[quote=“Abadd”]Solo - You really thought so? LOTR has great writing in it, just take a look at any of Theoden’s lines.
Halo certainly has a similar sort of epic (in the poetic sense… particularly all the scenes with dialog from the Covenant) feel at the LOTR movies, so I thought it would be a great fit.[/quote]
There were lots of great lines in the LOTR movies, but the noteworthy ones all seemed to come from Tolkien, rather than the additional dialogue that the movie writers added. I don’t have a copy of TLOTR book on me to check, but if you can find some noteworthy lines that Theoden said that weren’t based on what was in the book, I’ll certainly retract my view about those.
It’s not that the writing in the LOTR movies sucked, more that Peter Jackson and co seemed to think it was necessary to dumb down the script in order to appeal to a broader audience. In many places it didn’t have the same medieval style to the dialogue. Also, the writers were far too “in your face” than they needed to be, flashing the ring around every other moment, making characters speak about obvious things that were happening around them, etc. While you could argue that these things helped translate the story to a visual medium, a little subtlety can go a long way, and raise questions for the viewers, rather than have everything spelled out for them.
I have gripes about some of the changes to various characters as well, Frodo’s in particular. The comedy, whilst amusing while watching it, didn’t fit in with the seriousness of the world a lot of the time. Something like Legolas single handedly taking out an Oliphant would be very unlikely to happen in Tolkien’s world. The lack of respect the characters had towards the stewards… Gimli slouching on the throne, Gandalf whacking Denethor in the face, etc, I can?t imagine those scenes ever being written by Tolkien because they don’t make sense when keeping things consistent with how his world works. The Lord of the Rings trilogy were good, entertaining action films, that translated the themes of book into movies very well in most places, but they could have been so much better if they were treated less like a Hollywood film, and more like the serious, ancient themed saga they were based on.
Saying that, I don’t think Halo will be as hard to turn into a movie (or in this case, movie style game) as LOTR was, especially considering that it was a story written in modern times to begin with. The writing and characters of Halo 1 and 2 are much more in line with what you’d find in many action films, and given Peter Jackson’s love of monsters, epic battles, etc, I can only imagine good things coming out of this, so long as Bungie make sure he keeps things consistent with the universe of the current games and novels.
Lets hope so, or if this is meant to be another group of Spartans, for example, there’s a good explanation behind it. Whatever happened to the second group of Spartans anyway (I realise they came after this time period)?