what if John Boorman had made it??

[fadhatter]

Just rewatched Excalibur and it s so fantastic !!

[Ithrynluin]

The only Boorman film I've seen is The Emerald Forest (http://imdb.com/title/tt0089087/), and that's fantastic, one of my favourite movies, in fact.

[Mike]

Excalibur is indeed a great film, and was made when Boorman lost the chance to make his own Lord of the Rings film.

Somewhere on this forum there is an outline of the screenplay he and Raspo Pallenburg (sic) did for "the Lord of the Rings". It's very, very odd. In an attempt to cram the 1500 page novel in the space of 2 1/2 hours, they discarded many Tolkienian elements and added their own. The finished product barely resembled the novel. But then again, this was the first draft, where every concievable idea is thrown in. I'm sure in subsequent drafts many of these ideas would have been discarded and the the film moved closer to Tolkien.

I just can't get it out of my head how, at the battle of pelennor Fields, when the Riders of Rohan charge, we would hear the Vengelis theme pounding on the soundtrack. It would have been very odd indeed...

And then, of course, there's the special effects. Their original draft cut out flying creatures, ents, etc., leaving only Shelob and the Balrog to the special effects department. For the time, this was probably a wise move.