posted September 12, 2013 11:07 AM
I finished Fellowship of the Ring today and have already started with Two Towers. I will be blunt stating its been years since I watched the movies, but I really did remember how seemingly super human the characters were. How in the fight scenes, the whole group can take on hordes of 50+ Orcs with ease (especially Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli who were portrayed taking on 10+ Orcs singlehandedly in a regular battle). But as I read through Fellowship of the Ring, the fights were barely like that. If anything, at times it felt so scary for the Fellowship. The book describes so many close calls in which the heroes were almost hit in a fatal area by an arrow and only got lucky it missed just barely. The book has an ambush scene in which just before Fellowship ended, they were traveling on boat at night and they were attacked by arrows by Orcs. If it wasn't for the darkness, they would probably have been hit and killed and the book describes how desperately even Aragorn and Legolas tried to take measures to avoid being hit.
In the Moria scene when Balrog appeared, Legolas was so terrified just as he was about to prepare another arrow to fire, he suddenly dropped it out of a near panicking state.
In the river ambush, there was even a scary creature int he dark they couldn't see and Gimli was so grateful Legolas was able to hit it down with an arrow.
Don't even get me started on the early parts of the book when the Dark Riders were chasing after Frodo. It really did feel like demons were attacking the Fellowship.
Thats just one major difference I already see in between the book and Jackson's adaptation.
Granted in Boromir's death, they describe the exact same numbers of Orcs killed as typical in Peter Jackson's movie fight scenes. At least 20 dead bodies surrounding Boromir before he dies and lots of carcasses along the way that Legolas ran out of arrows.
But the way the Movie portrayed even that scene was rather exaggerated IIRC and so many fight scenes (especially later in the major battles) of the movies show such insane stunts and feats like Legolas's skateboarding down the castle stairs and shooting some Urukais.
I'll be blunt I only read Fellowship and have just started on Two Towers but I have to say Jackson's movies made the Fellowship feel like heroes outside from Greek Mythology like Achilles and Hercules. While the book makes them really human characters you can empathize with.