The Hobbit

[Armblessed]

Hmm, I'm looking forward to this one. And I'm happy about it being three movies.

I'm not a big fan of the Lord of the Rings movies. I own the extended editions and watch them now and again, but I just can't get that into them. They did a really good job and it could have been much, much worse, but there's something about the tone of them all that doesn't sit well with me. Its a tone that will be better suited to The Hobbit, I hope.

While I'm typically one for sticking to the book as much as possible, I'm actually kind of hoping they expand on a few of the things that I always wanted The Hobbit to spend more time on. The first being Gandalf going down with the big boys(I assume Galadriel will show up here as part of the White Council?) to deal with the Necromancer. I remember when I first read it being like "Wait, I have to read about the dwarves being lost in the woods when Gandalf is off doing something awesome? Lame!". The second being the aftermath of Smaug with the factions all getting pissed at each other and then the Battle of Five Armies, which I felt was a big let down in the book. Lots of build up and then Bilbo has a nap through it all.
While fleshing these things out wouldn't be directly like the book, I think there's enough in the writing to work with and make something interesting without straying far from what was intended.

Oh, that and I want the dwarves to be more than the laughing stock they were rather made out to be in LotR movies. Yeah, The Hobbit has some doofus dwarves played for laughs, but I hope they get a chance to shine, especially towards the end when their armies show up.

[_D_]

It would be good if they showed the council again with Gandalf, Sauruman and Radagast and the unnamed other 2 but it would be great if they showed Valinor and why the wizards are send to Middle Earth in the first place...

[greg]

Yes, there will be a lot of additional material to "tie" this in with LOTR. Lots of "fanservice" appearances from characters in LOTR who weren't even in the original Hobbit novel.

I think extending this to not just two but THREE movies is a disaster in the making. And they're already advertising Smaug. Now it's been decades since I last read the book, but doesn't he only appear in the second half of the book? At the way this trilogy is going to be paced, people won't see him until the 2nd movie at earliest.

Well, although Legolas wasn't a character in The Hobbit, he was retconned in the LOTR books. So having him appear in the movie is natural. That I understand. As for others like Galadriel appearing in this movie, I didn't really think of how she could tie in until Armblessed mentioning the council. As for Smaug, of course the dragon doesn't appear in the book until the end, but for good movie making, it makes sense to depict the dragon hoarding the treasure while Gandalf and the dwarves are discussing how they will win it back. Now Jackson could just have them just talk of the dragon and not show it until the end, but that doesn't seem to be his style. I imagine that they will have a montage of past events like in the first LOTR film.

While I admit I am a bit unsettled with the fact that Jackson is making one book into three movies, I think there could be some justifiable embellishment, especially with the Battle of the Five Armies at the end. As Armblessed said, Bilbo did get knocked out and missed most of the action in the book. I forgot about this until I watched the Bakshi cartoon from the '70s on YouTube sometime last summer with my wife and kid. If they expand a battle like that to make it more screenworthy, I see every reason for them doing so. Jackson made the Battle at Helm's Deep larger than it actually was in the book, even bringing in the Elves from Lothlorien and giving Haldir a heroic death. Purists may scoff at that, and they may also get upset about goofy Tom Bombadil getting axed from the Fellowship movie.

So I'd feel more comfortable with it being only two 2.5 hour movies, I do have faith in Jackson in doing The Hobbit justice. So the whole Mayan calendar/end of the world in December 2012 thing be damned; I don't think God will let the world end until at least the third Hobbit movie comes out. I'm pretty sure God wants to see how this new trilogy will turn out.

[greg]

I saw The Hobbit movie last night, I saw it last night with two like-minded guys who also hate 3D gimmicks. One of them is a guy who used to be a minor Hollywood director and producer, and worked on The Matrix and the first Spider-Man movies. He was even working on the Dungeons and Dragons movie in the late '90s until he rage quit because the stupid bigwigs failed to understand the subject matter (at one point they were even insisting on putting in some rapper to appeal to the ghetto demographic---this was before the LOTR movies came out and made it big). Anyhow, the movie is great and I enjoyed every minute of it. People who say it drug on too long were probably watching the uncomfortable 3D, HFR version which makes people uncomfortable.

