Commentators have compared Peter Jackson's 2001–2003 The Lord of the Rings film trilogy with the book on which it was based, J. R. R. Tolkien's 1954–1955 The Lord of the Rings, remarking that while both have been extremely successful commercially, the film version does not necessarily capture the intended meaning of the book. They have admired Jackson's ability to film the long and complex work at all; the beauty of the cinematography, sets, and costumes; the quality of the music; and the epic scale of his version of Tolkien's story. They have however found the characters and the story greatly weakened by Jackson's emphasis on action and violence at the expense of psychological depth; the loss of Tolkien's emphasis on free will and individual responsibility; and the replacement of Frodo's inner journey by an American monomyth with Aragorn as the hero.

Commentators admired the simultaneous use of images, words, and music to convey emotion, evoking the appearance of Middle-earth, creating wonderfully believable creatures, and honouring Tolkien's Catholic vision with images that can work also for non-Christians.

Scholars, critics, actors and fans have seen Jackson's version as a success, on its own terms, as an adaptation of Tolkien, and as going beyond Tolkien into a sort of modern folklore. The development of fan films such as Born of Hope and The Hunt for Gollum, and of a modern folklore with characters such as elves, dwarves, wizards, and halflings, all derived from Jackson's rendering of Tolkien, have been viewed as measures of this success.

Context 

Both book and film versions of The Lord of the Rings have been extremely successful in their way, enjoyed by the public and non-academic reviewers alike, attracting the attention of scholars to the differences between them.

Tolkien's fantasy novel 

J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes in 1954–1955 and has sold over 150 million copies. It has been translated into at least 58 languages. It takes up, according to the edition, around 1000 pages of text. Read out loud in the unabridged audiobook voiced by Rob Inglis, it has a running time of nearly 60 hours.

Tolkien was involved in a proposal to make an animated film adaptation by Morton Grady Zimmerman. He was not opposed to the idea: in 1957 he wrote that an abridgement "with some good picture-work would be pleasant". He felt that selective omission would be better than compression; in the script he was shown, he found the compression excessive, with "resultant over-crowding and confusion, blurring of climaxes, and general degradation".

Peter Jackson's film trilogy 

Peter Jackson's film series was released as three films between 2001 and 2003. The budget was $281 million, and together the three films grossed over $2.9 billion worldwide. The series runs for 9 hours, 18 minutes in the "theatrical" or cinema version, and 11 hours, 26 minutes in the extended version released on DVD. Although long for a film trilogy, this was short compared to Tolkien's work, presenting the films' makers with a major challenge of abridgement, compression, and transformation for the production of the series.

Filmgoers and non-academic reviewers rated the films as almost perfect, The Two Towers actually scoring "a rare 100%" on Rotten Tomatoes, and gaining many Oscars and other film awards. The film scholar Kristin Thompson, reviewing an early book on Tolkien on Film, wrote that "[literary] scholars seem particularly irked by the films' enormous popularity, not just among fans but also among reviewers", noting that the films have brought a "vastly enlarged" audience to The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps millions of new readers to the book; and that there are "book-firsters" and "film-firsters" among Tolkien fans, as evidenced (she writes) by the message boards on TheOneRing.net.

Differences 

The film version differs in content from the written version in several ways, including cutting some scenes, adding scenes, adjusting scenes to cope with other changes, such as moving some action to different locations, and adding some minor characters. The differences of content created by the necessary compression and transformation of Tolkien's story inevitably result in differences of style. Commentators have addressed the question of whether the observed differences are appropriate.

Transformation 

Scholars have stated multiple reasons why a film-maker would need to transform the source text into a screenplay. Tolkien's version contains a variety of types of writing, especially descriptions of landscape, characters, and their appearance, namely narrative, dialogue, and embedded songs and poems. As Joseph Ricke and Catherine Barnett write, "Tolkien's characters … – like the narrative in which they exist – pause often for reflection, lamentation, poetry, song, moral inventory, refocusing, wrestling with their consciences, and debating their commitment to the mission before them." Furthermore, the main text is supplemented by a prologue on the nature of hobbits, the distinctive small people of an England-like region of Middle-earth, and the social and political organisation of their home, the Shire. It is accompanied by six lengthy appendices describing the history of Middle-earth's kings, its chronology over more than 6,000 years of the Second and Third Ages, family trees, calendars, and guides to pronunciation and the Elvish scripts, and to the languages of Middle-earth. Film has different capabilities from prose fiction. The film version translates descriptions of landscape into actual landscapes, whether those of New Zealand or computer-generated imagery; something of the feeling aroused by the descriptions is conveyed by the choice of landscape and the photography, from woodland scenes in the Shire to wide panoramas of majestic mountains. Subtle effects such as Tolkien's indirect suggestion of the power of the Ring are difficult to replicate. Dialogue is sometimes taken unchanged from the book, but much is cut; some elements are voiced by other characters.

The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey noted that Jackson was under much greater financial pressure than Tolkien, who was risking nothing more than his spare time. In his view, Jackson was obliged to address different audiences, including teenagers who expected Arwen to have some of the characteristics of a "warrior princess", and who delighted in jokes about Dwarf-tossing, something that, he commented, Tolkien would not have understood.

Omissions 

Film-makers can omit written materials that do not materially further the story to be told in the film. The early chapters "A Conspiracy Unmasked", "The Old Forest", "In the House of Tom Bombadil", and "Fog on the Barrow-Downs", all of which concern a deviation on the Hobbits' journey from their home in the Shire to the village of Bree, are essentially omitted completely, though brief mentions of these are made later. The penultimate chapter "The Scouring of the Shire", in which the Hobbits use the skills of leadership and warfare that they have acquired to cleanse their home region of the enemy, is omitted, although a vision of it is seen by Frodo in the Mirror of Galadriel.

Additions 

Film-makers can add scenes to make a film flow better. An addition to Tolkien's main text that critics felt worked well is the incorporation of an appendix, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", as a secondary plot line on the "bittersweet love affair" between a man, one of the heroes of the film, and an immortal Elf. Another major addition is the attack on Aragorn by cavalry Orcs riding wolflike Wargs, leaving him wounded and unconscious. The entire episode is a digression from the main story; Shippey suggested it was inserted to provide more of a role for the beautiful but distant Elf-woman Arwen, who helps to bring Aragorn back to life.

Transformations of structure

Film-makers can transform the structure of a book to clarify the film's action; such transformations may necessitate further changes when story elements are tightly woven together by the plot. Jackson decided to make use of some of the "history" (events long before the main action of The Lord of the Rings, described in the appendices and recalled in dialogue in the Council of Elrond, midway through the first volume) in a dramatic film prologue. It begins with Sauron's forging of the Ring in the Second Age, his overthrow by an alliance of Elves and Men, and the taking of the Ring by Isildur, a distant ancestor of Aragorn. This resolves a major problem for the film-maker in the narrative, namely that Tolkien tells much of the history through "talking heads", reflecting long after the events on what they meant, and violating the basic "show, don't tell" principle of film.

A major structural change was Jackson's decision to abandon Tolkien's interlacing structure (entrelacement) and replace it with a story told in chronological order, with intercutting between characters in different places at the same time. This may make the narrative easier to follow, but it allows the audience to know more than the characters do, undercutting the feeling that choices must be made based on personal courage in the face of incomplete knowledge. One of the scriptwriters, Philippa Boyens, stated that the trilogy was simply their interpretation of the