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Ars: Final Hobbit Movie Is 'Soulless End' To 'Flawed' Trilogy
An anonymous reader writes: The final chapter to Peter Jackson's series of films based on The Hobbit debuted last week, and the reviews haven't been kind. Ars Technica just posted theirs, and it highlights all the problems with Battle of the Five Armies, a two-hour and twenty-four minute film based on only 72 pages of the book. Quoting: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience. Suspense is attempted mostly by a series of last-minute saves and switches. ... There are other problems. Everyone in this movie takes themselves way too seriously, which makes them even harder to sympathize with. Peter Jackson leans way too hard on voice modulation to make characters seem menacing or powerful. The movie's tone is still way out of step with the book's tone. ... There's one big thing that doomed these movies from the outset — the fiscally smart but artistically bankrupt decision to make a single, shortish children's novel into three feature-length prequel films." Other review titles: "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped," "The Phantom Menace of Middle Earth," and "Lots of Fighting, Not Much Hobbit."
I disliked hobbit movies before it was cool.
I'm not going to see Age of Ultron either.
I appreciated the use of Appendix material but that could have kept the movies at a cool two - three was just unneeded bloat. It's similar to how the Star Wars prequels could be edited down to one or two actually decent movies - but there's just so much padding that gestures at having a deep setting without that setting really existing. It's superficial.
part 1 was pretty bad and part 2 even worse. i feel pretty ashamed for having paid money for those two - and having encouraged bad, soulless, moneygrabbing filmmaking by that. sorry.
I hate the way my friends' HDTVs make movies look like soap operas. I hated the last Hobbit which I saw in HFR/HD and the "look" completely ruined the film for me. The lighting used stood out like a sore thumb from the live action characters vs. the CG, the movement of the CG itself was horrible in many scenes.
And this film was no different. Ugh.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Seems Gollum was right...
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Three stars in the Observer and four stars in the Guardian.
I'll still be going to watch it with friends between Christmas and the New Year.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
It was dry, but not BAD like Phantom Menace. Phantom Menace was horrendous on numerous levels and, if taken seriously, reduces the quality of the previous movies. This LOTR prequel finally was dry, unless you have some reason to be emotionally invested in the characters because of the book. But it was not a BAD movie, it was not poorly acted, it was not poorly written, and while it could have done with more meaning when it came to the acton (and I personally hate action) every last bit of the film-shooting and editing was done as spectacularly as can be done in a film.
This was not a BAD movie; it just wasn't the movie it could have been. And honestly, you'll never please the fan-boys anyway.
Where's a good threat when you need one?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Movies are about the visuals. That's why a good director means more than a good screen writer. The better the visual, the more time on screen. All movies need an inciting incident, an escalation, then a crisis and resolution. You can easily do a fantastic movie without much dialogue or voiceovers. In fact, the best way to do dialogue and voice overs is to let a good actor improvise. Works better than having the screenwriter do it - who should be creating potentially amazing scenes.
Books are about the dialogue and thoughts of the character. You can delve deep into their motivations and what they say. But book visuals are all in the mind of the reader. If a book has really good descriptions, it doesn't matter that much. But good words - said and thought by the characters, that makes the book.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Dear Peter Jackson,
You and I have journeyed far together. You brought Frodo's task to destroy the One Ring to life a mere decade ago, and with such verve and respect that myself and the world over could not turn a blind eye and fail to hail such an inspiring, thrilling, and (mostly) faithful adaptation. In those days it was clear your appreciation and understanding of Tolkien's most beloved work was paramount, and although some liberties were taken to accommodate the film medium, those liberties could be mostly forgiven in the wake of such illuminating entertainment.
Today is a far different day, and the lens I view your Middle Earth through now is not the same as when all was good and new. Time appears to have jaded your approach to the wonders of Middle Earth.
While some berated An Unexpected Journey for being slow, plodding, and somewhat uneventful, it still held much of the magic of yesteryear. Many great moments were found, and liberties, though present, were for the most part welcomed. Perhaps some moments in this first leg of the journey were a portent of what was to come, with Dwarves and Hobbit alike being immune to falling rocks, and Goblin Kings being so inept and vulnerable to attack by an aging wizard that one slice of a sword offers a silly comedic moment and death with little true peril. I held out hope here, however, as Thorin truly suffers in the mouth of Azog's Albino Warg.