So, here are my impressions of the movie, minor spoilers ahead, but since a lot of everyone have already read the book, it's no big deal, I think. I haven't read The Hobbit since 12 years ago, so my memory is a bit hazy.

OK, so there is a lot of embellishment, but it is good embellishment. Like my friend said, the main point in extending this into three movies is to make more money. However, Peter Jackson really loves Tolkein's works, and he is obviously pulling from a lot of supplemental material. To say the obvious, Tolkein, by today's standards wasn't a good writer. His story is good, but his pacing, lack of solid characterization, and failure to go into detail when needed is everywhere. He created a fantastic, fascinating world and endearing characters, but so much stuff was retconned in appendices and extended works.

It's quite probable that the decision to make The Hobbit into three movies is the decision of the studio and not Jackson's. But, I do believe that the action and pacing for this first movie does justify a trilogy. The movie starts out with Bilbo as we knew him from the original trilogy, just before his 111th birthday. Frodo makes a pleasant cameo, and naturally at this point he is still cute and naive. Bilbo describes the events of Smaug conquering the Lonely Mountain, and this action is shown on screen. See, the book can say, "Oh yeah, there was this big battle," but it does not make for good cinema. It sets up the premise of this new trilogy.

When the dwarves enter the movie, Jackson brings them to life and shows their culture well. He takes the time to make at least a handful of them memorable. Of the 13 dwarves, Tolkein didn't bother to really flesh out most of their characters, resulting in 13 very flat characters with no personality, with only a name and who is related to whom (and "Bombur is the fat one," etc). My only gripe is the effort to make Thorin Oakenshield the dashing, handsome type. I would never think any dwarf would fit this description, but the two young Fili and Kili are rather smashing and handsome for some reason. Well, whatever. They are brought to life better than the book could do, and for that I am pleased. Balin gets a lot of screentime, who, as you may know, went on later to rebuild Moria before it was overrun with Orcs again and was killed. Gloin, father of Gimli, was a fairly trivial character in this movie. I had to look him up here to see which one he was since I couldn't keep track of all 13 faces and their names.

Radagast plays a prominent role in this movie, and honestly I do not remember him being mentioned in The Hobbit book at all. Maybe this makes up for his bit part in Fellowship of the Ring being cut out. Anyhow, I just don't remember him being the one to discover the necromancer's tower. Still, this is handled quite well.

I always thought that the term "goblin" was another word for "orc." In this movie, it seems that goblins are slightly different than orcs, and they look almost like an homage to the Ralph Bakshi designs in a way. The escape from the goblin king was very cool.

A main antagonist is put into this plot, Azog the pale orc. I don't remember him being in the story much, other than being referenced to, but for a story that's lacking a real main antagonist, he'll do well, at least for the first two movies.

The movie ends right after the escape from the wargs, when Gandalf lights pine cones to throw at their adversaries after the group climbed up the pine trees. So the movie is very much embellished and the characters are more fleshed-out, so that's a good thing. And as we discussed earlier, in the third movie there should be a grand battle that takes place. In the book, Bilbo gets a knock on the head and is unconscious, then wakes up to find out half of his friends have died in battle. That may work for a book, but it makes for a boring movie.

So in all, I am very glad that this is being protracted. As Treebeard would say, "something isn't worth saying, unless it takes a long time to say it." My friend was commenting after the movie on what he would do as an editor to shorten the length, but I say let it all stay in. I love movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. I wish Blade Runner was even longer. Sure, you could edit Lawrence of Arabia to make it a 2 hour movie, but I say leave it alone. I'm disappointed with how movies have become so short these days.

Go see the movie. Just don't watch the 3D, 48FPS, scratch-n-sniff version. I've heard it is extremely disorienting, and looks more like a Discovery Channel documentary than a movie. It also looks, from what I've read on other forums and such, that it looks like they had filmed people moving at half speed and sped the film up twice to make it normal. I really do not want this to be the future of cinema.