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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."
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.
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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.
It doesn't by definition. But I fail to see how 24 fps is aesthetically better. Some movies work better in black & white, but only some. (Reminds me of a scene with an aspiring cinematographer sitting in a bar, fawning over some "artsy" B&W movie playing on the TV... until the barman whacks the old set on the side, and the screen snaps back to color). Likewise, some movies might be better at 24fps, but I suspect the "soap opera effect"will be gone with a generation or two, and the next generations will prefer the higher framerate once 24 fps is associated with "old people movies".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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
And Beorn, the most interesting and mysterious character in "The Hobbit" much like Tom Bombadil in FOTR, was never developed. Or how Gandalf used trickery and mind games to get Beorn to accept dwarves. Now that would have been interesting. The eagles could have also been explored as a race and characters. Instead we get an elf and dwarf falling in love. WTF? And an escape scene that looked like a Disney ride or an abomination out of the "Pirates of the Caribbean".
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
WRONG. WRONG. WRONG. There are two types of high frame rate: with and without motion blur. The two modes serve competing goals, and they're both "technically superior" to the other in achieving those goals.
Back in 1991 we had a Handicam with a "sports" mode. The output was analog 640i at 30hz, but it was easy to get the soap opera effect:
Normal mode: 30fps, but it looked natural because it has motion blur. Sports mode: same 30 fps, but it looked like a fucking god damn soap opera. Here's why: the CCD only sampled 1/300 second instead of the full 1/30 second = dramatically reduced motion blur to keep the ball from looking like an elongated smudge. You can get sharper still images with sports mode, but live facial motions look "uncanny valley" wrong, because they lack the subtle transitions that you see when you watch someone in real life.
New TVs that do interpolation between frames create a different uncanny valley effect when they attempt to create motion blur by morphing between frames that don't contain motion blur. Pay special attention to brow wrinkles, crows feet and mouth creases with the "dejudder" set to max. Now watch it with it turned off. Which one looked more natural? If in doubt, take a closeup video of someone you know and play it back on the TV. If the interpolated version doesn't make you think the person has been replaced with an alien impostor, then you're probably just face-blind.
tl;dr: HFR isn't the problem. Failing to accumulate motion blur for the entire frame is the problem.
It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.
I was appalled by how little he regarded the audience - and proportionally insulted his actors - in "Desolation". Huge musical cues 'instructing' the audience of the drama or character development that was supposed to be on screen, at all times. This seems to be because he cannot elicit real performances from his actors.
I might muse that this is because to Jackson, they are not actors - but merely the armatures on which he templates his green-screen composited glory... But to assume that this is the root of his deficiency, rather than another symptom of of his artlessness, would be to succumb to curmudgeonly urges.
The lesson to be taken away is that Jackson should be designing games, not ruining popular cinema.
It appears that - despite the contempt it provoked in my teenaged self - Rankin and Bass actually produced the best ever adaptation of Tolkien, with the greatest respect and truth towards the source text in feel and substance. Perhaps, when we have destroyed the concept of copyright as a tool of corporate greed, another - more thoughtful - filmmaker might use this as a point of departure for a loving and well-crafted "Hobbit".
apparently you missed the memo where he was dragged kicking and screaming into directing it, having been assured during sign on he was simply there for consulting; after Guillermo del Toro left. After LOTR he said he was done. No more movies. Ever. And certainly not another Tolkien. Took too much out of him. You can blame the media companies, but honestly I'm not going to hate PJ for it. When you burn out in life, you'll understand.
To be fair: LOTR and The Hobbit are the best movie-adaptions of Tolkien to date. Nobody here and no-one else has topped that. Anyone saying differently are not fair: just cold-hearted, miserable cynics who have never achieved anything worthwhile in their own lives and need to degrade other people's achievements to feel better about themselves.
LOTR 1-3 was great. It had soul and managed to tell the story mostly truthfully without sacrificing too much in the all too necessary conversions from dusty books to the big screen.
Hobbit movie 1 was also great. Not LOTR, but also full of soul, humour and attempts to be truthful to the book.
It's just that a children's book is not suitable to be dragged out into _3_ sequel movies! Hobbit 2 and 3 was passable, but in the end, it lost the humour and adventure that was in the book and The Hobbit 1 started to depict. The fascination of hobbits and their place, or lack of it, in the big world simply got lost.
Having worked on LOTR first may be a big disadvantage. LOTR is about war and huge armies. The Hobbit is definately NOT! Treating The Hobbit, a book meant to be a children's novel, as another war-story was a bad move (The Hobbit 3).
Everybody's entitled to their own opinion, and I might understand someone who read the books might feel cheated. But come on people. Don't ruin your lives by having too high expectations. Go watch the other Tolkien-movies for some perspective...
Jackson brought Tolkien to a wider audience, in essence, the whole world. For that he ought to be commended.