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Books are generally better
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this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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Trippin' Through Time
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I watched and loved the movies before reading the books so my opinion may be biased, but I think Lord of the Rings movies were more enjoyable than books.
I see how the books were great in their time and the worldbuilding of the books is amazing - but the movies do great job at streamlining the story and making it fun.
The battle of helm's deep is way better in the movies at least. Battle of gondor.. some parts are better in the books, the whole "ghosts killing everyone" in the movies was a bit cheap. But either way both are great.
Oh and frodo in book > frodo in movie
Hot take, the battles in the book aren't great because Tolkien doesn't want to glorify violence. Half of the fights are like two pages in the books before the point of view character passes out. After realizing that I was kind of disappointed in how "campy early 2000s action movie" the battles in the films are.
There certainly are things I liked better in the books, I remember that much. But when judging entirety of books vs entirety of movies movies were better in my opinion.
(I'm only talking LotR itself ofc)
Yeah the movies have 1 extra thing that puts it way above the books: music
The Hobbit and LOTR books are actually fantastic to listen to as audiobooks. The narrator (at least in the version I had) sings all the songs.
Oh yeah I loved those too. Depends on the narrator I guess as well. But the music in the movies is on a different level.
The LOTR movies need a lots of hand waving to work. Which is why you get questions like "why didn't they take the eagles to mordor?".
Eh. It is a popular meme but I think even with the info the movie gives it is pretty clear why. They need to go in secret and Sauron and Saruman have spies/scouts about (like the Sarumans birds).
And even if they flew to near Mordor undetected, the giant freaking Eye would spot them - if the patroling Nazgul wouldn't spot them first.
And then what?
What would they be able to do against a couple of giant eagles flying 300m above them?
Saruman could possibly magic them, but everyone else couldn't do a damn thing;
Ypu mean the Nazgul on their dragons would just shrug? I'd imagine they have balistas or other warmachines that could make the traveling above Mordor uncomfortable.
Sauron never thought they would want to destroy it. If they did the most obvious beeline towards Mt. Doom, he would realize this and would make it impossible.
The film is helped with amazing casting and a lot of care over the script. However there are things that were changed that do not matter and done for the right reason, such as Arwen being given more screen time (not quite a sausage fest as it was before), Glorfindels role in the Black Rides bit, but also bits that I really didn't like, such as messing with the power levels of Gandalf and Witch-king during their confrontation.
This lead to the abomination that is the Hobbit adaptation, partly because the film studio wanted to add an Aragorn to it, despite Thorin being nothing like Aragorn, and adding the three way love triangle because people liked the expanded Arwen story from LotR.
Yes, I very distinctly talk LotR only.
As for Hobbit, the Maple films edit made it quite ok and cuts most of the questionable stuff. Still too much Alfrid though. I hated Alfrid more than the love triangle if you'd believe it.
Yeah Alfrid was awful, I didn't like anything about that characterization.
I haven't tried the Maple films edit, the M4 edit was my favorite of the ones I have tried, its super aggressive with what it cuts out and tweaks the film grading
i am usually the meme boy, but i fully agree with you