Desolation of Smaug, in its extended cut, also held moments of magic, though it fell victim to much of the same shortcomings, peril-wise, as An Unexpected Journey. While there were some true moments of dread, found in Mirkwood and Smaug's Lair, there were moments of silly nonsense, particularly in the Forge of Erebor with an ineffectual dragon, but also with liberties taken by unnecessary fabricated characters such as Tauriel, cheapening elvish magic and Arwen's importance in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I still held out hope, even in this, because in the extended cut you brought us a better sense of pacing, more interactions with actual book characters such as Beorn and Thrain, and I couldn't help but hope you would do the rest of the book justice with proper emotional heft to go along with the bloody conflict that was soon to shake Middle Earth after its long peace.
After such a long journey, traveling through mountain, forest, valley, river, lake, and town, there were but some small matters to wrap up. A dragon threatened a town on the water. Armies of all manner awaited the opportunity to strike at Erebor should the threat of the dragon be eliminated. The characters we have traveled with required proper sendoff and emotional moments.
Certainly, the dragon threatens Laketown, burning and pillaging at whim. However, the witty, sadistic dragon I had hoped for instead functioned more as a flamethrower than a character. To this end, could Smaug not have tormented the denizens of Laketown a bit before reducing it to cinders and ash? A simple "Flee, flee for your lives! I will find you no matter where you hide and devour you as sheep." would have been very effective.
Certainly, the hero destroys the dragon, though in perhaps the most ridiculous way possible and within just a few moments. Smaug is further cheapened as a complete imbecile, ignoring the fact that the one weapon that CAN pierce his hide is pointed at him (and don't say he doesn't know what it is, because he had many of them fired at him the last time men had strength).
Certainly, Dol Goldur falls, but why does Galadriel appear so weak at particular moments throughout? It feels rather convenient that she falls to the ground weakened while the men (including the aged Saruman) fight it out amongst the Nazgul. While she may cast out Sauron from Dol Goldur, her appearance here felt very highly inconsistent, cycling between frail elf maiden and "beautiful and terrible as the dawn" elf queen.
A few more scenes before Kili and co. arrive from Laketown's ruins would have been nice, showing Thorin beginning the descent into
Before anybody points it out - all of the post below is anecdote - usual caveats apply.
A friend of mine is a teacher - he generally works with the 10-11 age-range (which in the UK at least, is unusual for a male teacher). This is, as is documented in any number of official and unofficial studies, a particularly critical year in the education of boys; it's when many of them start to fall behind the girls in their year group in academic terms (not catching up until the 18-21 age range). The individuals who start falling behind at this point generally never catch up.
Now, just a few weeks ago, and spurred by the impending release of this movie, I had a long conversation with said friend about childhood literacy, academic achievement and the Hobbit.
See, his view is that the big problem with the UK education system and boys is that they lose all interest in reading for pleasure right around that 10-11 age range. This is, in part, because the generally approved reading materials in schools have a heavy female tilt (lots of teddy bears and thinking about feelings, not so much on the swords, dragons and robots), but there's not actually a mandatory reading list at this age and teachers (if they're willing to stand up to the senior management in their school if needed) have quite a lot of leeway.
And his big antidote to "losing" boys at this age has, for close to a decade now, been "The Hobbit". Indeed, he's of the view that it's one of the finest children's books ever written; short enough not to be off-putting, gripping pretty much from the first page and written with an authorial voice that strikes a good balance between not being condescending and not being too advanced for the age-range in question. It is also a damned exciting story, with wizards, dragons, goblins and magic rings. The girls don't hate it and the boys absolutely lap it up.
So from his point of view, the movies have been a bit of a disaster. He'd been hoping for something he could take classes along to. Instead, the movies, are dark, brooding, serious, dark and extremely violent in places. They're absolutely not suitable for the age range the book is pitched at and, in any case, they miss the fundamental quality of what makes the book so great.
It's not a disaster for him - the book is still there and always will be there. But his view was that it was a missed opportunity to give the "best children's book ever written" a proper adaptation.
