Having made the only Star Wars–grade trilogy blockbuster since Star Wars, they went Full Lucas, and made the jump to PrequelSpace.
Now that you mention it, one of the things I disliked about the first Hobbit movie is that all the actors in scary Orc makeup had been replaced with goofy CGI cartoon characters.
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You know, as satisfying as it would be to have the hobbits come back to Hobbiton, experience the Scouring and end up using their newfound courage to run a broken Sauruman out, in a way it seemed more bittersweet for the grizzled veterans to come back home to an unchanged Hobbiton. They can never go back to just being the happily ignorant Hobbits.
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Anyone else notice how big all those gold coins are? Does Smaug disdain to horde anything smaller than a full troy ounce of gold?
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Yeah, really it does make sense. But I agree about disliking Bloom. The whole thing seemed like something put in explicitly for tumblr fangirls and fanboys, but I think even tumblr is going to steer clear of embracing this.
I love Stephen Fry and he was well-suited for the role. He basically played it like his A Bit of Fry & Laurie character where he’s an executive who says “DAMN!” a lot, which was amusing. But there was barely anything there for him to work with. However, he has bipolar disorder and during filming he attempted suicide and flew back to England… given what’s in the film, I speculate they had planned to shoot more with him? Don’t know. I guess we’ll see more of him in the third film though.
Anyway, I’m not a Tolkien or Jackson fanboy and I too am not really a fan of The Two Towers film. As a film judged by itself it doesn’t really work. In that case it’s not unfair to judge it that way since the book by itself works. I just don’t think Jackson and the other writers are good at middle films. As I suggested earlier though, I think once the third one comes out if you watch it as a single 8-hour film it will work (assuming they don’t totally botch the third film, but that seems relatively unlikely). The beginning and the end of this one feels really awkward as a standalone film. That worked for Empire Strikes Back but doesn’t work here.
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One of the problems with having a multibillion-dollar franchise under your belt is that there are fewer people willing (or able) to tell you that something about your new installment is a really bad idea.
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It’s only a bad idea in the “this film will suck” sense. In the “it’ll make us richer than Croesus” sense it’s a good idea.
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I came here to say this exact thing. Can’t wait for the fan edit. The hobbit was a fun light book. There’s this trend to turn everything “epic”. Even Ben10, that my boy watches, aims for that epic sensibility.
Epic is tired. Let’s have some fun!
Also i’m really curious to see what Jackson has up his sleeve for the 3rd film to bring us back to the cinema considering the material that’s left.
When we watched the Hobbit at home (2nd viewing) i realised that about halfway in we were all either chatting or doing other things. It was that boring. And we’re a movie loving family!
The padding, the PADDING!
Yes, they do it for the money and I’m okay with that. I don’t work for free either. And if something good is successfull chances are there will be more of it, and that can be a good thing.
But.
The approach in making a movie should be to make a good movie. I.e. make a movie that works - idea, plot, story, directing, acting, editing, etc. etc. It doesn’t matter how long it is or how many parts it has - as long as it’s not too short and not too long but just right.
Padding ‘The Hobbit’ by inserting elements that just make it longer but don’t help the story or improve it in any way means the approach was ‘let’s maximize the return on investment’. Which is how investment banking works, and look where that got us.
A book and a movie can not and should not be the same because books and movies are different media. They work in different ways. You can actually mess up a movie by staying too true to the book if that means you’re not using the possibilities of the medium film in their full range or use them wrong.
But you can also mess up a movie by simply overloading it. Let’s put in some more SFX and a pretty face so the viewers won’t notice you could cut half of it without actually missing anything? Really.
Okay, this is turning into a tl;dr and I guess I’ve made my point but let me add just this: right now in the background season 6 of The Big Bang Theory is running and Dr. Koothrappali just proposed a film festival. The theme: Movies that killed their franchises. Dr. Hofstadter immediately suggests Jaws 4, Indiana Jones 4, Daredevil 1 …
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From the most wonderful green screens New Zealand has too offer, a 3 hour prequel that will not address the PLOT until 43 minutes in. Enjoy.
Based on true monster!
I believe there’s also “evil floor” and “evil wall” monsters somewhere in some edition of AD&D, too.
I would love to see, before I die, a nice, simple, faithful adaptation of The Hobbit.
The low-budget, disappointingly abridged Rankin-Bass cartoon was more faithful to the story than Jackson’s overblown epic. Mind you, I don’t think the R-B version was acceptable, but it was a well-meaning try that was’t flashing dollar signs and personal eccentricities (falling shit).
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There’s always the BBC Radio Play…
I have heard it, but not in ages. I had the LOTR one on cassette, that was very good.
I’m weird with Tolkien adaptations; I love the Bakshi one, despite it being no more faithful that the Jackson films that leave me tearing my hair out. It must be something about the rotoscoping…
I would have loved to see that in the movie. I also think it was a good idea not to do it. In a book you can spend 5-50 pages (as Tolkien often does) on a tangent story to display a theme, or tell a history, or show that not everything in the world is about the heroes. If the reader gets bored he can skip ahead or take a break. In a movie that’s already really long, you’ll lose much of your audience.if you do that, and with LOTR level effects it’s not necessarily even worth being in the extended edition.
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On the other hand, it might make a good mini-series. One hour specials on the the Ainulindale, awakening the elves at Cuivienen and leading them to Valinor, Melkor and Ungoliant destroying the Two Trees and stealing the silmarils, the voyage of Earnedil, the rise and fall of Numenor.
Disclosure - haven’t seen the second the second Hobbit movie yet, but I am enough of a fan to have read the Silmarillion twice.
I may disagree with Jackson’s particular choices, but the Hobbit needed an overhaul. Tolkien himself rewrote his stories many times before and after publishing, and never quite got around to making his world or myths as coherent as he wanted. Even the geography of Middle Earth changes between the two books, and characters didn’t know things they really should have because Tolkien hadn’t figured them out yet.
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Jackson is doing it to maximise revenue. Personally I decided ten minutes into the first movie not to see the next two.
The Children of Hurin could make a nice lighthearted film.
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In fairness, you’re seeing them next to a guy who’s supposed to be about 3 feet tall.
Of course that brings up another question: wouldn’t Dwarves mint small coins?
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