
Jason Lopez
>there is variation between different breeds of orc There is, but apart from the Uruk-Hai, even the largest Orcs were not taller than a head shorter than Men.
Gavin Hughes
You are, if you're taking Uruk-Hai to mean those Isengardian orcs that seem to be a bit tougher than average. There were three separate contingents of orcs on Amon Hen, the Isengarders (who were Uruk-Hai), and orcs from Mordor and Moria, whom presumably weren't, or at least not all Uruks. "Uruk" is simply the Black Speech word for an orc, but in connotation means a hand to hand warrior orc.
Also, even Isengardian Uruk-Hai don't seem to be quite as large as men; see Gimli's reaction to them at Helms Deep, where they're smaller than the Dunlendings.
Jeremiah Sanders
>setting the bar.
the LotR trilogy, for it's faults. is miles above the fucking Hobbit
the first movie i thought was almost straight tolkien.
second movie was doing great until we got elves, then was just OK after surfing Legolas...
third movie was mindless spectacle, with some relatively poorly underwritten parts. Gimli's lines come to mind. at least it sorta followed the books might as well have had Sauron show up at that point see the deleted scene commentary....
Christian Gutierrez
Gotta say for all else that the movies got wrong, I actually liked the Isengard orcs a lot. Best damn evil army I think i've seen on the screen.
Luke Thompson
>Gimli's lines come to mind. Gimli I think is one of the biggest victims of the adaptation, along with Denethor. They took a somber warrior poet guy and turned into nothing but comic relief. Feels bad man.
Joshua Brown
IT's kind of weird how much planning went into the movie and when it came time to do the Sauron fight with Aragorn they kinda shuffled their feet, got some basic footage in, then turned him into a troll for the final footage.
Hudson Torres
>the first movie i thought was almost straight tolkien. The first movie is definitely the best of the bunch. It's also incidentally the one that had the most constrained budget. There's an interview with Viggo where he talks about how he thinks the movies got worse as Jackson got more money and suddenly didn't have to be smart about he made them anymore.
The relevant paragraphs: >“Anybody who says they knew it was going to be the success it was, I don’t think it’s really true,” he says. “They didn’t have an inkling until they showed 20 minutes in Cannes, in May of 2001. They were in a lot of trouble, and Peter had spent a lot. Officially, he could say that he was finished in December 2000 – he’d shot all three films in the trilogy – but really the second and third ones were a mess. It was very sloppy – it just wasn’t done at all. It needed massive reshoots, which we did, year after year. But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn’t been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video.” >Mortensen thinks – rightly – that The Fellowship of the Ring turned out the best of the three, perhaps largely because it was shot in one go. “It was very confusing, we were going at such a pace, and they had so many units shooting, it was really insane. But it’s true that the first script was better organised,” he says. “Also, Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back. In the first movie, yes, there’s Rivendell, and Mordor, but there’s sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it’s grittier. The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it’s like that to the power of 10.
Matthew Morgan
Viggo is a cool guy Always enjoy watching his films
This seems to be a very common theme in both the filmmaking and video game industries. More money almost never translates into more quality, and frequently has the exact opposite effect.
Which is probably partly why all the super action blockbusters have been so shit these past years.