I've not read The Hobbit for many years myself, but this does chime with my own memory of it.
the first one was meh and when i saw some stupid jumping sequence that looked like a tie in to video game merchandising in the second one i never bothered to watch it, definitely don't the slightest shit about the third one. say...speaking of shitty fantasy trilogies i thought that shit with the blue aliens was supposed to be a trilogy? whatever happened? i guess the merchandising and bluray sales didn't really hit expectations for a new sci-fi property/brand?
I love The Hobbit! Boycott Ars! Who has the list of women MovieGate should harass?
Dude! Get back on your meds, man!
... a movie version of The Last Ringbearer? Though perhaps by a Russian director this time.
I would like to see some mix o these three movies into one - closely related to Tolkien's novel.
in the battle of five armies. WOW what a BORING movie! This is the first and LAST of the Hobit movies we will go see. Good thing we saw it on $5 Tuesdays, I would have hated to have wasted full price on this movie.
The Truth is a Virus!!!
...is that enough people will pay to see them to make them look like a good idea. CGI shiny all over, not a hint of story.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
20 parts but a darn good nap.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion
The reviewers hated it?
Whine because it's not like the book?
Another stinker?
From what I've seen of the others movies in comparison to what the reviewers and Hobbit Fans think, I'm actually excited now.
And as for me not being a Hobbit fan?
Fuck all y'all. It was the first novel I read, have a copy of it when I was 5.
Now get over yourselves and just enjoy the movie.
From the summary: "The battles in Battle of the Five Armies are deadly boring, bereft of suspense, excessively padded, and predictable to the point of being contemptuous of the audience."
That pretty much describes all 3 movies to a Tee.
The original story was a books for childs that started with "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" and kept being childish most of the way. This movie? "Die Hard: Dwarfs edition", deserving a PG-13 or R rating for violence and mass slaughtering. It was like watching the porn version of Cindirella. The basic elements were there, but is not the same.
Anyway, may worth to see the CGI work.
I wonder if they'll try to make The Silmarillion next?
If you're even a mild Tolkien fan it is worth seeing.
Visually it is quite stunning.
However, with that being said, can the three PJ Hobbit films, taken as a whole, be considered absolute and unadulterated crap?
Well of course.
The first one was just lame and way too long.
The second one sucked bigtime and was way too long.
The third one isn't bad, and was way too long.
At the beginning of the third one is a scene where the members of the White Council show up to find out why Gandalf has been at Dol Guldur so long... It is wayyy videogamed out, but actually kind of a cool scene.
I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and when I see these I have to assume I'm watching someone play a game...
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Peter left Bad Taste in my mouth with this movie. It was Braindead idea to begin with.
After return of the king - I never considered the movies Tolkien - It is Christmas, so I will be kind and say they are lovely bits of Fantasy better than the normal crap that goes direct to video.
Boxing day: I think it would be nice to get some Canadian Syrup and cover the screen writers who destroyed Tolkien's works and Peter Jackson down in a South American forest over night. Setting up a chain link fence to keep the Jaguar's out but allow them to be slowly eaten by the insects of the jungle..
Still - not as a bad as Enders Game or Starship Troopers..
OH wait it's almost Christmas.... ...
Merry Christmas everyone (your offended by that tough move to Mecca)
If history doth repeat itself, then we will see a tightly cut single movie version of Jackson's Hobbit as soon as amateur film makers can get a good digital copy of all three films. Anyone who saw the Star War's prequels refactored into well paced and well cut movies knows that compressing three Hobbits back into the original book will be a treat. There is plenty to take out, good acting, and with skill the story can be made right again.
F=ma
But Phantom Menace bad? Nowhere close.
The Rankin & Bass animated Hobbit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... is truer to the source material than this bloated mess.
Peter Jackson ripped the soul out of Lord of the Rings when he neglected to film The Scouring of the Shire. No one who loves Tolkien expected anything better this go-around.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
Enjoy what? The never ending CG fight that doesn't seem to go anywhere? Tauriel being a good little damsel straight from Peter Jackson's imagination?
