I stayed up writing this last night but the network didn’t see the laptop and I didn’t feel like fixing that at 2:15 in the morning; ah well, gives me the chance to add a few things I came up with while in bed and in the shower.

We watched the Lord of the Rings films again— the first two in one evening as a school-holiday movie marathon; we have the third in the house as well but the other two are so long that The Two Towers ended well after midnight, and everybody was just plain too tired to face another one even if it does have the happy ending that the others so sadly lack.

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Well. The Fellowship of the Ring starts splendidly; exactly my image of the Shire and normal hobbit life. If the people hadn’t been so short, parts of it could actually have been set in Valdyas. The first moment I consciously noticed where it was Going Wrong is when they first saw Elves— walking excruciatingly slowly, which turns out to be their trademark, and singing floaty Enya-ish music, which I shook my head at increasingly more often because it got in the way of everything, even occasionally of a good fight.

Yes, the fights. There are too many fight scenes, but most of those would be very good indeed if they were half as long. Every fight goes on too long; the one in Moria with the cave troll and the one at the river where Boromir falls go on twice as long as they should, and the one at Helm’s Deep three or four times as long.

And Rivendell is wrong, and Lothlórien very wrong— Rivendell like a nineteenth-century artist’s impression of an early medieval fairy tale, and Lothlorien simply twee. Why must everything with elves be twee? Celeborn is okay; Galadriel is horrible, even though she’s Cate Blanchett; Elrond looks like a frog; Arwen needs a good shaking-up; Haldir is a creep; any scene with lots of (i.e. more than two) elves is annoyingly static, as if elves have nothing else to do than stand around in stiff rows. [ETA: Prima observes that Tolkien elves live so long that they probably really have nothing else to do.] With more floaty music, of course; and in the lament for Gandalf I heard quite clearly “Amen”. (Prima heard “Alleluia” another time, probably in Arwen’s dream of Aragorn on his death-bed.) Jackson’s idea of elves is probably much more refined and rarefied than mine, or even Tolkien’s. Haldir, creep as he is (like a thickset Lucius Malfoy), is at least refreshingly earthy for an elf, especially when he is killed.

Some things are truly excellent. The women and children (and indeed the whole culture, what we see of it) of Rohan, though I still think it a waste that hundreds of trained able-bodied women aren’t allowed to fight, not even to defend the children and the elderly in the keep. Éowyn could have led them; she has the skill and the people trust her. The arming of the little boys. Haleth son of Háma— he looked like a young woman dressed as a man so she could fight, but I found accidentally on imdb that he’s played by Calum Gittins, the sixteen-year-old son of one of the screenwriters. The Ents, who could very well have been twee but amazingly weren’t, and their attack on Isengard. And the mumakil.

Some things are almost right: Bree, with the leering regulars in the Prancing Pony, possibly seen through the eyes of the hobbits but probably nastier than necessary. The friendly rivalry between Gimli and Legolas in the battle, spoilt by Jackson thinking it necessary to make Gimli comic relief. The resurrection of Gandalf, more than a little overdone.

Some things aren’t in the book and shouldn’t have been in the films: the whole plot about Elrond sending Arwen to the West. I don’t remember whether she actually starts going before she comes south and joins the battle. In the first conception of the movie she, and not Haldir, was going to fight in the Battle of Helm’s Deep, but Peter Jackson changed this. Faramir —curse him! or at least the film version of him, the one in the book is unallayed good, which I suspect Jackson couldn’t stomach; either that or making Boromir the good brother necessitated making Faramir the evil brother— taking the hobbits to Denethor, and into Osgiliath (Oh, and the pterodactyl flyover in Osgiliath; though Faramir almost redeems himself by taking one down with a well-aimed arrow).

Some things aren’t in the book but are very effective in the film: Boromir’s death scene comes to mind, when he has a chance to say to Aragorn what he doesn’t get to say in the book because they find him too late.

Some things are in the book and should have been in the films, notably Tom Bombadil, because he makes the world make sense.

Some things make me really, really want to read the book again, for instance to know whether Saruman was really possessing Théoden or had merely poisoned his mind. I did like the way he got older and older as the mind-poisoning or possession or whatever continued, and younger again —perhaps a bit too young— when Gandalf fixed that.

Some things are just plain silly: horses can’t charge down a 45 degree incline, especially not with heavily armoured riders, and won’t charge into a wall of spears.

Some things are perhaps technically good but I dislike them intensely: Gollum; the horror effects (admittedly Jackson’s forte); Gríma played as a bad Shakespeare villain; and the habit of switching from one setting to another mid-scene on a cliffhanger, not a few times, but almost every time. Finish something occasionally, for Varda’s sake!

Aragorn becomes appropriately more kingly as the films go on, but I’d have liked him to refrain from the coquettish “head to one side and apologetic grin” that Viggo Mortensen may think is boyish charm but is all the more annoying as he becomes more kingly.

Some of it was much less impressive on DVD than on the big screen ( here’s Boudewijn’s review of The Two Towers on the big screen), especially the Mines of Moria and the transformation of Isengard, though I do prefer a smaller screen for faces in close-up, which there were a lot of.

And the best-looking woman (well, with a substantial part) in all of the films isn’t Arwen, or Galadriel, but Éowyn, hands down. It’s a shame that the film Faramir, though passably handsome in a weakish way, isn’t worthy of her.