So I just finished watching the LotR trilogy extended cuts

So I've just heard the Saruman death scene wasn't shown in theatres in either return of the king or two towers? lol how did they wrap up that story arc then?

They ride up to Orthanc, everything's flooded, they find Merry and Pippen, Treebeard says "Saruman's trapped in his tower", Gimli says "Let's go kill him", Gandalf says "Nah, he's powerless now, it doesn't matter", then Pippen randomly finds the Palantir laying in the water. Then they all ride off.

You don't see Saruman or Grima at all (which pissed Christopher Lee off when the movie came out), and there's no real resolution to their story (though ironically, that's actually closer to the story in the books - since they don't die there, but later escape to scour the Shire).

It's the one big thing everybody complained about at the time.

Yeah, I just saw the extended cut of Return of the King for the first time. I was like 'DAMN, THAT'S A SCENE!!!'.

Of all the scenes they cut, that one was by far the most bizarre choice.

Because yeah, as PO said, they just kind of say, "Yeah, don't worry about the demigod in the tower - he doesn't have a stick anymore, so it's fine if we leave him alone. Oh look, a palantir!".

Made me wonder at the time if they were actually going to adapt the Scouring of the Shire to the film (which I thought would have been an odd choice), but no, they just leave it completely unresolved in the theatrical cut.

They really are the best way to watch the films.

Rotpar posted...

They really are the best way to watch the films.

Especially if you do the all-day, one immediately after the other, no stops except for piss breaks marathon.

Bonus points if you're one of those people who snack on setting-appropriate hobbit food all day while watching.

To be fair, even the theatrical cut of RotK is a long-ass movie. Leaving in an extra ten minutes to resolve Saruman wouldn't change that significantly, but they had to trim out a lot to keep it from running too long, and I can understand trimming the scene down to just the bare essentials of getting Merry and Pippin back and Pippin finding an orb to later ponder.

The extended version is definitely a better film, though, even if it's an epic undertaking to watch it all in one sitting.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Especially if you do the all-day, one immediately after the other, no stops except for piss breaks marathon.

yeah that's literally what I did in the cinema a few weeks ago, watched lotr for the first time at a cinema marathon. Sadly I had to leave 1hr into the two towers so I've had to watch the rest of them at home but definitely worth watching.

But anyway that seems like a unsatisfying way to wrap up the saruman arc in the theatrical releases.

What's scouring of the shire? have i missed something?

FatalAccident posted...

What's scouring of the shire? have i missed something?

Did you read the books?

Its what the elf queen showed pretty much in her little viewing pool, except the white wizard and his henchmen are doing it.

FatalAccident posted...

What's scouring of the shire? have i missed something?

In the books, after Saruman is defeated at Orthanc, he and Grima Wormtongue persuade the Ents to let them go and flee to the Shire. Turns out they had been using a relative of Frodo's (Lotho Sackville-Baggins - you actually see a cameo of his parents in the extended cut of the Fellowship of the Ring; they're the two hobbits who keep trying to pester Bilbo, first at Bag End, then at his party) to gain influence and control over the Shire (Lotho was rich due to pipe weed sales and had been buying up parts of the Shire).

Saruman (now calling himself "Sharkey") arrives, takes control (with Lotho later being killed by a then-feral Grima Wormtongue) and starts industrializing the Shire, in essence trying to turn it into a new Orthanc. He's aided in this by a force of wild men, goblins, and traitor hobbits.

When Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin return home to the Shire, they discover it a half-ruined wasteland. They succeed in rallying the hobbits and, after a brief battle, drive out the invaders. They then confront Saruman and Grima - Frodo tells Saruman he is exiled from the Shire and Saruman agrees to leave and never return. However, when he commands Grima to accompany him (with Grima now basically a Gollum-esque half-mad wretch), Frodo calls out to him and tells him he doesn't need to accompany Saruman any more. Saruman mocks Grima and kicks him, before turning to walk away, leading to Grima running up behind him and cutting his throat with a dagger before being killed by hobbit archers.

It's kind of a strange conclusion to the journey of the Fellowship, if I'm honest. It kind of feels "tacked on", given that Sauron and his armies have been destroyed. The movies obliquely reference it (the scene in Galadriel's mirror in FotR is basically how the Scouring was portrayed, except Sam is there for some reason, and you probably noticed from the above description that Saruman's death scene in the extended cut of RotK is basically lifted pretty much wholesale from the Scouring, except with Theoden playing the role of Frodo), but I'm not surprised they left it out.

darkknight109 posted...

It's kind of a strange conclusion to the journey of the Fellowship, if I'm honest. It kind of feels "tacked on", given that Sauron and his armies have been destroyed.

