Something I've always appreciated about Lord of the Rings is that it actually took time off from the story to tell you how the army of Mordor is fed. Apparently they have absolutely enormous amounts of farmland by lake Nurnen in southeast Mordor.
Fellowship of the Ring is the closest to Tolkien's vision for sure, with some notable exceptions. I think he would have enjoyed seeing rivendell designed.
Too bad The Lord of the Rings movie got a Disney make over with the happy ending where the Shire was never destroyed. This is so Non-Tolkienish that he must have turned in his grave.
Can't wait to see multiple new media adaptions of LOTR when this happens. Though, I doubt it will. New Zealand's tourism industry, film industry, Amazon, etc will lobby pretty hard for an indefinite copyright.
This actually raises an interesting dilema, where the original books copyright ends earlier than the copyright of a film. Does this mean that new LOTR films are still in breach of New Line Cineams copyright over the films, despite them only buying the rights from the Tolkien estate? I wonder if there are any precedents here for movies derived from creative book fiction.
I've gone the Lord of the Rings route before using locations: shire, barrowdowns, moria, lothlorien, isengard, mordor, rivendell, etc. The only bad thing was that only about one in ten people knew how to spell isengard.
The Hobbit movies are far more egregious in their use of bad CGI than the original trilogy. That river scene is one of the worst offenders in modern movie history for me.
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