Forget there's a book at all, the movie is just plain bad. It's probably alright for the Transformers crowd, they love endless CG with no particular point.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Rabid fans of the movies, vs "Peter Jackson is satan incarnate and must be stopped". The latter is left over from print-fan memes during the original run of LotR, who would hate the movie no matter what he did, not because it's a movie, but because it's not the book. Print fans come in all shapes and sizes, and have all sorts of justifications for their views. I find it interesting that, back in the day, of the print fans that believed Lord of the Rings should be made into a movie, it was generally believed that only a 20 hour miniseries would be enough, in order to capture every scene and every song and poem, and the elves should be CGI because people weren't beautiful enough, and today we have print fans that are saying that three movies was too long. What the hell make up your mind.
Then there are the print fans who would be absolutely against any film, generally justified as "it substitutes Jackson's imagery for the reader's own" or somesuch, and from there leads to a place of madness, where calendars, posters and even cover art are forbidden, and the only way to read the stories should be on loose leaf paper from Tolkien's own typewriter.
I digress. Anyway, for those who need a more faithful light hearted Hobbit, there's still the Rankin-Bass film from 1977. They even set some of Tolkien's poems to whiney music sung by people with terrible singing voices, so, like, cool. It made me want to gouge my eyeballs out and use them to plug my ears, but your mileage may vary.
As to whether any or all of the Hobbit films are the best films ever or a travesty that requires that the director be tarred and feathered and ridden out on a Grond, the actual truth is somewhere in the middle. Yes, three movies were probably excessive. No, one movie would not have done it. This is because it's not a matter of just telling the story in The Hobbit's measly 300 pages, but also giving the backstory that was in the appendicies to LotR (to which Jackson had the rights) and maybe approaching what might be a full telling of The Quest of Erebor, the story Tolkien later started to write, essentially re-writing The Hobbit to better fit into the tone and pagentry of Lord of the Rings. (Published posthumously by his son Christopher in Unfinished Tales.) Unfortunately, Jackson did not have access to Tolkien's writings other than what was in the appendicies and The Hobbit, and Christopher Tolkien absolutely refused Jackson the rights to Tolkien's other notes. So in order to make it fit with Lord of the Rings, Jackson had to make some of it up in order to not be sued by the Tolkien estate.
So, did he make stuff up that Tolkien didn't write? Of course he did. Did he make up *too much* stuff? Maybe. Did he put in too much filler? Yeah, probably. Should he have kept it to one movie and only filmed what was in The Hobbit? Absolutely not. There is more story there, (Specifically, why Gandalf felt Erebor was so important to the coming war) and Jackson told as much of it as he was allowed to. Three films *was* excessive, but to say it shouldn't be filmed because it wasn't in The Hobbit is to show ignorance about all the backstory and detail surrounding the Quest of Erebor that wasn't in what was essentially a children's book. And besides, The Hobbit was already filmed, in 1977. (I didn't like it much. It made my teeth hurt.)
Footnote, after all these years, having read the novels multiple times, once to my daughter before the films first came out, I just recently had an in-story epiphany. It always seemed curious and whimsical that Gandalf was so adamant about Bilbo being included in the quest. But think -- that simple decision set in motion a chain of events that after many years leads to the destruction of the One Ring -- something that probably could not have happened otherwise. How did Gandalf know?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The original idea for The Hobbit was to make two movies. Then Hollywood executives got involved and the third movie was invented. With it came the need to invent new stuff to fill all the extra time, and most of it is garbage.
If you trim it back down to two movies, there is enough content to make a good pair of movies. Instead, what we got was Peter Jackson's attempt to make The Lord Of The Rings II, occasionally featuring a hobbit.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The Hobbit is often put out as a "children's book" but it's more than that and told more tightly than the sprawling LOTR. That's why the kids like it, it looks simple enough, but more hides in there. As for the female tilt of books taught in most schools note that male teachers are a minority and teachers will pick books they found fun to study and build lectures around.
I don't see how you can claim the Lotro movie was faithful. I love the movies but is missing far to much to be faithful. They failed to mention there was a 20-30 year gap between Gandalf telling Frodo to keep the ring secret and his return during which he searched for gollum and he had people protecting the shire and that Frodo was ~60 yrs old when he left the shire. They skipped the entire section of the book for when they left the shire and went into the forest/graveyard. They changed the story on the reforging of the sword. They killed Sarumon before the final battle and completely cut out the battle of the shire. There were quite a few other differences as well but I last read the book 10 years ago so some details are faded.
