Time for a quick reality check folks.
Let's make the BIG assumption that the movie(s) eventually gets made in a few years time... There is no way that they will be made as a scene-for-scene, wholly accurate conversion of the books. It just doesn't happen, for a whole host of reasons. Films and books are completely different media that work on completely different levels.
Look at the LOTR conversions, which I thought were excellent. Extra characters added in, entire portions of the books removed, pivotal scenes changed. Did that distract from the overall experience of the films? Not for me. Did I miss Tom Bombadill, or the scouring of the shire? I certasinly didn't miss the scouring, which IMHO was superfluous in the books themselves. Then there was the ordering of events: I may be wrong but I'm sure the part with the mother of all spiders was in TTT, not ROTK.
So why is the general consensus among all but the most die-hard Tolkien fans that the films were a success? There's a list as long as your arm, but I believe that Peter Jackson's vision of Middle Earth was just about as good a portrayal as I could imagine. I'm sure this has all been discussed on other forums, so without going over old ground, here's a basic list of what I believe will be fundamental for a successful conversion LFB, which is true to the SPIRIT of the books. (I'm assuming here that the intention is to film them as separate movies...)
1. TC needs the internal conflict provided by his leprosy, as this is crucial to his unbelief.
2. His unbelief itself - if TC is a "willing" hero in a film conversion, then that would FUNDAMENTALLY alter the nature of the story, rather than changing certain plotting elements.
Anything else will be at the whim and mercy of the screenwriter/director/time constraints/plotting and pacing requirements. All we can hope for is that any conversion is true to the spirit of the books themselves. There's so much narrative and history that would be difficult to incorporate.
We all have our wish-lists of course...heres mine
The opening scene in FOTR was superb: a grand scale, fantastic CGI, which helped to establish the history of Middle Earth. For LFB, instead of an opening shot of a grey, gaunt man walking down a street, I would love to see something similar portraying much of the lands early history. Berek Halfland could be established as a great hero from the past, as well as the old Lords... and imagine a CGI rendition of Foul and Kevin Landwaster initiating the ritual of desecration... we could have so much of the Lands history portrayed, if done properly it could really draw the viewer in to some of the central themes before we even get introduced to TC... the beauty of the land, the dedication of it's servants, the despair of Kevin Landwaster, the despite of Lord Foul...
I'm going to stop now because I'm in danger of rambling and getting away from the point of my own argument... maybe some of this should go in a different thread.
In conclusion... as long as the film sticks to the spirit of the book(s), I think that's all we should expect, otherwise we're heading for a big let-down if our own personal fave scenes are excluded.
Cheers
