Jackson to do The Hobbit, after all?

Movies
1933

I just saw the last movie tonight. Now I guess I know how the people who hate the lens flare in the new Star Trek movies feel.

Something about the visuals for all 3 Hobbit movies really gets to me. From the very beginning of the first movie with the kaleidoscope roller coaster ride through the Lonely Mountain it’s bothered me. Some scenes are worse than others, the furnace scene from the second movie was particularly bad. It’s hard to describe what it is, but it’s the same feeling I get when I see faces in video games that try too hard to be realistic. They aren’t real, they just end up being uncanny and distracting. I guess for the Hobbit it was supposed to look fantastical and storybook like? Whatever the goal, it didn’t work for me and just drove home the impression that the movies never really figured out what they were trying to be.

1934

Saw this on Christmas day. It was the first time we’d seen one of the movies in “Extreme 3D HFR” so that was quite a change from prior viewings. I don’t know what the “Extreme” did except add a couple of bucks to the price. It was being shown on a 70 foot screen (perhaps that’s what made it Extreme) and had reserved seating so we were certainly comfortable.

My wife couldn’t get over the HFR aspect so that was a downer for her. I know it’s been discussed a lot when the movies first came out, but she felt that it gave the movies a cheap feel - she kept saying it felt like a soap opera (maybe that’s partially a judgement call on the quality of the script though). It definitely made it feel more “TV like” and therefore less of a spectacle (to me).

As for the film itself, pretty disappointing. As I said to my wife after the first 20 minutes - I guess they didn’t feel the need to do any of that bothersome character development. And I agree with the discussion that they could have / should have wrapped up Smaug at the end of the 2nd movie, instead of having all those ridiculous slapstick chases through the foundries. Does anyone really think if Smaug had been killed at the end of the 2nd movie that people wouldn’t have wanted to go to the 3rd one?

The fight with Legolas doing all of his magical acrobatics (including climbing up the rocks as the broken tower he fought on disintigrated) was a bit much. And the amount of CG/pancake makeup on Legolas was a bit disturbing, but I guess that’s what you get for filming prequels 11+ years after the original movies.

The callout to the LOTR films was sort of goofy. “Hey Legolas - go north, there’s this dude you need to meet.” We don’t need that, guys.

And yeah, the continued focus on the Laketown doofus (Alfrid, was it?) felt like padding and a waste of time. Hey Peter Jackson: nobody cares about that guy, stop wasting screen time with him!

I guess overall the Hobbit trilogy is disappointing in that it surely felt like it could have been 2 decent movies with 4 to 5 hours of interesting storytelling. Instead what we got was 7 to 8 hours with a couple of hours of pretty obvious bloat.

At least I got a pretty good family experience out of it!

1935

I went into the movie expecting it to be pretty bad, in some part thanks to the “disappointed” sentiment that echoed strong enough across the internet to be a meme. However, it still was a good movie to watch. Not great, but certainly good and therefore plenty better than I’d hoped. Every criticism indeed holds up, but none were strong enough to drive the fun from the experience for me and mine. I think, perhaps, that it’s the Civ V of films for this year.

1936

Peter Jackson is the new George Lucas, with the exception that he does better action seens (but still occasionally ridiculous).

This movie, as with the past two, had good bits. This movie, as with the past two, had bad bits. And this movie, as with the past two, had inexplicable bits.

  1. Dragon Sickness - what? Why?
  2. Sky Lances - why did we spend all that time setting up the sky lance nonsense again? And that was all in the service of (1) not allowing Bilbo to locate the weak spot (a nice moment for Bilbo in the books) and (2) just having Bard do it with a regular bow (albeit one that was made out of bits of a bow and his, uh, son).
  3. Why include Beorn at all if you’re only going to have a 3 second clip of him getting Eagle Dropped into a mass of orcs? He’s practically the sixth army in the books. More imporantly, we could have skipped “next best dressed troll” #13 for more Beorn running around being super awesome shots.
  4. GUYS THE RING IS EVIL. Actually, that part felt toned-down in part 3. The rest of the “ZOMG WERE LEADING INTO LOTR” stuff was sort of obnoxious.
  5. Forbidden Love - no. Just. . . no.

Freeman and Armitage were terrific in their parts (all the returning players were just as good as before). The rest of the Dwarves performed admirably, and Luke Evans is best. Jackson’s Jacksonism sort of gets in the way of everything, though. Most of the action was solid, though at times some of it felt completely weightless (like Dain wrist-backhanding people with a gigantic hammer).

1937

From what I’ve read, there were a few more Beorn shots planned, but since Weta didn’t have much time to finish all the battle scenes, Jackson wanted to remove Beorn completely from BotFA. It was then the studio to insist on there at least being a few brief bits to have some more ties to the previous movie. (Probably, for merchandising purposes as well.)

  1. Forbidden Love - no. Just. . . no.

BUT IT WAS REAL.

1938

So Beorn should be expected in the director’s cut? Yay.

I would have preferred to watch it in 2D - it was too blurry and dark as I expected, but the kids really wanted to watch it in 3D so what can you do Re ‘dragon sickness’ - the kids (10 and 6 year old) interpreted as ‘Thorin was greedy’ and not at some mystical ailment so score one for Jackson I guess there. Other then that I enjoyed it for what it was - the base story is too good for Jackson to completely ruin, and I’m happy we got to see this on the big screen.

1939

I hate the defense of this movie that I’ve seen in various places that boils down to “Wait until the extended edition!” Hate it.

It’s like when people tell me that something “makes more sense” with the backstory in some supplemental media like a tie-in comic or web site game.