...but I can't recall for sure whether or not I even saw the second one. I think from that you can estimate my level of enthusiasm for seeing the third one.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
If the movies were enjoyable, I might, but they suck on their own terms as well as adaptations of a much beloved book.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I watched the first hobbit movie on an overnight flight from Toronto to Paris. It was the best stretch of sleep that I had on the whole flight. I caught bits and pieces of it, but the ridiculously over-long fighting and chase sequences soon put me back to sleep.
I have no desire to watch the other two, unless I need to take another red-eye.
Of course I found the LOTR movies dreadfully dull as well, and I've read the books dozens of times.
------- Mark
Who makes these particular reviews and what other reviews on other movies have they made?
There are alot of hollywood asslickers who are intrenched in the usual hollywood mindrot which gets their salaries paid.
You apparently didn't have to sit out the 320 minutes Director's Cut version!
Consider yourself lucky!
I stopped being a purist about such things long ago. I found it helped me to enjoy movies as their own story, loosely based on the book. I started watching GoT and made the conscious decision to stay one book behind the series, which has made a huge difference. I find I'm able to enjoy the show and appreciate the additional details and plot point differences in the books.
Same with comic book movies. Of course, comics have so many different origin story lines, it might be easier. When it comes to Star Wars however, I am an original trilogy theatrical release purist. Han shot first!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...or in this case, it might as well be called the fan un-edit. I will definitely have a copy of all the movies... but will be one of the first to download a fan edit that is closer to the original story. Hopefully there is enough material in there to repair it. (First thing that comes to mind is the barrel amusement park ride.) If we are in luck, Peter captured a lot of extra footage that could be used from the extras. I still see it big enough for two movies.
When I saw how much weight he lost and how much more dignified he looked since LOTR, my hopes for the Hobbit movies fell drastically.
I watched LOTR (all three films, extra length) and really enjoyed them. I hadn't read LOTR, but was always curious. I remember Peter Jackson's story prior to commencing LOTR: "No one wanted to make three films. They wanted to condense everything into a 1 hour or maybe a 90 minute film." He was about to give up the film rights, but made a last gasp attempt at New Line (mostly known up to then as a film distributor, rather than a film production company). He told them his ideas, showed the CGI and hoped for two 90 minute films. The head of New Line told him: "There are three books aren't there? Why don't we make three?" And it was like a kid at Christmas getting every he asked for three times over. And so he made three 2.5+ hour films. But I remember my grade 6 teacher (1976) reading the Hobbit to the class. And I enjoyed it. Everyone did. And now Peter Jackson has turned it into LOTR. And just as it was dumb to turn 3 books into one movie, its even more dumb to turn 1 book into 3 movies. And Peter Jackson did. And the Tolkien society has a valid right to beef and complain. And so do I and everyone else. Turning literature into padding is just dumb, and offensive to the art. And Jackson should have known better. And I think he did, and either caved to others, or got greedy. Either way, the whole series is a waste. Until someone pulls out a cutter and slices all 3 supersized pieces of crap into one elegant sized film, I pass.
It wasn't so bad, overall... but they should have made the series two movies, at most. There was significant filler.
...Steve
That's like watching a Godzilla movie and complaining that it has an anti-nuclear message.
I haven't seen any of the Hobbit movies in full yet, but I know to expect an action movie.
I wonder what this reviewer thinks of the SuperMoses movie? Put off by too much action hero stuff in action hero movies?
Three movie review stories on the front page.
Plenty of other techy stuff that could be advert^W^Wtalked about.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I see a lot of movies, but I disliked the last Hobbit movie enough that I have no interest in seeing this one.
Even in Middle Earth. This can't be classed as a problem with the movies, the issue exists in the source material as well.
Throughout both The LoTR and The Hobbit, the heroes are mostly invincible. Aragorn and the Nazgul on Weathertop, the Mines of Moria, the Orcs at Amon Hen, Gimli and Legolas at Helm's Deep, and so on and so on.
