Funny you should mention cartoons. When I first saw that “Legolas sliding down the War Oliphant’s trunk” scene in ROTK I couldn’t help yelling “YABBA DABBA DOO!”
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And failed utterly. 
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Yep, the LOTR movies felt very off the mark before that, but that’s the moment where they really jumped the shark. Haven’t watched the hobbit movies yet, not sure I ever will.
Peter Jackson so obviously has oodles and oodles of talent, but somehow it doesnt seem to really hit it off… or at least find an outlet amusing to me, perhaps I should rather say. Dang, Bad Taste and Braindead are such marvels! (honorable mention also to Meet the Feebles).
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that’s only half of what he said, way to go, BB. they were so behind because Guillermo del Toro left the the project a year and a half in, and then jackson came on, and the studio either couldn’t or wouldn’t give him that year and a half back so he could get up to speed. no wonder he was maxed out.
The thing is even with his year off to plan the battle of the 5 armies, the third film was still an absolute mess. The point I gave up on it was the barrel scene. Although Smaug did raise my hopes a bit. If you were going to deviate from the book, that’s where you needed to do it.
Isn’t there a fan-edit of the “three” of these movies cut together into one (90 minute, I think?) film?
I know Topher Grace did a Star Wars edit like this- but couldn’t this (maybe?) be fixed?
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even tolkien was rewriting parts and making it fit better with the larger narrative by the end of his life, toning down the kids story and making it part of the larger epic storyline. there’s no way they could’ve kept it as child-like as the book AND made it tie into the LOTR movies without changing it.
The only way they could have kept a mood of family-friendly fantasy adventure would have been to make it before the LOTR movies instead of as a prequel.
For example, if you read The Hobbit before Lord of the Rings then the part of the story where Bilbo finds the ring is all “Cool! I wish I had a magic ring like that!” But if you’ve already been introduced to Sauron and the evil, corrupting nature of the One Ring then it’s all “Don’t pick that up, Bilbo! It will eat your very soul!”
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I’ve only seen a 4 hour cut made of all three films, and even then it’s only middling. There’s no tension in the battle at the end, all of the good guys are appropriately invincible, the CGI looks awful and narrative payoffs are telegraphed so clumsily you half expect Chekov to come into shot and shout “Oy! This is my gun which I am leaving here, you see?”
Basically it’s like seeing George Lucas go from the original trilogy to the prequels without several decades in the middle.
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I have no idea what you’re talking about. I love the Hobbit movie.
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Especially for the fact that they get through the entire Battle of Five Armies in under three minutes. And only seventy seconds of it involves actual battling, rather than just jawing and dick-measuring.
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About the same time the Third World War is supposed to take.
“Who pressed that red button?!?”
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That’s what we got, though – an identical story arc. Because it worked so well in the first trilogy.
I suspect that the computer game tie-ins were written first, and the movies were plotted accordingly, as an extremely protracted advertisement. Is there a Hobbit theme-park yet?
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I had the opportunity to watch the third one on a long haul flight recently. After having seen the first two I had appropriately low expectations, but even so by about 30 minutes in I was all “Oh, FFS. GTFO.” Watching ‘Goodbye Pork Pie’ and ‘Monuments Men’ instead felt like a much better use of my time.
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Next up from Peter Jackson: The Simla… Silmalir… Smilirifia… The Silmaright-o-then… DAMNIT
The Thing-With-All-The-Funny-Language-In-It-ion.
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What none of you seem to realize is that while there were unique challenges to The Hobbit, almost all major Hollywood movies have a release date set before the script is written. From then on it’s a race against disaster, with disaster frequently winning. Only Pixar seems to have been immune to this, having a writing culture of “get the script right, THEN start production”. But that may be changing too under Disney pressure.
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seriously fk these cts, they had employment laws changed so they could make these films and it turns out it’s because the whole mess was a disorganised piece of sh**t.
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I liked it too. Brian Glover acting at the top of his voice is nearly as good as Brian Blessed doing it.
