Oh dear, I really don’t want to watch this one. I hoped the LotR adaptation was the last of Jackson’s vendetta against JRRT.
Interestingly enough it takes me less than NINE HOURS to just read the book.
I saw this coming when I watched Jackson’s King Kong. His extended edition is fully twice the length of the 1933 original, and tells exactly the same story. The old one really holds up, and moves like a freaking freight train. Jackson’s version takes most of an hour just to get to Skull Island.
After the success of LOTR, Jackson can write his own ticket, and nobody’s gonna tell him no. He’s like a kid, playing with the best-funded and most enormous King Kong playset (and now Hobbit playset) ever conceived or produced by the hand of mortal man, and he’ll tell the story and act it out to himself until he’s bored with it.
I loved the LOTR movies. I don’t find it useful to compare them against each other, since they were filmed largely simultaneously; I think of them as just one long movie, and it’s my favorite movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not without flaws, to be sure, but it’s a staggering achievement and I find it thoroughly entertaining. I’d read the trilogy three times before I saw the movies, and Jackson’s changes didn’t bother me overmuch. I didn’t really miss Tom Bombadil, and I always felt the Scouring of the Shire was a weird anticlimax that diminished both Saruman and the overall achievements of the four hobbits. It bothered me that they had to be celebrated as local heroes for local deeds, rather than for their much larger deeds in what Granny Weatherwax would have termed “forn parts.”
But anyway, I feel The Hobbit is a very different kind of story from LOTR, and deserves different treatment. I’ve always felt the Rankin-Bass cartoon was pretty satisfactory. John Huston as Gandalf was as excellent a choice as one could make in 1977, and I can’t remember one word from the cartoon that didn’t come directly from Tolkien’s text.
That said, I’m not gonna get bent outta shape about Jackson’s self-indulgence this time. He’s using the framework of The Hobbit to make a sprawling Hobbit/Silmarillion/Unfinished Tales prequel to his LOTR movies rather than doing a more straight adaptation, and that’s okay with me. The bloat sits better with me this time than when he fattened up King Kong. At least this time the excess time is spent in Middle-earth rather than Depression-era New York and what looks like a slightly more authentic Gilligan’s Island. I can spend an awful long time looking at New Zealand as Middle-earth without getting bored. Once I learned not to expect slavish faithfulness to the text, I found myself able to enjoy it more, and my kids are into it, too. I wish I could take them to see Part 2 this weekend, but they’re really too young to sit still through a three-hour movie in a theater. We watched Part 1 over three afternoons a few weeks ago, and we’ll do that again once Part 2 comes out on Blu-Ray next year.
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What makes you think they’re dwarvish coins? Don’t dragons gather loot from far and wide to make their nests?
How would such a ginormous dragon even pick those things up?
Don’t they stick to it’s belly, or sumfink? I dunno. Maybe it licks it’s own belly (a bit like a cat) then rolls around in loot, then flies back to it’s lair where the coins fall off once the dragon spittle dries.
Ah, feck it. It’s a dragon. Who knows? Somehow, because MAGIC!, the coins and other loot get there, in vast quantities.
I bet you were that kid who ruined Christmas by figuring out that Santa couldn’t possibly visit every house on earth within 36 hours without traveling faster than escape velocity, and thus being flung out of Earth orbit and to a firey death in the Sun 
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On Orlando Bloom:
I’m pretty sure the only reason why I could stand him was due to John Rhys-Davies, whose sweet and genuine performance was able to somewhat compensate for Bloom. Bloom’s performance in LotR, felt to me like something way too loud run through a studio compressor. He was always on the verge of chewing the scenery but somehow stopped just short. And, I for one, find that extremely grating.
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the stone giants were in the book playing rock toss with each other. they weren’t added by jackson.
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Ah, The Barrier Peaks! My first intro to D&D.
