Adaptation: It's Ain't Easy

Books and movies: not the same thing. Normally, levelheaded people are pretty chill about this difference. But when a movie adaptation of a book comes out (especially of a series with some of the most hardcore fandoms out there) people just can't help comparing the two… and hulking out when the movie falls short of their expectations.

No Tom Bombadil? Outrageous! Aragorn in love? Terrible! Arwen taking up precious screen time? Horrible!

But think about just how insanely hard adapting a book to the big screen is. In our humble opinion, the overall merit of a movie shouldn't depend on how true it stays to its source text. That merit should depend on how explosively awesome and heart-churning the movie is on its own … which The Fellowship certainly is.

In an interview (that you can watch in our Best Of The Web section), Jackson says that recreating the books page-by-page would have been "un-filmable. (And if you've ever read the book we're sure you would agree.) Instead, he had to choose what was essential to the story and make it come alive in glorious Technicolor (and CGI).