What really helped me in that regard is that every single time they made doe eyes at each other, I heard someone whispering from the audience, “forbidden loooove”. Yes, it was me, and I laughed every time.
TNT (or is it TBS?) has been showing this a lot lately. I try watching it but there is just so much wrong with it. Unlike the LOTR movies I just don’t stop what I am doing and watch it.
TNT just got the rights to show Battle of the Five Armies about a month ago. That completes the pair of trilogies for them, and the first weekend they premiered Battle they did all three LOTR movies and all three Hobbit movies like all weekend long. This past weekend they did the LOTR movies Friday and Saturday, then had the Hobbit trilogy play from 12PM-11PM Sunday.
Personally, even though I own all 6 movies on DVD/Blu-Ray (extended editions for the LOTR), I still love when TNT airs them as a marathon. Yes, there are issues with both trilogies, and Yes, the Hobbit movies have a bunch of cringe-worthy scenes (personally I despise any scene in which Radaghast appears…they should have cut the character completely), but in the end you have to step back and remind yourself, this is an amazingly well made theatrical version of one of the greatest stories of all time.
I absolutely love the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit stories, first read them as a nine-year-old kid when I found “The Hobbit” in my school library, and have been in love ever since. Peter Jackson did more than any other director could have to bring these books to life, and the WETA people are just brilliant at what they do. The combination of incredible effects artists, a director who adored the subject material, writers who tried to stay as true as they could to the plots and themes of the books, and a production company that gave them all the time and money they needed to make it happen resulted in what is, in my opinion, an epic series of movies that do the subject material great justice.
They are comfort food of the highest order for me, and I will stop and watch them every single time they’re on, no matter how often I’ve seen them before.
I feel that way about LOTR, and I love the book The Hobbit. But sadly enjoying Jackson’s movie version requires watching some real bad mixed in with the good. There are parts of those movies I just find cringe worthy. And those parts are made even worse by my knowledge of the book.
Agreed on the cringe worthy bits, but in the end I am happier the Hobbit movies were made than I would be if they hadn’t. Ian McKellen, Martin Freeman and Richard Armitage all did excellent work with Gandalf, Bilbo and Thorin respectively, and Lee Pace was a very good Thranduil (though I can’t not see Joe from Halt and Catch Fire when he’s on screen). I even enjoy Benedict Cumberbatch’s voice work for Smaug. There is a definite step down in the overall impact of the Hobbit Trilogy versus the LOTR Trilogy, some of which is due to the Hobbit being made a bit more comical than the original trilogy. Perhaps because it was originally a more kid-friendly story, or maybe just to appeal to a broader audience base that included kids.
In any event, I’d rather the movies were there for me to enjoy for what they are than to have not had them made at all. I would have felt like something was missing, a sense of loss and of wondering “what if Jackson, WETA and New Line had teamed up again to make the Hobbit?”. Now I don’t have to wonder, I can just lose myself in 18+ hours of Middle Earth movies (and just fast forward through the cringe worthy bits).
Lindsay Ellis has a pretty wonderful movie analysis channel that I’ve been following for a couple of years. She doesn’t nitpick. She doesn’t tear things up for lulz. She does really deep dives, looking at script issues, cast changes, studio gossip, trade rumors, and tries to get to the heart of what happened on projects. Recommended.
She finally tackled The Hobbit trilogy. You’ll probably want to watch both parts, but the real get is that in the second video she travels to New Zealand and interviews John Callen, the actor that played Oin. It’s terrific and sad because it confirms a lot of what everyone suspected. From his perspective, the production really changed when Warner/New Line decided to turn it into three movies instead of the originally planned two.
Part 1
Part 2
The most expensive extras ever indeed.
Thanks for these. They very much coincide my feelings on them and the huge disappointment about these movies.
I have to add my vote for Lindsay Ellis in general, and for these videos specifically. She is very fair with her criticisms of these movies, and goes out of her way to point out the things she likes first. I always learn something from her videos.
Those were terrific, Telefrog. I appreciated the twist at the end of the second video.
I kind of feel sorry Peter Jackson. There’s so much pressure on him (and Richard Taylor) to secure massive Hollywood contracts for Weta and the New Zealand film industry at competitive rates, that even with $260 million in public funding set aside to incentivize international co-productions, Weta’s staff increasingly have to do more with less, and he just seems beyond burnt out. It’s becoming a tougher proposition to shoot a film on the other side of the world, so corners are being cut and the work’s suffering (see Valerian, The Great Wall, Ghost in the Shell, Warcraft). He’s also invested tens of millions into trying to build an absurdly ambitious movie museum in downtown Wellington, which has into all sorts of headaches with the local council.
Hopefully his massive WWI documentary, which is due later this year, will be a return to form.
