The Hobbit Who Wasn't There- - - - The most abused characters in Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings are Gimli, treated as a buffoon, and Gandalf, transformed into an inconsistently psychokinetic X-Man. It's almost astonishing how little love and respect the filmmakers have for the Gimli character. Book-Gimli remarks wryly that dwarves are no horsemen and that he wishes he could walk rather than be bumped about like a sack of grain in the saddle. Movie-Gimli does a pratfall off his horse and claims it was on purpose. Book-Gimli ultimately wins his orc-killing contest with Legolas, by a score of 43 to 42. Movie-Gimli gets no such moment of triumph, and opens the contest by churlishly claiming one of Legolas's kills for himself. Book-Gimli is constantly decapitating orcs taller than himself. This might have been translated to film with Gimli bounding through the air, whirling like a dervish and bouncing off walls like a muscular Yoda. Instead, movie-Gimli's signature attack is hitting people in the crotch, much like the kid from the Home Alone movies. Another favored movie-Gimli tactic: get pinned under something and wait for Legolas or Aragorn to save you. I think it's a shame that Jackson did not make a movie version of The Hobbit before doing The Lord of the Rings. Most of the things I don't like about Jackson's Lord of the Rings might have been fixed if he had to make The Hobbit first. As it is, Jackson must have read The Hobbit, surely, but I don't think it influenced him enough. In The Hobbit, Dwarves occupy a central position and are sympathetic characters (in contrast with say, the Elves, who appear in a more mixed light). Then the Dwarves move off-stage in LOTR, leaving Gimli as their sole representative with a reservoir of associated goodwill. If Jackson had gone through The Hobbit as a filmmaker like a reader going through the books, I think Gimli would be treated better and we would be spared the dwarf-tossing jokes in LOTR. Similarly, there are two striking chapters in The Hobbit, the encounters with the Trolls and with Beorn, where Gandalf saves the day basically through clever wordplay. That should have established the proper precedent that Wizards in Middle-Earth get ahead mainly by having a way with words (Oxfordian Linguist as Hero?), not by having psychic battles or engaging in telekinetic chop-socky. |