The Fellowship of the Ring: Differences Between the Book and the Movie

By the Ranting Critic

I just finished reading Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring for the second time. I was in 8th grade the first time I read it, so the details were really hazy, especially because I did more skimming than reading. Now that I've read it again, I notice some subtle differences between the book and the blockbuster film adaptation (the changes in the film version of The Two Towers were a lot more extreme, but that's another post)
The first big difference that you see between the book and the movie is that there's a nice long twenty years that pass between Bilbo's birthday party and the time that Frodo leaves Hobbiton. You can tell a lot of time passed in the movie,  but that's a detail Peter Jackson forgot to get around to, because Bilbo seems to have aged twenty years while everyone else aged about a year or two. I also noticed that Merry and Pippin aren't quite the troublemakers in the book that they are in the movie. Pippin doesn't even become that important until Frodo leaves the Shire.
Second big difference: In the movie Frodo just leaves Hobbiton, but in the book he sells Bag-End to the Sackville-Bagginses and pretends to move to a town near Buckland. It's not quite as big a difference as the first one, but it would have been nice to know.
The third big difference is one that fans grumble about a lot: the omission of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Downs. The reason I've heard for this omission is that Peter Jackson wanted to increase the tension in the audience by making the Ringwraiths a more constant threat, and the incident with Bombadil's house would compromise that tension. I agree with that, but at the same time the fact that he  didn't include the Barrow-Downs means that they just got swords from...nowhere, really. They just kind of had them. If you remember in the book, they got the swords after Bombadil chased away the Barrow-Wights.
This next difference isn't too important. Remember in the movie how Arwen took Frodo to Rivendell? In the book it was an Elf-lord named Glorfindel.
The Council of Elrond was pretty spot-on in the movie, but the fifth big difference is huge. Like character altering huge. Remember how Aragorn had that whole internal struggle in the movie with whether or not he wanted to take the kingship? He was actually striving to become king in the book. I will admit that that makes his character more boring, but that's how it is.
Anduril (Isildur's sword) was re-forged and given to Aragorn when they left Rivendell in the first book, not in the third one like in the movie.
Arwen's presence in the movie is A LOT stronger than it is in the book. This is probably because most of the female figures in the Trilogy are almost nonexistent. Eowyn isn't as important in The Two Towers, and Sam just kind of marries Rosie when he gets back. She's completely absent from the first book.
After this the differences are a lot smaller. Sam is given a box of seeds from Lorien by Galadriel, they spend more time on the River Anduin (or the Great River), little things like that.
So there it is. The movie's not quite as spot-on as most people are led to believe. But it's still a darn good adaptation of a great book. You'll see a lot more differences that are huge in the second book, which I'll get around to comparing later.
Any thoughts about the movie or book? Share them if you do.

Movie Review- The Avengers (2012)

There has been a lot of buzz about this movie, and for good reason. The Avengers has been anticipated by Marvel fans for four years now since the end credits of Iron Man. 
The Avengers revolves around the Norse God Loki's plot to use the tesseract (that blue cube thingy) to bring an extraterrestrial army from the other end of space to conquer Earth and make all humans subject to Loki's rule, since he can't be king on Asgard. The first half of the movie focuses on the differences between each of the team members and their struggles to find common ground. Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Steve Rogers (Captain America) in particular butt heads a lot, mainly because of the fact that Stark is a narcissistic jerk and Rogers is a selfless hero who puts in everything he's got.
If I told you any more than that, I would spoil most of the movie.
The Good:
I thought that there would be little time for any character development due to the fact that there are six or seven main characters and to the nature of the massive plotline. But there were some serious team-building experiences here, and you could see each of the characters begin to overcome their differences to act as a cohesive unit. The action didn't get too caught up in itself like most movies of this nature; when there was a serious moment one of the characters would often crack a joke that would lighten up the rest of the team and the audience. There were a lot of inside jokes for Marvel geeks like me, and there were also jokes that everyone could understand and laugh at. The special effects were amazing, and the action scenes were definitely action scenes. Not only was the storyline good, but it also improved the rather rushed and poorly done storylines of the movies Thor and Captain America.
The Bad:
The plot was good, but at times it felt a little too much like the plot of Transformers 3, which I hated. The climactic battle scenes of the two movies were very similar, but the one in the Avengers benefited from the jokes that would lighten the mood throughout the sequence. Loki was an okay villain but he could get a bit tedious sometimes, especially with that bratty I am the Rightful King type of attitude that he always had. The director also had a minor case of redshirt syndrome, I think.
The Rating:
The Avengers gets 4.25 stars. The bad was bad, but not bad enough to subtract too much from the overall awesomeness of the movie. Definitely worth the four years it took to get it out there. Highly recommended, and well worth the wait.
After you finish watching the movie, stay after the credits. Not just the first line of credits, but the second one as well. Don't ask why. Just do it.