As much as Tolkein was adamant that none of his writing was ever meant to be allegorical, I'm fairly certain the Scouring of the Shire was his way of expressing the idea that soldiers never really get to leave the war behind, with the world they return to being irreversibly changed from the one they left (WWI in particular having done a ton to accelerate the industrialization of Europe). Deliberate allegory or not, it's pretty likely that a lot of LotR was Tolkein's way of self-medicating the trauma of his experience in WWI, given how many obvious parallels there are. The Scouring is really awkwardly tacked on and anticlimactic in that you get the big climax of "you won! Good job!", but then out of nowhere "JK no you didn't here's one more problem that you're going to have to solve that will take you like four seconds but no happy ending for you yet," but through the lens of a soldier who won and got to go home but then had a whole new battle to fight to reintegrate into a society they barely recognized, it makes sense that Tolkein would have wanted to depict a success in that regard as part of the fantasy he was painting. In the same vein, ring-bearers getting to sail into the west is pretty obviously analogous to more extreme cases of PTSD and the fantasy that a kind and loving God would have a special heaven to comfort them after their lifetime of suffering. Tolkein may not have deliberately written allegories, but the fantasies he wrote for escapism's sake still tell us a lot about what he/the peers he wanted to help wanted to escape from, and in that regard they are more than a little allegorical.

Personally, I like how the RotK movie handles that idea better than the anticlimax that is the Scouring. RotK's ending(s) is a little awkwardly strung together in its effort to tie up so many loose ends, but the scene in the pub in particular has always struck me as being particularly poignant in the way that it conveys the whole idea of "we're back home and nothing has really changed, but we've been changed by our experience and we're not really sure how to get back to normal now." It just does such a good job of portraying not just a contemplative silence, but a contemplative silence where everybody at the table knows exactly why nobody else is talking and is okay with that because they're all in the same place. That is, however, a scene that only really works in a movie and not a book, since that poignancy relies on the audience's interpretation of basically nothing happening, and it's hard to describe nothing happening in a book without adding detail that takes away some of the audience's opportunity to interpret it.

Allegory aside, the Scouring of the Shire probably had a lot to do with the fact that Tolkien was mourning the slow death of the traditional "Merry England" lifestyle in favor of industrialization and urbanization.

It's why he literally made the town he grew up in the Shire. The hobbit lifestyle is literally his mental image of a perfect life, and the Shire is the perfect place to live. And then the outside world comes in and ruins everything.

adjl posted...

Personally, I like how the RotK movie handles that idea better than the anticlimax that is the Scouring. RotK's ending(s) is a little awkwardly strung together in its effort to tie up so many loose ends, but the scene in the pub in particular has always struck me as being particularly poignant in the way that it conveys the whole idea of "we're back home and nothing has really changed, but we've been changed by our experience and we're not really sure how to get back to normal now." It just does such a good job of portraying not just a contemplative silence, but a contemplative silence where everybody at the table knows exactly why nobody else is talking and is okay with that because they're all in the same place.

Completely agree. I actually think the movies did a magnificent job of honouring that element of Tolkien's writing in a way that was a bit more narratively sound. Even outside of the pub scene, the hobbits - and Frodo in particular - never seem totally settled. They were trying to go back to the life they lived, only to discover that their experiences had changed them - in some cases drastically.

darkknight109 posted...

Of all the scenes they cut, that one was by far the most bizarre choice.

Another very strange choice was cutting the flashback scene of Boromir and Faramir celebrating their victory in Osgiliath. It was an absolutely essential scene for establishing Boromir's character.

faramir77 posted...

Another very strange choice was cutting the flashback scene of Boromir and Faramir celebrating their victory in Osgiliath. It was an absolutely essential scene for establishing Boromir's character.

That would probably be my second choice for weird cuts.

That one's a little more defensible, because Boromir still functions just fine as a character without it, he just comes across as a lot more weak-willed and corrupt than he was intended to be; the deleted scenes do a lot more to humanize him and make it clear he is a hero in his own right, just one suffering under immense burdens heaped upon him thanks to his station.

It's not nearly as egregious as cutting out Saruman's death scene, given that removing those particular scenes meant the entire Saruman sub-plot is left with no resolution at all, which feels incredibly jarring.

faramir77 posted...

Another very strange choice was cutting the flashback scene of Boromir and Faramir celebrating their victory in Osgiliath. It was an absolutely essential scene for establishing Boromir's character.

That one was probably cut simply by virtue of not being in the original story.

They basically added that scene in the first place to try and humanize Boromir a bit, because he's generally the least developed character in the Fellowship in the original text. So they extrapolated that out based on stuff from the Appendix, combined with descriptions of their contrasting personalities and emphasis on the fact that both of them were strongly affectionate towards each other (as opposed to how Denethor seems to see them).

Sure, it helps the overall story, but when you're looking for things to cut, it's easier to justify cutting stuff that's not in the original over stuff that was. Especially when you're already cutting out major scenes like everything Tom Bombadil related and the Scouring of the Shire.

While it was bad I'm not sure if it's worse than leaving out everything related to Theodred then expecting us to feel impacted by his death

It's just like the king is better, ohh wait, he's sad now from the death of someone he was probably related to

They took out some important scenes in the theater version. That's why I bought the extended version of all 3 parts.