The Hobbit

[thegayhare]

I haven't seen Desolation of Smaug yet  but I have recently watched the unexpected journey

This isn't a review, or a complaint but just my feelings on the movie

now when I first heard they were making the Hobbit into 3 movies I winced that they were just padding it out to make money... and I'm sure that's in there too.  but so far what they have brought in to expand the story seems to be working.  I think it works because they are drawing in stories from the appendixes, and unfinished tales to add and build up the story.  Also the longer running time gives use more time to build up the characters of the dwarfs   

So dispite the first movie's slow start (but even so I love the party scenes) I rather like how its being done.  I'm even watching the extended cuts  I'm guessing that the dragon will be dead in the second film,  if not early on in the third, and the bulk of the third film will deal with the build up to and climax with the battle of 5 armies


And for something funny.  I was watching the movie earlier today and when Rataghast the brown was introduced my cat Salem climbed onto my belly and started watching intently.  the little bugger purred and drooled all over me the entire time he was on screen and then left as soon as his scene ended.  So I think he's a fan of that change atleast

So what do you folks think

[Brunhidden]

ill try to keep it short to avoid blabbering for an hour, and avoid spoilers if theres an off chance that can even be a thing

first off when i took my daughter Eowyn (on this thread im warranted to slap you if you dont spot the connection) to see part one last year she was the same age as i was when i read the book on my own- 8, which she still is for 3 weeks. the book has a lot of importance to me

second, when i took my kids to see part 2 tuesday night Eowyn who is ADD sat like a statue the whole movie enraptured, yet Mia (age 5)who does not was vibrating with excitement. somewhere along the line Mia became a fan of gandalf and smeagol (she does smeagol impersonations)


in a way you could think of the hobbit 3 part movie vs the book like the christopher nolan  batman trilogy- its a different beast then, say, the 90s animated batman. you can enjoy both without a problem, or you can preffer one over the other. i actually still love the old rankin bass animated hobbit, it captured a lot of the essence of the book and had some good dramatic composure (as a teenager thorins death could make me cry a little) despite changes from the original.

heck, my family even saw and enjoyed a live play version of the hobbit presented by a troupe of homeschooled kids to raise money for 'hobbitat for humanity' (the trolls threatened to eat you if you didnt donate). unless smaug and gandalf start kung fu fighting in the hobbit part 3 next year there is no way it will be less accurate then the play
- frodo makes an appearance in the beginning, reading aloud about how trolls turn to stone in sunlight from an adventurers handbook while enjoying tea with his uncle
- the acting is so full of ham it injured a rabbi, ham has become a verb during the performance. this is lampshaded in the performance
- bilbo tries to steal from the trolls while they were busy singing about eating people during a laurel and hardy style pratfall routine. all three of the trolls are actually professors from my college
- the goblin king, one of the trolls, and gollum are played by women. this is also lampshaded
- gandalf motivates bilbo to go on the adventure by singing about adventure and how dangerous yet wonderful it is, when that does not work he threatens to sing it again
- the spiders have a musical number about spinning webs, the elf fortress breaks into a song/dance about partying and dreamwine, smaugs fire has an interpretative dance routine with ribons
- bilbo swordinates smaug himself
- the battle of five armies is replaced by an extended scene of bilbo crashing his home auction after people refuse to acknowledge hes not dead. most of his relations try to argue he is a ghost

of course we enjoyed it, regardless of the changes. Mia insisted she get her picture taken with gandalf after the show

returning to PJ hobbit parts 1-3, i fully think that thusfar the vast majority of added material lends more to the story or explores angles not fleshed out too much in the book. thorin is a dynamic charachter who fully validates having his meaty background expanded uppon, all the dwarves are made unique individuals and the idea they are craftsmen and not warriors or 'generic dwarf' makes the story more impressive. i didnt think they really needed to sexy-ify some of the dwarves like they did, and to be honest some parts of part 2 i wasn't thrilled about or kind of poked small holes in the experience, but is there any movie you can think of that didnt have parts that were less then stellar?


and no, i dont have a stance that any interpenetration of a literary work is valid in itself. as an example i give the animated dragonlance movie from a few years ago, it genuinely made me sad and should have been done far better.

i lied, it took me 45 minutes to write all this, during which i had to leave internet connectivity area so this was supposed to be posted yesterday. way to keep it brief dude.

[thegayhare]

LOL she's a smeagol fan girl is she?

Yeah I agree in the rankin bass version (which I love) and in the book (more love) really the dwarves had little to no personality  to distingish them from one another in this you get a feel for the individual dwarfs.  some are fighters, pretty sure Dwalin is a bar brawler, some like Bombur and Dori seem even more out of place on an adventure then Bilbo, and Ori doesn't even get a decent weapon.  but they are distinct, even at a glance you can tell which is which... if just because they arent the one with a pick axe stuck in there head... why do I feel thats the result of an embarrassing self inflicted mining accident.

Brining in the ork hunting party also makes sense in the long run too,  the Orks grudge against Thorin also makes the army that will show up in the third movie more believable in the book the ork army just showed up out of no where,  but with a mad Ork general bent on the death of Thorin's line, we've already seen the lengths he'll go to for that cause, so him gathering an army, absorbing smaller packs, maybe even forcing the goblins into service and marching it on erebor is more believable then the originals who just came out of no where


I wonder the rings all effect the races they were given too,  in dwarves I wonder if thats the cause of there greed for mineral wealth,  but what effect would they have on the elves,  could the elven rings be

[joshofspam]

Me? All very interesting in the first Hobit movie. I especially like how Gandalf takes care of the great goblin the the time Bilbo meets and exchanges riddles with Golem and the scenes with Radagast the Brown. (Which brings up things that probably link directly to the next triligy that already came out.)