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I’m a nearly 40 year old who was introduced to Tolkien by my father as bed-time stories. I’ve been through all the books and basically consider the Silmarillion right up there near the Torah and Tanya in terms of books which have impacted my life. I’m totally fine with the “Jacksonian” version of both The Hobbit and TLOTR for two reasons: 1) Cinema is not the written page and 2) bringing in additional Tolkien material (and even additional non-canonical material) will for many people be their only exposure to the truly vast vision Tolkien had for his legendarium.
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I saw the movie last night. It was enjoyable but long. Jackson and team do a great job with the scenery. (Well, the underground halls all look alike and apparently middle-earth mountains are almost completely hollow, but they are pretty.) But they don’t do so well with story. I think compared to the books, Jackson introduces many more holes than he fills.
My biggest complaint though is the endless and ridiculous “action” sequences. And did I mention long? To me, having characters that can see behind themselves, move much faster than humanely possible, always get lucky, do outrageous acrobatics beyond that of an Olympic athlete crossed with a master yogi, don’t get hurt unless -insert plot point-, gives me absolutely no fear for the characters. I’m a big JRRT fan and I come to the movie already caring about the characters. After the first minute of an “action” scene, I just don’t care anymore. I have no fear for the characters. It’s boring. And what makes a boring scene even more boring?, make the scene long. What? not boring enough?, make it even longer. By just cutting the action scenes down to a third, make them at a little more realistic (i.e. actually scary) and Jackson would have a much better movie that wouldn’t have to be 3 hours long.
And for this movie, just get rid of the orcs. They add nothing, except some extra big plot holes. Okay, have a few hanging around Dol Goldur smoking cigarettes or something, but it would have been a massive improvement to drop all the rest.
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I have to disgree, Tolkien repeatedly emphasized that Frodo and the other Hobbits’ main impetus for setting out on the journey to destroy the ring was to ensure that the Shire should remain untouched by Sauron’s evil. I feel that having the Hobbits return home to find that, despite their triumph over evil, the Shire has still been impacted by the events of the war is one of the keys to the book and brings to the forefront what I consider Tolkien’s anti-war stance .
That being said, I recently listened to the entire unabridged audiobook of LOTR and when it came to the Scouring of The Shire episode I thought “This could be made into a fine movie or even mini series” Then I remembered “Oh right they f****ing killed Saruman in the movie.”
So . . .
The High Frame Rate thing was very cool. It made the fast action sequences smooth and visually comprehensible. I never felt that “too much to take in” feeling.
The story . . . well, almost all the way through I was thinking “This is much less egregiously silly an adaptation than the first one, and I can enjoy it as a sort of Indiana Jones type adventure.” There were still problems.
Mirkwood went from a major, spooky part of the book to an abbreviated “maze” sequence. I miss Bilbo’s teasing of the spiders. (“Addercop!”) Beorn went from a source of mystery to a convenient stop-over.
I know Tolkien himself had notes retconning the long war with Sauron into The Hobbit, but the White Council add-on story was just too much. Azod, Bolg, positively identifying the Necromancer as Sauron, the whole Thorin revenge drama . . . needless padding. Ugh. But I was expecting that, right?
Then I saw the last 20 minutes. Oh, give me a freaking break. Indulgent video-game style eye candy that didn’t make any dramatic sense. The whole forge / gold thing . . . utterly ludicrous.
I did like Lake Town. The elaborations there were harmless. Nice sets, good characters. The elf characters were slotted in fairly elegantly, but I totally don’t buy the . . . unusual romantic angle.
To some things up:
This was a nicely done action movie. But . . . Peter Jackson didn’t take liberties with The Hobbit; he got it passing-out drunk, dressed it as a clown, and photographed it in bed with a she-warg.
I saw this movie last night. Ethan, you absolutely nailed it!
There is a subtle thing which I believe took place in the movie, which the writing & Freeman as Bilbo carry out, if you pay attention to it.
Bilbo seems to lose himself to the exciting adventuring itself–including but beyond the influence of The Ring–yet at some point begins to realize that he has done exactly that. It seems painful or at the very least troubling to him to reflect upon this and to realize that it is not entirely a good thing, and that there will be consequences.
It’s very subtle, but it seems to me to explain some of Bilbo’s self-reflective acting during the latter part of the film.
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