Daagar
1681
For those upset by the changes made to the books, this series brings light to why staying true to the book isn’t always a good thing. Read the ‘about’ section before zooming in so you understand what you are looking at.
That is too dumb to warrant a real response.
Daagar
1684
It is. It made a bit more sense very late at night after an adult beverage so apologies. The core point does stand though - some of the liberties taken by Jackson are for a purpose. Staying too true to the text (especially the dialog) wouldn’t necessarily have made things better.
rshetts
1685
agreed: while it is silly, so is a lot of Tolkien’s dialog. Especially where elves are concerned.
I like Jacksons LOTR and Hobbit movies for that reason. Books rely heavily on an individuals imagination. It is impossible for someone to adapt a book to film and please everybody. I accept that these are Jackson’s vision of Tolkiens work. He keeps the core of the story lines and goes from there. It would be a miracle if he made these movies as I have envisioned the books so I dont expect him to. I enjoy them for what they are.
Scuzz
1686
So I finally saw the movie last Saturday. I would like to say I loved it but I just can’t. There is no way you can add all that crap to the story and still call it the Hobbit. This movie should be called “Peter Jackson’s Hobbit”. There is so much padding added to the movie that adds nothing to the story. The stupid Radagast bunny wagon, the way the barrel escape is handled, the Taurial-Killi crap, the Dwarves-Dragon chase in the mountain, the insane Orcs following the dwarves everywhere they go etc etc etc.
The stuff with Gandalf investigating Dol Gulder is fine, it fits in with the book and with the continuing saga but the rest is pure fluff.
I would give the movie at best a B-, or even a C+. I think I can honestly say that unlike the LOTR movies I will not be stopping to watch this a couple years from now when it shows up on TBS or Spike TV.
Also, rather than needing an extended edition these movies need an editors cut edition.
I’d love to see a reduced, non-director’s cut, take all 3 movies and slice it down to about 3.5-4 hours and call it a day. And an undoubtedly better film.
But… you know there will be 4 hour long extend editions of each film, you KNOW IT!
The “extended” version of the first Hobbit film is “merely” 13 minutes longer, just pushing it past the 3-hr mark (182 mins). As you might expect, it’s mostly added filler (on top of all the other filler), although the prologue shows Thror deliberately snubbing Thranduil, which puts a more personal spin on his refusal to help the dwarves when Erebor is attacked by Smaug.
eliandi
1690
Its in the Third Age mod for Medieval TW 2.
MadGav
1691
I’d say your in the tiny minority with this opinion, but hey - some people just love to hate!
Saw this today, great - apart from the ending ( middle movie syndrome )
Saw this last night finally at the theater, and my wife and I both came away impressed. Dramatically better than the first movie, felt much more in keeping with the LOTR movies. It took a little while to grab me, at one point around the Beorn encounter my wife asked whether we’d walked into an animated movie by mistake, but once they arrived at Mirkwood we were hooked. I was prepared to be disappointed by any depiction of Smaug, but I wasn’t prepared for Weta to completely nail it. He was magnificent. The last hour of the movie flew by, I was sure there was at least an hour to go when it finally cut to black. I’d still prefer to see an non-embellished version of the story eventually, and perhaps if I read the book again (it’s been 30+ years) the inconsistencies might annoy me more, but yeah, pretty good.
Mr_Zero
1693
My question about this movie: why did the spiders speak English?
You ever try to teach a spider French?
Nuf said!
My 15000 post on this forum ladies and gentleman. A dumb joke about a movie spider. At least I wasn’t being a dick!
They didn’t, they spoke spiderish. When Bilbo put on The One Ring, its power allowed him to understand the spiders. I was watching for that because I wondered how they would handle the book scene of talking spiders without it looking ridiculous.
Mr_Zero
1697
As I remember it, the English persisted after the ring came off, but I may be wrong.
No, that’s not true. The Hobbit was written before Tolkien had decided that Bilbo’s ring was the One Ring. It’s sole power in The Hobbit is invisibility. The spiders speak the common tongue, later called Westron, because they’re sentient, not simple beasts. Tolkien treats Westron as English in his books, and in The Hobbit almost everyone, from trolls to goblins to Smaug, uses it as either their only tongue or one of their languages. The only exception that comes to mind is the wargs. Only Gandalf could understand their speech when Thorin and Company were trapped in the trees, so clearly the wargs weren’t speaking Westron then. Whether or not they could if they wanted to is unclear.
Note too that I’m only talking in the context of The Hobbit here. It’s true that the One Ring did grant its wearer the power to understand the speech of various dark creatures, but that was a much later addition by Tolkien, a retcon if you will :-). Nothing that happens in The Hobbit requires or is explained by that conferred ability.
I laughed enough to cause my wife to ask what was so funny, so there you go. For the record, she agreed that it was a dumb joke. ;)
Haha, worth it! Wait till you see what I do at 20k. :)
