The last time I revisited LOTR I made a video of one of my complaints, but overall I just wished they had portrayed the battles a bit more grindy and less Total Warhammer. I never bought that the emperilled humans, in fairly small villages and cities (as they were portrayed) would ever have held their ground against the vast array of not only numerically superior Sauron forces, but the size and scale of the critters they were up against, where skill meant nothing. Being saved by 45 degree angle cavalry charges and clouds of green foam don’t help things in that department either.
(Since then, the Hobbit went even wackier with magic gatling gun sleigh rides, so maybe in retrospect they weren’t so bad.)
Well, those Hobbit movies pulled in about a billion dollars each at the box office, so as much as it disappointed us fanboys, I think “the folks that gave him the reigns” were plenty satisfied with their decision.
Also, it oughta be noted that Jackson didn’t seem super-keen on directing The Hobbit and spend another 4+ years of his life on a single project. He was only Executive Producer until del Toro left the project. I’m not saying we should pity him because he surely got paid a buttload of money to take care of things himself then, but I’m guessing the onus here is also on New Line Cinema for insisting.
There are multiple Hobbit consolidation fan edits floating around. Some definitely better than others.
I think the one I liked the most was just called “There and back again”
It completely cuts out a lot of the long and drawn out individual fight scenes in the battle of five armies, going further and making the whole thing just a brief montage once Bilbo gets knocked out. Also pretty much all the Lake town scenes are completely gone. The dwarves show-up, immediately present themselves to the Master, and are right off to the Mountain, which they never enter except for Bilbo until after Smaug is dead. Plus all the White Council stuff is removed, and a lot of the dwarf/orc backstory, and the red-headed she-elf is reduced to an extra seen briefly in the wine cellar when the dwarves barrel ride out of Mirkwood completely unhindered. Basically any scene that doesn’t have Bilbo present is cut, and then some.
Total runtime was still over 3 hours though (but I suppose it definitely beats the cruel torture of watching 9+ whatever hours of the 3 originals)
Well I didn’t notice any dramatic change in quality, but maybe I am blind.
The only problems I recall were a few continuity issues mostly between the film breaks. The most obvious one was when the eagles fly the dwarves to the Carrock and Thorin is all beat up for some unknown reason and everyone is concerned. The scenes of his showdown with the Albino Orc during “Fifteen birds” is completely cut. Gandalf just throws acorn molotovs and everyone escapes on Eagles.
Got my fiance to watch FoR on Netflix. She’d never seen it and enjoyed it well enough. I have the Extended edition blue rays but would need to setup a player in the bedroom so Netflix was the choice. Plus, I love the films but can’t really sit thru the 4 hour versions all the easily myself without one of the commentaries.
Anyway, we watched it over a couple of nights and then I go to look for TT and RoK and neither pulled up in Netflix. What the hell is this insanity?
edit: I just did some checking and while the US only gets FoR, Canada only gets TT and RotK, but NOT FoR?!
I convinced my mate to binge-watch the entire EE trilogy this weekend. LoTR still remains my favorite movie trilogy ever, and Fellowship one of my favorite movies.
Jackson got more right than wrong, and just about every editorial change he made I agree with. I love Faramir’s character, moving reforging Narsil to the end, and Arwen’s character. There are misses, to be sure, and not everything that got put in the Extended Editions should be there.
The Fellowship was perfectly cast. I love Jon Rys-Davies as Gimli, and Gollum is such an amazing creation.
Not confusing them. She was played by Liv Tyler, I remember her, I’m just not good with names. But I don’t count her existence as Elrond’s daughter to be the same thing as being in the books. In the books she never had a scene with any of the characters, and definitely no dialog or any actions that she performed. She was as much in the books as the various hobbit family members that get a mention in the Shire when Frodo is wrapping up his affairs during the year he spends between Gandalf’s warning and when he finally sets off.
She is a bit part in the books. I don’t mind adding her for a few reasons: it gives Aragorn’s character more depth; and Tolkien really didn’t have a lot of female characters in the book.
Glorfindel is probably the single coolest character in all of Middle Earth in terms of his role in the world’s history, and one of the most powerful, too. But if you only read LotR you wouldn’t know it, and so I think he probably could have been done without.
See even as someone who has read the Silmarillion multiple times, I find his inclusion peripheral at best to Fellowship.
From the perspective of self contained movies it was the right call to place his role on another character. Haldir would have been another halfway decent choice as his death later would have more heft, but would not have made as much coherent thematic or tonal sense given his role elsewhere in Fellowship.
