[quote=“Khelavaster, post:2050, topic:39100, full:true”]
Never bothered with the sequels after the first one. At least the costumes look good, but what’s with the overdone bloom?[/quote]
I think the Bloom was overdone as well. I mean, Legolas wasn’t even a character in The Hobbit novel.
He was hugely popular with the original trilogy. I mean say what you will, but this is still a movie. If they can grab someone from a hugely popular movie and stick them in another movie, they’re going to do it. Legolas was certainly around during that time whether he was mentioned in the book or not… I’ll forgive them for that. And that doesn’t mean I actually liked their little love triangle either.
Bravo, Mr. Dreadful! That couldn’t have gone better if you guys planned it.
-Tom
“woosh”
I prefer the version where boar-riders are halflings (according to the Illwinter guys). Boars are forest creatures, dwarfs are not. Fantasy history is full of false accounts!
So I watched the first one and the second one (The Desolation of Smaug) on Blu-ray and they were OK. Should I bother with the third one?
To me the second one was the worst and felt like filler material on top of filler material. I’d argue the barrel/river is right up there with the Episode 1 pod race - as in it’s an action sequence that seems tolerable during its first minute and then very quickly overstays its welcome.
That said, I just recently saw five hours of behind-the-scenes material on Desolation of Smaug - and that stuff was worthwhile. As much as I didn’t care for the movie, watching the WETA people talk about production design and whatnot was a joy.
Except the podrace scene gave us one of the greatest games of the 64 bit era, so I will always forgive its excess for that. It was one of the few things in EP1 that I remember fondly.
Wow, I didn’t know there were people out there who didn’t enjoy the Pod Race from Ep 1. That’s my favorite action scene in all of Star Wars.
Think of the dwarven barrel river run and the pod race and simply believe that neither of those events are even close to the reason why those trilogies or movies did not live up to their potential.
Fair point @Nesrie. That said, I also really disliked both sequences a lot.
In particular for Ep 1, though, I just hated any scene with Baby Anakin because I hate kids :)
Maybe if you didn’t have to endure Jar Jar, triplicate bigger fish in the sea sequences, and terrible lines from a kid that didn’t really invoke emotions you might not have found the race that terrible. Both those scenes were just silly fun, and for what they were, they were done pretty well.
Yeah, I suspect if it weren’t for all the parts of the prequels I loathed, I would have enjoyed the pod race about as much as I do, say, the car chase sequences in a Bourne movie. Which is to say a big explodey gee-whiz thing I slowly lose the ability to focus on over the course of 5+ minutes :)
He came to a complete stop and still won the race. It’s all just cartoons to me (if it wasn’t completely clear already) after that.
I just zoned out during the whole barrel sequence. It was really boring for me, but until this thread, I’d forgotten it was in the movie, so it didn’t hurt my memory of the movie. Mostly when I think of the second movie, I think of the end with the encounter with the Smaug. And I thought that whole sequence was very well done.
I still watch these movies and enjoy them for the most part from time to time even if they’re not at the top of any list. The Smaug encounter kind of got ruined for me a bit when Bard decided to use his kid as jury rigged ballista.
That part happened in the third movie though. The Smaug encounter that happened in the 2nd movie that I was talking about was the one between the Bilbo and Smaug (and the dwarves, to a lesser extent, and nearby lake town).
I understand what you meant. But for me Smaug is Smaug. His encounter started with when Bilbo talked to him and ended kind of stupidly so… knowing that, I find everything around Smaug less enjoyable because as soon as I see the dragon I think about how it ends with a kid ballista.
I found the vast majority of the third Hobbit movie to be dull, and I find myself basically unable to recall any one point with any degree of clarity.
But I thought most of the second movie was fairly well-done and it’s mostly stuck with me. The exchange between the hottie elf and the annoying non-bearded dwarf; the barrel fight; the thrush-knocking. But especially the exchange between Bilbo and Smaug in the treasure-vault. I think that was the best of Tolkein’s writing in the book, and I think it was probably the best sequence in the movie trilogy as well.
Oh God, that character. It’s not just that he lacked a beard, he looked like a regular guy, no dwarven features whatsoever for no apparent reason. He took me out of the movie every time he showed up. Of course he was later involved in a romantic subplot. sigh