I can't really think about anything bad about the movie. Maybe the Ring triligy might make it seem less action packed because that trilogy was set in a time of on coming war, while the hobit was mostly simply an adventure of a small band of Dwarves, a Wizard and a Hobit. But it was well thought out. Good movie overall in my opinion.

[Aisha deCabre]

I'm a fan of the books, I was a fan of the original LotR movie trilogy, and I'm already a big fan of The Hobbit.  Though honestly I haven't (yet) read the extra materials that they're using to flesh the story out, I can tell that they're putting a whole lot of effort into making the movies as quality a fantasy story as the books deserve.  I both laughed and teared up when they included the memorable songs that the Dwarves sing when they invade Bilbo's home and convince him to come with them.  The little, memorable things they add like that from the books makes it great.

Smaug was practically perfect down to the voice and characterization.  I say "practically" because I know some dragon fans out there still pout because of his design, but he's no less epic.

[Corgatha Taldorthar]

Going to risk angering the mods for necrothreadcy, but I don't come back here that often, was browsing, saw the thread, and wanted to put in my 2 cents.


I despised both parts of the films so far, and don't really want to see the third.  It's an extension of some of the problems I've noticed in the main trilogy of LOTR films, but PJ seems to be getting more daring as he goes on.

Peter Jackson treats Lord of the Rings, and by extension, the Hobbit, as one grand, tightly bound together story of good versus evil, and about how all the free peoples of the west eventually band together to stave off the threat of Mordor. I believe he once said in an interview that the Dead Men of Dunharrow was a cheat, a way of Tolkien getting himself out of the corner he had written himself into, to have the good guys win the battle for Gondor.

I don't agree with that sentiment. I don't think the text supports it either. Lord of the Rings is more structured like the Prose Edda, or a book of mythology: A number of smaller stories with some intersection, all happening to take place in the same world.  Because Tolkien doesn't bother to give numbers, it wasn't necessary to have the Dead Men of Dunharrow show up. In the books, Aragorn could have gone to Pelargir, done something suitably heroic like kill the Corsair leader, rallied the troops defending the town, and brought them up to Minas Tirith, and without substantially changing the "main" narrative of the War of the Ring one iota. The reason it's included is because while it's not important for the mythic arc of "Mordor vs West", it's hugely important for Aragorn's own personal arc, as Isildur's heir and the one who lets go, to fix all the things that Isildur broke. What's most important about the army of the dead isn't what they do, but that Aragorn managed to command their service when Isildur couldn't.


When it comes to the Hobbit, PJ starts right off the bat by connecting it to the Lord of the Rings continuity, with the primary focus in the introduction being "How did Bilbo get the ring, which leads to everything else?". Again, I don't think that's the main focus of the story of The Hobbit.

The Hobbit is primarily a story about how a stand-in for what is basically a Victorian country gentleman is thrown into a dark-age saga world, full of monsters and adventure and supernatural occurrences. He's not familiar with it, he's not comfortable with it, and he's not supposed to be.  Even at the end of the book, Bilbo never once masters the sorts of skills the Dwarves possess. He can't light his own fires (and gets sick because of it when barrel riding), he sits out the battle of five armies, he feels foolish when dressed up in armor and actually hides the princely gift of the mithril coat.  No, Bilbo is much more content to brew coffee, smoke his pipe, read his daily delivered mail, and enjoy the comforts of civilization, of an order that we don't see anywhere else in middle-earth, not even among the "advanced" elves.

That's not to say he's useless. He does, after all, become the key to victory, and what's more, he shows his own sort of courage; there are three times I can recall when the book calls Bilbo "brave", when he decides to go back for his companions after escaping the Misty Mountains, when he decides to try to save them from the spiders despite having the ring and being able to escape, and when he decides to go on to Smaug in the tunnel of the Lonely Mountain. Every time it happens, he's alone, in the dark, and it's not about fighting or bodily strength, it's about making the right, moral choice, despite the personal hazard it offers to him. Contrast the time the Dwarves are called "brave", during the battle of the five armies, and it's much more like Beowulf or something, it's a symbol of their prowess in battle, displayed for all the world to see.


The movie COMPLETELY misses this. The climax of the first one is when Bilbo charges to the rescue of Thorin when he's menaced by Azog, and is in essence showing a triumph of the Dwarven mode of bravery and values, and casting Bilbo as an inferior that needs to learn their method to be functional. Bilbo can only become the hero by being better at what the dwarves do than the dwarves themselves.


I don't mind movies adding things if they help. I don't really mind cuts, as I know they're inevitable. But I do mind a lack of grasping the central themes of a textual work, and then building a movie based around a rather sad mis-comprehension of what it's about.  It's the same reason the Starship Troopers movie annoyed me.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

That's an awesome summary, there, Corgatha. It's something that had annoyed me, but I hadn't figured out how to put it into words.

I mean, I enjoyed the first two parts of The Hobbit, but felt they were different to the book for some reason, and I couldn't figure out how.


Thanks for that.