Fellowship of the ring text movie#
As readers of prose, Tolkien aficionados tend to go deeper than movie and TV fans. For one thing, Tolkien fans have been around a lot longer - people fell in love with Middle-earth when Lucas was still piloting go-karts. Despite superficial similarities, Middle-earthheads do not compare with Trekkers and Star Warriors. Tolkien enthusiasm is the champagne of fandoms. But Jackson's trilogy will not become a blockbuster without also appealing to hardcore Tolkien readers - who tend to be a discriminating bunch. To that end, he has streamlined the story, pumped up the characters, and employed state-of-the-art effects. He knows that whatever he comes up with must appeal to people who don't know hobbits from marmots. Many have read it dozens of times.Ĭurrently, Jackson is hunkered down in a Wellington editing room piecing together The Fellowship of the Ring from thousands of hours of Middle-earth footage shot over a 15-month period. Tens of millions of people have read LOTR, and it regularly tops reader polls as the best book of the 20th century. (The second installment, The Two Towers, will come out Christmas 2002.) But one thing's for sure: Tolkien enthusiasts have the potential to make Jackson's movie trilogy bigger than George Lucas' original Star Wars triptych. Saruman's fate is not revealed until late in Tolkien's tale, so the mystery of the wizard-kabob will not be fully resolved until the third film, The Return of the King, is released in December 2003.