Even Boromir was nigh-on unkillable at Amon Hen and only died because Tolkien needed him to. The book has him "pierced by many arrows" and the heroes there had a kill-ratio of at least 10-1. More if you discount the hobbits.
If anything, the kill-ratios were lowered for the movies. Read the LOTR Wikia entry for Amon Hen http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Skirmish_at_Amon_Hen for a comparison.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
Bilbo and Frodo were both 50 when they started their adventures. Peter Jackson is a tool and a true hollywood stooge. Tolkein would have shit himself over the treatment of his works. He actually had to correct editors several times trying to correct what they percieved as mistakes. Tolkein had a very detailed picture of what he wanted to portray and Jackson may as well have gone and shit on his grave for all these movies are worth.
You'd get a 3.5 hour musical directed by Baz Luhrmann that rivals Pricilla Queen of the Desert in campness.
I was hoping that the trilogy could be rescued by a fan-edit. But now I don't.
The Hobbit is completely devoid of suspense (haven't seen Part 3 and will wait for DVD). Compare with FotR:
Opening story with Sauron kicking ass.
The early scene where Frodo and the hobbits nearly get discovered by a Dark Rider. Probably the best scene of the trilogy, with visually-distorting magic and insects freaking out if you weren't convinced yet.
Weathertop, not one of the better scenes but still great.
Arwen rescuing Frodo. First deviation from book but probably made it a better film (unlike deviations in later 2 films).
Moria scenes: just amazing.
To be frank, FotR was vastly better than the subsequent two, which relied on large battles for thrills. I'm going to guess that Jackson had some help with FotR... and thank God. It's become one of the best films of all time.
Now the Hobbit had nothing like that, maybe because of child audience potential but also because of the other big flaw: none of the dwarves are convincing bar possibly Thorin. They don't look right and don't act great either.
Maybe keep the sections focussing on Bilbo, Gandalf, Radagast, Smaug, bits of Thorin and turn it into an hour long prelude to LotR. Yep, cut 80-90% of it.
There's a lovely quote from Bilbo in the first lord of the rings movie
"I feel... thin. Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread."
which I feel describes the Hobbit trilogy perfectly.
I've seen the first two so far and they didn't convince me for the 3rd. I'll probably go because my GF wants to.
The problem is that The Hobbit is an entirely different book compared to LOTR. It's a childrens book, a soft introduction to Middle Earth, not an epic fantasy tale. It should've been dealt with in a different way, not as a "we made a shitload of money, so let's make more LOTR movies" prequel. It basically fell into the same trap as the Star Wars prequels - the attempt to replicate a success by doing more of the same, completely missing the idea that maybe the first was a success exactly because it was not more of the same, but stood out from what else was on offer at the time.
And omg were they filled with crap that had nothing to do with story or book and was only added to complete some Hollywood recipe.
They should've made it one move, for a younger audience, made by a different director, without trying to make it a prequel and "foreshadowing" everything we've already seen.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What? Grown men find a movie written for boys ages 6 to 12 shallow? You don't say...
I took my son to it yesterday.... he spent the rest of the afternoon riding our Dog around like a warg and chopping at lego dwarves. I think the movie had the effect it intended.
Director's Edition will be the compilation REMOVING all the boring parts, presenting a 3.5 hours movie.
Was Hobbit perfect? No, of course not. However, it could have been much, much worse. I'll point you to the epic ruination of Starship Troopers or the somewhat lesser mangling of Ender's Game or the utter crap fest of Battlefield Earth (strip out the thinly disguised Scientology elements and you still have the bones of a good story). These are books I grew up with and I felt real excitement knowing they would finally be movies... Then I saw the movies...
For all the purists that think every line of dialog should be preserved to properly honor J.R.R. I'd like to mention Dune. I've worn out copies of this book. I've got just about every version available of the David Lynch movie. However, I said for a long time that I wish that movie had more from the book and was more faithful. Then I got the Dune mini-series on SciFi channel. It was chock full of hours and hours of dialog. You know what? I can't stand it, it's just boring. Books and movies are different media and just blindly spamming straight from the book does not make an engaging movie.
