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According to the books Saruman didn't just lose his staff, he lost all his powers in that meeting with Gandalf. All that was left was his voice. As a person he was just arrogant narcissistic tyrant that did what he did just to get even with hobbits. He wasn't even planning to "win" and he did calculate quite correctly that hobbits would not kill him, eventually it was wormy that did it. A servant driven too far so that he snapped. A surprise for the Saruman I would believe.
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Unfortunately he doesn't have capability of doing subtle horror/tension building. Too little terror, too much splatter. I was especially disappointed by Balrog of Moria. It was just moronic large beast in fire, a thing that big enough gun can kill. In the book it was way more frightening being...at least in my imagination.
Kind of T-Rex vs Alien, to clarify my point.
OTOH that guardian of the lake was pretty good, though I would have preferred not to show its body.Comment
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“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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Don't know for me the first association with Balrog is R.Comment
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I tried watching that 4.5hr edit of the hobbit movies and I still couldn't do it, it's too long and forever-taking and there are a lot of thematic clashes that come with bringing the style of the first LOTR movies to the hobbit. I gave up right around the part with the riddles. RIPGlaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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No written/filmed prose/action can compete with person X's imagination, given enough persons. I think that's pretty well esatablished by this point.
Point made, I think?
This is classic English/British lore. It's the Kraken. We already know (folklorically) what it would look like.
--snip--
(in addition to everything else in this thread: )
You're all writing/speaking as if Tolkien was a master of suspense. I realize this might be unpopular, but unless you're already buying-in to the world he's creating, the whole of LoTR is absurdly boring nonsense. ("Nonsense" as in... "fantasy".)
There's quite a lot of it that doesn't make any sense, except... it has to.Comment
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I always thought of Tolkien as the opposite of suspense. A lot of his stuff falls squarely into heroic fantasy or mythic tragedy, so you basically know exactly what's going to happen at the end -- it's the struggle against fate that keeps you reading. The Silmarillion is obviously moreso tragic than LOTR, but I don't think the conclusion of the latter was ever in doubt either.
As much as I like what Tolkien was doing, I like the darker stuff better. Poul Anderson's "Broken Sword" pretty much hit everything that I like about fantasy right on the head. Zelazny's Amber was a close second, but there was a lot of fluff to cut through in his books (especially the second series.)
Modern authors who are writing what is being called "magical realism" is my favorite of all, but has very little to do with what we'd consider "fantasy" as a genre (even though a lot of the basic concepts are the same.)Glaurung, Father of the Dragons says, 'You cannot avoid the ballyhack.'Comment
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PWMAngband variant maintainer - check https://github.com/draconisPW/PWMAngband (or http://www.mangband.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=9) to learn more about this new variant!Comment
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