Very cool, only watched the first one so far, but anything on YouTube that can keep my attention for 36 minutes and make me want to watch part 2 is impressive.
I just finished Part 1 as well. The ending of Part 1 was really funny and well done. Overall, I really liked it. My favorite parts were the reminders of how the LOTR movies improved upon the books in the original trilogies. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time, though I felt the same way back in the day.
My consumption order was thus:
Read first half of The Hobbit.
Saw Movie 1 (Fellowship), was really confused by a lot of things in the movie.
Read second half of The Hobbit.
Read the LOTR trilogy.
Saw Movie 1 (Fellowship) in the theater again, this time loving it. And loving the changes they made to the books.
Saw Movie 1 (Fellowship) again as part of the extended Edition DVD with commentaries and other extras.
Fellowship added a lot of great things that weren’t in the first book.
Fellowship is my favorite of the 3. They totally nailed how I pictured the scenes in the movie. Moria was excellent.
@Telefrog - I’ll add to the list of people thanking you for those links. Really well done and enjoyable :)
Great videos, thanks for posting! Such utter disappointments after the LotR movies. I have yet to muster up the desire to rewatch them someday.
The LotR films were nothing special either, so I can’t say I hold her opinions in much account when she credits mindless action films designed for 15-25yo men as so inspirational. The Hobbit movies were the natural progression for a direction already established by Jackson and his team in the first trilogy.
I’m not going to argue personal taste, but a lot of people who enjoyed the books felt like the movies were very faithful adaptations, while the Hobbit movies seem to have changed a lot; paradoxically, they removed a lot of things from the books, then replaced them with completely new scenes.
Even the uber-Tolkien faithful that hated parts of the LotR trilogy for some of the changes from the books, had to admit that the movies were probably the best they were going to get financed by a major studio. When you think of the time Fellowship came out and what a risk the whole concept was, it’s amazing they even exist.
If you didn’t know or care about Tolkien, the movies are generally pretty good. Maybe a little long in parts, maybe a wee bit goofy in others, but there’s nothing wrong with them structurally or scriptwise. There’s a good story, solid acting, and well-paced action. At worst, it’s a fair-to-middling fantasy adventure trek.
The Hobbit movies though? Yuck. They’re terrible. Even for people that don’t hold any special love for the book, they suck. Badly paced, chock full of weird stories that do nothing for the overall plot, and the obsession with 3D ultra-fps filming ruined the effects. Garbage movies.
Even a big Tolkien fan should be able to recognize that book, and film, are two different medium, and that not all concepts translate well. Certain things simply are not appropriate for screen, such as the many linguistic diversions. Also that many of the things cut would be hell on pacing. Tom Bombadil and Ghan Buri Ghan being two such things.
So I find most of the changes for the better, as a movie. I mean go back and read LotR. The Moria scene at Balin’s tomb? It is basically ‘A bunch of goblins banged down the door, and the Fellowship fled down the back stairs after fighting a few’. His action scenes were considerably underdeveloped, far inferior to the portions exploring lineages and languages.
My problems with the movies aren’t their lack of utterly slavish textual devotion (I would’ve cut Bombadil too, though worked with writers to get the Barrow Downs in if possible, have Strider save them or something).
Tolkien wasn’t a novelist by trade, and I honestly think the prose served the books well in terms of cultural adoption for the time period in which they were published. There was no market for fantasy fiction. Sci-fi was still largely driven by magazine shorts, though that was slowly changing. Tolkien’s writing style, as awkward or even at times inept as it reads today, was intended for serious, adult-oriented myth building. There are few action scenes because that didn’t fuel his imagination or serve the narrative he wanted to tell (the 14yo in me is still disappointed we didn’t get a Gandalf vs Witch-king throw-down though).
I’ve written grad papers on the central theme of the trilogy decades ago and basically came away that while there are moments of hints of divinity consciously or subconsciously injected by Tolkien and his faith (one of the key being the winds that suddenly swept Aragorn’s fleet up the river to reach the Pelennor Fields in time to affect the battle’s outcome, and free will orthodoxy revolving around Frodo’s quest), it’s the sacrality of the natural world Tolkien created for his languages to inhabit that’s the trilogy’s core theme and not Christian allegory. And this is completely missed by Jackson and his decision to skip the Shire Scouring (fueled by the turn of the century industrialization of England that Tolkien hated so much). Rather than epic mythology we got modern-day Hollywood action sequences and campy dialogue, Disney-esque CGI, etc. Sure, Jackson & co hit the main story beats, but they missed the tone by miles IMO. That f’n WWE staff-match between Gandalf and Saruman is still unwatchable.
In fairness, I can watch the Fellowship and mostly enjoy it. Mostly.
Part 2 of this series is fantastic. Part 1 is really well done, but nothing I haven’t heard (or thought) before. But Part 2 is exceptional.