Had Peter Jackson made the LOTR movie purists wanted, it would have flopped and you wouldn't have gotten The Hobbit at all. Had he made the first Hobbit movie the way purists wanted, we might not have gotten the end of the story (see Battlefield Earth, it's abysmal failure doomed the second movie intended to actually finish the story).
Hey, if you don't like the movies, that's fine. Everyone gets an opinion. However, given the Hollywood track record with adaptations of Sci-Fi/Fantasy, and the need for them to make movies with as broad of an appeal as possible, I think that we actually got far better than we could have expected...
Tolkien wrote the Hobbit for small children. Twee in tone - the dwarves had green, and yellow, and blue beards, for instance. In his short piece, A Meeting in Erebor (adapted into the movie!), he had Gandalf and Aragorn meet at the Pony, I think, and they discussed dark and grave matters in an adult tone, setting the Hobbit events up for the LOTR. Had Tolkien not had a day job, he'd probably had rewritten the Hobbit to bring in in line with the LOTR and the older stories.
Jackson had the appendices of the LOTR to work with, but nothing else from the Simarillion or Untold Tales, because the Tolkien estate doesn't like what he did. Perhaps that was shooting themselves in their own feet, as he had little story material and so had to make up filler.
Do recall that the Hobbit, as a story, is rather thin.
I'm holding out for the 4-movie 16-hour extended-trilogy version of Farmer Giles of Ham and the first part of Leaf by Niggle: An Unwanted Journey.
That, or if I do watch Hobbit 3, I'll need some good pipeweed first.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Uhhh...wow. This movie was a great ending to the trilogy. It really captured the characters from the books, even if they did get a bit liberal with additions to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed it, moreso than even the Lord of the Rings (which cut out far more than I'd have liked, and didn't have the correct scale for battles, landscapes and such).
Green screen extravaganzas aimed specifically at the ADHD generation that needs five minutes of action for every three seconds of dialog. LOTR it ain't.
Tauriel being a good little damsel straight from Peter Jackson's imagination?
While Tauriel doesn't seem to have a point besides speaking the most banal of lines... most people who read the Hobbit later in life and aren't used to its eccentricities will reach a moment when they realize "wait a minute. I've read a few hundred pages and I don't think I've even heard a mention of a female, even in passing. Hey, all these characters are single dudes, do woman even exist in Middle Earth?"
Dude, you've been listening to Christopher Tolkien too much. He's far more purist and hardcore than his father was.
There were enough tells in the first movie that I decided to skip both prequel sequels. My only regret concerns the movie not made.
The problem when you have a strong emotional investment in something is that one's instinct is to give it one more chance. By the time you've watched two bad movies, you're almost pot-committed to watch the third.
It takes a special will to abandon a franchise without falling into the emotional mulligan trap, and so there's ultimately little incentive for Jackson to not do what he did.
I'm slowly learning. My loyalty function has now evolved to where it's almost vertiginous.
that in a free market, success is the indicator of talent and/or competence.
YOU may think it's cool to plunge into the group-think of Jackson-hate, but your baseless assertion that "Jackson has so little talent as a director..." only exposes you as a troll. His supposed lack of talent employed an army of people who were probably quite happy to have jobs, and packed theaters world-wide with audiences who went and handed over their cash by their own free will (unlike some crap like Obamacare where people are FORCED by law to buy the product) to see his supposed lack of talent. Jackson's asserted incompetence produced BILLIONS of dollars of economic activity .... just how much money did YOU generate in mommy's basement?
Peter Jackson did NOT ruin ANYTHING. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit books are completely unchanged and anybody is free to go buy them and read them. The theaters in which his interpretations of these books aired are completely undamaged and will be showing plenty of films in the future. Given the fact that Peter made HIS films HIS way, you certainly cannot rationally assert that he "ruined" the films either ... they are the way he made them. You CAN assert that YOU would have made better versions if you had had the opportunity and resources (though you certainly cannot prove that) and you CAN say you dislike choices he made, but there is no way you can legitimately claim that Peter Jackson "ruined" ANYTHING; doing so makes about as much sense as Jackson saying that YOU "ruined" cinema or his films by your poor performance as an audience member.
