Amazon's Lord of the Rings casts Spartacus actor - Redanian Intelligence

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Will it include the material in the Silmarillion?
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Not sure, the show map certainly draws from Unfinished Tales.

But I reckon it would be rather difficult to write a comprehensive plot set during the Second Age of Tolkien’s legendarium, without any degree of access to the Akallabeth and Of the Rings of Power chapters of the published Silmarillion.
 
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I think Fellowship was the best of the three movies and an almost pitch-perfect adaption of the book. Nearly all the changes made for filming purposes were, I think, necessary for that medium - Tom Bombadil, obviously, had to be cut.

I mean the entire momentum of the drama - which until then had been driving the story forward - stalls for whole pages upon pages of flowery descriptions of folkloric characters that owe little, really, to the plot and indeed (at least in Bombadil’s case) appear to undermine it (i.e. there is this all-powerful One Ring, that none can resist and which would corrupt even the wisest of the wise into doing evil for ostensibly good ends…uhm, well, apart from this Bombadil fellow who is totally impervious to its influence and just flings it around like a toy).

Those chapters were beautiful to read for purely aesthetic literary reasons but no competent film-maker could ever seriously consider including them.

The decision to drop Glorfindel and replace him with Arwen at the Ford was, I feel, the right one. It gave Jackson the opportunity to enhance the (limited) female presence onscreen and given that Glorfindel doesn’t make much impact on the wider plot, worked better for narrative-purposes on-screen in having Aragorn’s “one-true-love” be the one to bring Frodo safely to her father.

Then there was the last major change in the first film: the decision to introduce a forced-PJ conflict in Aragorn’s characterisation, to give him more internal conflict. In the books, whilst he does “grow” as a character, he’s never seen doubting his destiny as the rightful king of the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor. In the film, by contrast, he is depicted as fearful of his ancestor Isildur’s ‘weakness’ having passed down to him and even shown as wary of his right to become king.

In favour of this change, one can say that it makes for a more impactful character arc on screen. Against, one could argue that it was just unnecessary to fundamentally alter a key character’s motivation and traits in this way.

The two later films, whilst enjoyable cinematically and more “epic” in the movie sense, were less faithful adaptions I agree (although I still think they were masterful in their own right, not overlooking the big flaws they had in retrospect, compared with the appalling travesty that was the Hobbit).
 
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Where’s Tauriel with her, " Why does it hurt so much? " corny line when you need her. The answer from Thranduil: “Because it was real”.

As you noted earlier, the one thing the Tauriel-Kili bad-romance didn’t have was the slightest degree of ‘authenticity’.

They introduced a major female character (because, legitimately, they were acutely aware that the Hobbit had no major female characters apart from Shelob) only to put her in an utterly contrived love-triangle with a man she has absolutely no reason to care about.

We know from " The Hobbit " how deadly executive committee decisions can be.

It is an open secret that the abysmal interspecies “Tauriel - Kili - Legolas” love triangle in the Hobbit movies was a studio decision, originally made over the head of the screenwriters and forcibly shoehorned in by New Line, because they thought Tolkien’s ‘saccharine-sweet’ (in their judgement) children’s book, with the closest thing to romance in it being male bromance among the Dwarves in Bilbo’s company, needed some burning romantic passion.

And this, unsurprisingly, was one of the most widely panned and detested dimensions of an awful trilogy - along with the decision to turn what had originally been two-movies into a three-film extravaganza, thus excessively padding out a slender book with layers upon layers of unnecessarily convoluted subplots.

The result was a bloated mess that likely strayed far from what Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh would have wanted had the studio simply allowed their creative juices to flow more holistically.

Most of the worst decisions on film or TV emanate from execs removed from the creative process looking at profit charts.

We have no clear idea what relationship Amazon has with its writers room and the Tolkien Estate. If Shippey is right, the Estate has a veto and has insisted that the “shape of the Second Age” cannot be changed:

The Tolkien Estate will insist that the main shape of the Second Age is not altered. Sauron invades Eriador, is forced back by a Númenorean expedition, is returns to Númenor. There he corrupts the Númenoreans and seduces them to break the ban of the Valar. All this, the course of history, must remain the same. But you can add new characters and ask a lot of questions, like: What has Sauron done in the meantime? Where was he after Morgoth was defeated?

Theoretically, Amazon can answer these questions by inventing the answers, since Tolkien did not describe it. But it must not contradict anything which Tolkien did say. That’s what Amazon has to watch out for. It must be canonical, it is impossible to change the boundaries which Tolkien has created, it is necessary to remain “tolkienian”.

The Tolkien Estate keeps a very careful eye on everything and is quite capable of saying no. They retain a veto over everything that concerns Tolkien.
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Shippey is acting as a consultant on the new series.
 
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Thankfully, I never had to endure it in movie theatres as I was so disillusioned with the first film that I only saw the sequels after they’d left the cinema (and really I wish I hadn’t bothered even doing that, in retrospect).

You really couldn’t have gotten less Tolkienesque dialogue if you’d tried either.

But that line was, ultimately, a rhetorical question that practically stood in for the audience and summed up the entire Hobbit trilogy: “Why does it hurt so much?”

Why indeed Tauriel, why indeed.
 
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Billy Connolly’s Dain (for some reason they kept pronouncing it as “Dane” in the film when it’s meant to be “Die-in”), I never understood why they decided to use crappy CGI for him.

It was so jarring, and obviously artificial looking, given that all the other Dwarves were live-action people.

Why…?
 
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