Book Review- Shadow Ops: Control Point by Myke Cole (2012)

Shadow Ops: Control Point is the debut novel of Myke Cole; a former soldier and government civilian that served something like three tours in Iraq. Ace, the publisher, decided to publish this book in mass market paperback (the small kind) only.
Control Point starts off at the beginning of a mission to take down a couple of kids that have manifested illegal magical talents and are destroying a public high school. The main character, Oscar Britton, is one of the men involved in this assault and is having second thoughts about using the full might of the military to take down two high school aged kids. The night after the mission he manifests an illegal magical talent himself and is forced to go on the run. But unfortunately, this guy is no Jason Bourne. He has no idea what he's doing and ends up killing several people before being caught by the military. He wakes up in a secret facility, where he is told that his crimes have been pardoned by the president under the condition that he will use his magic and become a mercenary under the orders of the government.
I can't tell you much more without giving it away, but I will tell you that he is taken to a magical world where little creatures the military calls goblins rule, and where the U.S. Army is fighting to take control. The problem is that goblins manifest magical skills twice as much as humans, and they are greater and more numerous than the Americans stationed there. The conflict of the novel focuses primarily on Britton's struggles and doubts about whether or not he should be a killing machine for the government.
The Good:
Oscar Britton is a very human character, and he is supported by several other well done characters. You can tell from the first page of the book that Myke Cole knows a thing or two from his long service in the military. The battle scenes are very well done, full of action but never to the point where you begin to get annoyed. He integrates magic into the combat scenes very well. The thing I really liked about the combat scenes is that people actually die. He doesn't just kill redshirts, he kills people you've come to know and even like. That's something you don't always see in a book like this. You can feel the friendship between Britton and his fellow teammates growing throughout the book, and the villains aren't blindly evil. They have reasons behind their motives, and sometimes those are very good reasons.
The Bad:
Oscar Britton was human, but sometimes he's TOO human. His flaws were easy to see, and sometimes they got annoying. I liked that he questioned the motives of his leaders instead of being a mindless soldier, but it got annoying sometimes that he questioned every order he got. He can't seem to get over the fact that his job  in the Shadow Coven involves killing people under orders, even though before that he was in the military before that. Killing under orders is pretty much the main idea of the military, isn't it?
The thing that really irritated me is that the relationship between him and Theresa, an attractive woman with healing talents to boot, never really developed. It was just kind of there. Cole could have done a better job on that, I think.
Honestly, the doubts and unwillingness of Britton to kill under orders didn't bug me a ton. I can understand why he tried to avoid killing people. It's just that he questioned it SO MUCH.
Overall, it was a very well-done thrill ride. A book like this would make a very good military urban fantasy action movie. The pace was fast but not so fast that you couldn't keep up.
The Rating:
This book gets three and a half stars. It was good, but I felt that the negative elements dragged it down a little bit. All things considered, it was pretty good for a debut novel.
Before you go and read it, I have to warn you that the military men really talk like they're in the military. If you're younger than sixteen or seventeen, the language might be a little heavy.

Book Review- Vodnik by Bryce Moore (2012)

