Well-known fantasy author Neil Gaiman went to see LOTR:FOTR en put some of his thoughts about the movie in his online journal which can be found at NeilGaiman.com. However since it dates from a while back it doesn’t seem to be online anymore. Ringer Spy Shana was kind enough to send us the parts that mentioned LOTR:
“Saw Lord of the Rings last night, and thought it was thoroughly wonderful. It was a movie in its own right, and it mapped so strangely onto my own mental Fellowship of the Ring: my Saruman is not Christopher Lee, although he was astonishing; my Gandalf, on the other hand, is the one in the film portrayed by Ian McKellan. Jackson had done an amazing job of staying faithful to the book in all the right ways.
“I would have liked to have seen more of the world from a hobbit’s point of view: the Elves gain so much in the book from Sam’s delight in and obsession with them, for example.
“When I was a kid you’d get amazingly faithful BBC adaptations of classic books — eight or twelve one-hour episodes to build a minor Victorian novel, recreating all its felicities. Sometimes I found myself sighing for that. But not often… Because how often do you get taken into a personal vision, by a group of people who care enough about the vision to create it, and to recreate it, in detail and in nuance?
“The film of Lord of the Rings is a map to the territory which, every now and again, becomes the territory itself. And if half of the kids who walked out of it last night going ‘Huh? What kind of an end was that?’ go and get the books to find out what happens next, I’ll be happy. Reading Lord of the Rings can be — possibly should be — an initial journey to a world as real and dense as this one.”