1940

I agree with that perspective. Much as I prefer the extended editions of the LotR films, they were still fantastic in their theatrical cuts.

I don’t really expect the extended edition to save this one, anyway.

1941

Considering the fact that Jacksonian bloat is the film series’ worst sin, how could it? Less is more in the case of this trilogy.

1942

Looking forward to reading through all the comments here after we see it tonight. Not going in with high expectations so hopefully it’ll at least be entertaining!

1943

Best thing about the movie was that it extended at exactly 11:59pm…other than that, wow. I guess I’ll watch the extended edition some day and see if that changes anything. I pretty much agree with all the criticisms above - just too many to recount. I was kind of rooting for the orcs near the end for some reason. And I was fully expecting Alfred to die in some embarrassing T-Rex/toilet-like scene. He was setting that up the whole movie and then just forgot to do it? Like maybe Bard shoots the fat troll and it keels over onto poor Alfred-in-drag, its big fat troll balls smothering him to death.

1944

Just got back from seeing it in 3D (only show available). I disliked the first movie, liked the second one… and this one fell somewhere in between. It was about as good as you might expect, and better than you might hope for given that it’s a two-and-a-half hour movie based on like 30 pages in a 150-page book.

Really, the movie is like 45 minutes of dialog and just under two hours of CGI-combat. The highlight of the movie (oddly) might have been the first ten minutes in which poor Cumberbatch the Dragon tries to go out to a barbeque and is mercilessly slaughtered by a random schnook. Everything more-or-less goes downhill from that scene, though there were some highlights:

All the Big Guys for the LotR movies get to come back for cameos and generally kick some ass in a few sequences, so if you didn’t want to go see this movie because Agent Smith the Uber Elf wasn’t in it, or you don’t think a Middle Earth movie without Christopher Lee is worth your time, rejoice! Everybody gets a paycheck from Peter Jackson!

My wife - who was the one that demanded that we see it in the theater - said that the best thing about the movie was trying to guess which “war animal” would make and appearance next. There were War Dogs, War Pigs, War Goats, War Elks… E-I-E-I-O.

And though Jackson stuffed a VAST amount of extra stuff in there, like forbidden intra-speicies eye-gazing and Dune-like giant worms that apparently no one realized lived not five miles from the fucking lonely mountain, he still managed to remain largely true to the book in several key aspects that pretty much everyone hoped he wouldn’t: Bilbo manages to miss the majority of the titular battle, and the goddamned deus ex machina giant eagles manage to swoop in and save the day apropos of nothing.

For those keeping track, that’s three movies out of six that have giant fucking eagles coming out of nowhere to save the day, completely un-earned by the heroes. And that’s not even counting all the times they save Gandalf simply because he knows how to speak to moths.

They say that if all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. But sometimes when you are surrounded by nothing but nails, you have to start asking yourself why you don’t start using the hammers you have in the shed. And by hammers, I mean Giant Fucking Eagles. If I were a human, dwarf, of elvish commander in Middle Earth, Giant Fucking Eagles would be my first and perhaps only answer to every problem.

“Sir! We’re being attacked by orcs!”
“Send in the Giant Fucking Eagles.”

Sir! We need to get some random civilian to Mount Doom!"
“Get me a Giant Fucking Eagle and an air-sickness bag.”

“Sir! Balrogs are selling unlicensed dwarf-on-elf porn!”
“I’ll need a Giant Fucking Eagle, a four-foot length of twine, and a staple gun.”

1945

After the Sandworms, and Troll-a-pults, and the Advanced Orc CnC, I didn’t mind Eagles coming in dropping a Beorn Bomb on Orc Army#2.

After some time and distance from seeing the movie, I am mostly over being sour about Battle of Five Armies. Thinking back on the trilogy as a whole, I love the actors in their characters so much that I can forgive almost all of the Jacksonisms. When the extended editions come out, though, I may be motivated to hack-edit my own versions without all of things I was bitching about earlier. Dave is spot-on when he writes that in the case of The Hobbit, less is certainly more. I will repeat my lament that the comparatively stripped-down Jackson of the LotR would have made these movies much better. No one is going to miss a minute of Azog-on-Ice here and Alfrid-in-drag there.

In the end, after watching the behind the scenes stuff I wonder how much of Jackson going back to the director’s chair was the result of Jackson and/or the Studio(s) not being happy with Del Toro and having a thousand people and $500m for New Zealand depending on you to get these movies made.

1946

Hahahah. Well put. Those were similar to my thoughts back when I first read the books too. But by the time the movies came out, I’d forgotten all about them, so the Eagles are a surprise to me every time.

I’m still wondering if I want to go see this movie in the theaters.

1947

Saw this on Saturday with my son. Overall we both liked it. I could have done without the romance angle and think it took more away from the movies than it added. Dwarves and Dragons are my two favorite things in Fantasy so I wish we could have had more of both. When Dain (Warpig!) and the Dwarven army showed up I almost let out a little squee of joy.

1948

Clearly either you or Peter Jackson himself “borrowed” the idea from the good old LOTR HISHE. ;)

rezaf

1949

But even if you have a instant win button for everything, you don’t want to push it too often lest it breaks upon the furious pounding. And then maybe the more they see the unstoppable eagles, the more they will react and develop counter measure, like wraith lord with uber drake pet, or just focus firing.

1950

This doesn’t need an extended version, it needs a minimized version. Reduced to maybe 3-4 hours would work.

1951

I don’t know, man, I could have easily watched another 10 or 20 minutes of that barrel ride down the river.

1952

Dammit, I done been trolled.