Here it is. The review that many of you have been waiting for since January.
Since I already gave you a summary of the book in my earlier post Vodnik (Upcoming Novel), I think I'll skip right down to what I thought of the book that I've been hearing about on and off for the past six months.
I've read books by authors that try to be funny and fail, but Bryce Moore does it almost without any effort. Tomas, the main character, watched movies constantly before moving to Slovakia, so some movie quotes are expected. The characterization was very well done, I found myself caring for almost all of the characters in the book without noticing. He makes you feel like you are a part of these character's lives, which is something that only a few other authors I've read have been able to successfully do.
I knew there was going to be some racism in this book, but I didn't expect it to get quite to the level that it did in Vodnik. What makes me sad isn't that the racism in the book is so heavy, but that that's actually how they treat Roma (Gypsies) in Slovakia. Tomas struggles against the sudden hatred that he didn't encounter back in the States.
The other thing I didn't expect is the level of complexity in this book. Tomas was juggling four or five different problems throughout the plot, but Bryce Moore wraps them all up nicely in the end without getting tongue-tied like other authors that try the same thing.
The villain, called by the characters The Vodnik, is the most interesting character out of all of them. I'll try not to give any spoilers, but the Vodnik is a mischievous water spirit that drowns children in Slovak folklore. He's friendly, but at the same time he's demanding and violent. He isn't evil because of some deep-seated psychological hatred, that's just the way he is.
Before I continue on to rate the book, I've got to explain how I'm going to rate books from now on. Before I used a sort of grade-percentage type system, but to make things easier I think I'll go to the standard five-star rating system used by pretty much everybody else. I'll keep giving it a grade, but the percentage is gone.
Considering all of the elements mentioned above, along with the quality of the writing (which was quite good), Vodnik is easily four stars, probably closer to four and a half. That's a B+ for you people that liked the old grading system (if there were any).
Very good, especially for a first novel. Highly recommended.

Book Review- The King Beyond the Gate by David Gemmell (1985)

It's been a while since I did a book review, so I think I'll talk about David Gemmell's 1986 fantasy novel The King Beyond the Gate, which I just finished about a week ago.
I was a little disappointed by this book's predecessor, the renowned Legend. I expected it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, as most of the other people that read it thought. It was okay, but my expectations were a little too high.
Anyway, The King Beyond the Gate is the sequel to Legend. It has been many years since the first book, and the Drenai Empire has been taken over by a cruel tyrant. Teneka Khan, the result of a political union between descendants of the heroic Earl of Bronze and his sworn enemy Ulric the Nadir warlord, must gather an army to take down the evil king and his army of Joinings, half-man, half-beast monsters that are quicker and stronger than ten men.
I don't really have a lot to say about this book. It was pretty good, but it wasn't great. It was a book that fits under the category I like to call Popcorn Reading. It was very entertaining, but it didn't have much else besides that. It was like eating a pork chop compared to eating a steak.
And that's pretty much all I have to say about it. The characterization was pretty good, and the plot was typical heroic fantasy. There isn't much in this book to give a Rant about.

Vodnik Preview Chapters

Bryce Moore has put up the first several chapters of his novel Vodnik on the internet for people to read before its release later this month. You can read the chapters here at http://www.scribd.com/doc/83955152/Vodnik.
I read most of it, and it's pretty good. Definitely worth a few minutes to check out

Book Review- Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson (2012)

If you've made it this far into the Dune series, then you should get an award. This is book number 17 in the Dune universe, and number 11 by the original author's son Brian and coauthor Kevin Anderson.
Sisterhood of Dune is the first book of the planned Schools of Dune Trilogy. It follows the schools of the Mentats, the Bene Gesseritt, and the Suk Doctors eighty years after the end of the Butlerian Jihad.
Instead of dying out after the destruction of Omnius and his Thinking Machine empire, the Butlerian movement has grown stronger, turning to the mechanical conveniences of man. As the Butlerian leader Manford Torondo grows stronger in the Imperium, Mentat leader Gilbertus Albans and Reverend Mother Raqquella struggle to conceal dark secrets from their pasts.
But that isn't all. After watching his family get kidnapped by slavers, Vorian Atreides returns to the public to protect his home on the planet Kepler. After being forced to leave his home to protect his family, Vorian goes to the planet Arrakis to try and talk to the Freemen, or the Fremen. After seeing him on Salusa Secundus, Abulurd Harkonnen's great-grandchildren hunt him so they can avenge Abulurd and his grandfather Xavier. What's more, the Titan Agammemnon's two other children have woken up, and are hunting Vorian Atreides as well.
This book, like most of the other Dune books, had a thing or two to say about the balance between caution and extremism. It wasn't anything that  hadn't been said before, whether in the previous Dune trilogy or in Frank Herbert's original series.
The worst I have to say about it is that it was a boring waste of five hundred pages. Like the two previous Brian Dune novels Paul of Dune and The Winds of Dune, it felt unjustified, like there wasn't any reason for it to be written anyway. It switched viewpoints way too much, so it was hard to tell sometimes which character was doing what. And there were too many characters to switch between, as well. It was like a Wheel of Time book on steroids.
If you're a diehard Dune fan, this may or may not be good, depending on whether or not you like Brian Herbert's books. If you don't, than you'll hate this book. For those who've only read the original  Dune chronicles, it won't matter to you if you read this or not.
50%, and that's being generous