All this anti-Hobbit film carping reminds me of the disco era. Back then, nearly everybody in the pop culture was playing disco music, wearing polyester shirts and bell-bottom pants, and dancing under mirror balls. Then one day a rebellion started against disco and suddenly all those airheaded idiots who'd been completely soaked in disco were all pretending they'd always hated it.... it had become "cool" to hate disco. All the records had to be smashed, the polyester tossed into the Goodwill bins, abd the nmirrorballs taken down. The whole thing was supremely dishonest and superficial with most participants never having been interesting in the actual artistic or fashion merits either during the rise OR during the fall of the thing. The Hobbit films are what they are. They can be discussed on the mertits with no need for the fashionable Jackson-hate. I assert that these are the best motion picture versions of these books ever to be made and whether or not they approach perfection, nobody will do a better job in my lifetime. Any hater is free to do better. Put up or shut up, the words of critice who never do anything better that what they criticize are without any redeeming value.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Teddy Roosevelt
Tolkein was WRITING stories for the printed page. Most stories written for print are not well structured for film, and authors are infamous in some circles for their breathtaking ability to seriously imagine (and then commit to print) things which would be quite unbuildable, disproportioned, structurally unsound, etc. and the average author is NOT writing his novel with a view to how each character and story locale will look in 70mm, what character actions and locations will look "right", maintain a required "pacing", keep "key demos" (like teenage girls) sufficiently entertained, etc. An author can describe a group of characters in a particular place grouped together in some way and it all can read well on the page, but look insanely stupid when committed to film; authors are NOT directors or cinematographers. None of us (including Tolkein's heirs) can have any knowledge of how Tolkein would have written these books if he had been writing a film script and had access to Jackson's budgets and tools; he MIGHT have done things radically different from Jackson OR he might have made the same choices Jackson made. After viewing animatics of some of his story elements Tolkein himself might have winced and ripped-out and/or re-written much of his material. These two men were simply working in different media with entirely different toolsets.
This is all just PART of the reason all books that end up as movies are "adaptations". NOBODY does films that are perfect representations of the books and IF somebody did, then there'd be armies of internet trolls denouncing THOSE films and film makers for horrible scenes, impossible sets and costumes, unimaginative and uninspired results etc. In fact, after the first Hobbit film came out, I saw quite a few people complaining that Jackson had taken the book too literally and bored the hell out of people by trying to have the film show EVERYTHING that was in the book.
That cartoon was the worst insult ever applied to a book. Amateurish 1970's ick.
There. See how easy that is?
Just because you prefer one set of artistic choices over another, it does not mean you are right and that the one was actually better than the other. Personally, and YES this is an OPINION, I think a person must be insane to prefer that horrific pile of bad ink over Jackon's works. Unlike most of the Jackon haters who seem to be all over the place these days however, I admit that my opinion is only the opinion of one person based on his personal preferences rather than some self-evident unbiased objective wisdom. I have begun to think that a bunch of you guys are just "Occupy Wall Street" types who are spewing hate for Jackson because he got very rich off these films and hating people who make lots of money is very popular with the left (inheriting money, on the other hand seems more OK for many for some reason). C'mon.... REALLY? the CARTOON??????? I loved the books but could never stomach the animated presentation enough to make it all the way through - too much like one of those amateurish Original Trek reboots (or even like the Trek cartoons compared to the live-action episodes). I love the Jackson films AS HIS INTERPRETATION of Tolkein's books - they are well cast, well acted, the sets are great, the effects are great, and in the many places where the fims diverge from the books the choices are quite reasonable IF you ever cared enough about the books to have actually READ them in their entirety INCLUDING the extra material.
I think all the Rings films are very boring - beautifully photographed and set, but *stupefyingly boring* nonetheless. And so long. Last one I saw I feel asleep in the cinema. I don't get was Dildo does.
The Hobbit wasn't soul-less. It was Bro-less. Nobody kissed the hobbit's ass in the end, like they did with Frodo.
I actually like it. So did my family. Things can always be better and what's good in one persons eyes may be lacking in another's. It was a bit obvious the ending was a segway into another movie. It was a bit dreary for sure that was the context of the movie. War, madness of a king, greed, dragons et al.
IIRC Minority Report was like a little over 30 pages.