The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug Reviews

mikecl wrote: And Shakespeare gets retold in all kinds of ways. It's still a homage to the author.

... and Dostoyevsky, and Homer and Chekov and.... but when it's a nerd hero like Tolkien all the nerd rage comes out and blasts it. I find it really odd. No one cried a river when O Brother Where Are't Thou came out "that's not like the Odyssey" or when Adaptation came out or Barney's Version or Tideland. It's just that Tolkien has such a rabid fan base.

I mean aren't most fantasy movies and books kind of rip offs of his world anyway? How many of the people complaining about this liked Dragonlance or any of the other thousand and one LOTR rip offs out there?

If Jackson's heart is totally in this, why does he have to make so many unnecessary changes to the story? Does he feel that Tolkien's story wasn't very good, and that he is such an amazing director that he can improve on the story in so many ways?

Let's take the romance for an example. Is The Hobbit a bad book because it doesn't have a romance in it? Must every story have a romance in it? Or can some stories be about other things, like say adventure and exploration and a big freaking dragon. I think that there is room in the world for stories that don't include a romance, and that forcing one into The Hobbit is an obvious example of trying to reach a larger market in order to make a lot more money.

Yes, I get it, movies are generally made with the intent to make a lot of money. But why must The Hobbit feature major changes in hopes of a huge audience, instead of sticking closer to the original story and just making a moderately large sum of money? The answer is greed and cynicism. After the success of the Lord of the Rings movies, Jackson had already made a lot of money for himself and the studio. If he was truly in this to make the best movie he could make, then he lost sight of his priorities and let the studio's greed guide the story.

This isn't bullshit and this isn't a guess. Anybody with even a modest amount of common sense can see that if the trilogy needed three movies, then this single book by the same author didn't need three movies. The only realistic explanation is that Jackson and the studio knew they could make a lot more money by stretching The Hobbit into three movies, and also that stretching it to four was going to be too blatant. Your shrill denial doesn't change that math, but it does make you look gullible.

All that said, I thought that Jackson made some very sensible changes to the LotR trilogy. Tom Bombadil could have very easily been a trainwreck of Jar-Jar proportions. The Two Towers introduced too many new characters, and Jackson wisely left many of them out. That final conflict in the Shire was a bit too much even in the book, and would have fallen flat on the big screen after the previous epic scenes. So I was very surprised and disappointed with the bad decisions made in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and I am hearing more of the same about The Desolation of Smaug.

I'm with Shellhead on this. I don't think taking the book into three movies is taking artistic license or anything. Like trying to do it better. It is pure money grab, I know movies are a business and that's reality but the best way to tell The Hobbit isn't in three movies so it's something else now. And the decision to make it something else was not to try and make it better or to do justice to the book. That's the difference.

When they start making the Twilight spin-off movies, I won't be upset because it's obvious what those are and what they represent. The LOTR trilogy is terrific cinema and true art. This Hobbit stuff is not that. There are elements of beauty in it but it's long and drawn out only for one reason. LOTR was not long and drawn out for money. They could have made 6 movies out of that but they didn't.

I'm just waiting for the final shoe to drop and for the last instalment to end with, "…Part One". Then I'll skip out on that like I did with Harry Potter and Twilight (which I had given up on after the first one regardless).

I just don't like that Middle Earth has become a movie franchise. It wasn't Jackson's idea to make it three movies. They probably just asked him if it was possible. Hobbit would have been an okay single movie, a fantastic two movies, and a really average three movies. I would have loved to see it done in two movies. that would have been perfect for me.

Shellhead wrote:

Jeff White wrote: Jaded.

I've moved away from the idea that these are three movies just for the sake of greed. If that was the case why all the extra work? Simply do three, standard hour and a half movies. Higher profit there.

With all the backfill and new material, I believe Jackson and company really wanted a three film prequel the scope of his lotr. At least an epic to set up his trilogy. Maybe I'm an apologists though. Regardless, I'm glad there are three and that they are long. I rarely go to the theater anymore so I dig the event feel of the thing.

When you supersize your meal at McDonalds, you get more french fries and more beverage with your burger, you don't get a better quality meal. The Hobbit is a big story, so cramming it into just one movie would probably required sacrificing too much. But blowing it up into a trilogy is an obvious money grab of epic proportions, and you are being a huge apologist to come up with any other rationale for it. The addition of a female character and a love triangle is more cash grabbing, by trying to appeal to a wider audience than the book was ever written for in the first place. Jackson knows that many viewers are more interested in quantity than quality, and he delivers, with longer movies. The love triangle helps fill up the extra time, as does Bard's backstory, personalities for all the non-Thorin dwarves, and this whole side-adventure featuring Gandalf.

What? The audience? Tolkien's book and Jackson's movies are not for the same audience. Thinking the movie should only target the same audience as the book is nieve.

And are you saying these films aren't high quality? Disagree with some directorial or screenwriting choices if you will but I can't see where one would say they aren't high quality films.

And oy the romance... I can't believe y'all are this hung up on it. I'm glad Jackson is giving some of the dwarves some personality and something to do on screen so their deaths will have _some_ weight to them. Here Jackson is doing the story a big solid. Besides the romance only takes a few minutes of screen time... damn.

As far as three movies, again, if this were a season of 9 one hour episodes on HBO y'all would be eating it up...

I think I might end up liking the Hobbit trilogy better than LOTR one (although both are great)...

My only complaint is that the dragon chasing around the dwarves scene went too long. There are some exquisite shots in the movie, such as when Gandalf and Radagast standing with Dol Guldur as the background...

mikecl wrote: And Shakespeare gets retold in all kinds of ways. It's still a homage to the author.

Shakespeare is generally retold using Shakespeare's original verse, often in a different setting. His verse is considered an important part of the quality of the stories he tells. I particularly enjoyed Brannaugh's Much Ado About Nothing. But -- a particular favorite film of mine is a true rewrite of The Tempest, no original Shakespeare verse used. But it's not named "The Tempest" so it gets a pass from me.

JJ wrote: No one cried a river when O Brother Where Are't Thou came out "that's not like the Odyssey"

That's because it isn't called "The Odyssey". People didn't go into the theater expecting to see The Odyssey, they expected to see something they could compare and contrast to The Odyssey, something on a similar theme. I don't have a problem with that.

I think you can make a fair argument the Tolkien's writing style and story telling are both superb. Writing in an elf chick with two guys pining for her, presumably to spice things up for the ladies, i.e., broaden the demographic, and stretch 300 pages to eight or nine hours of film (that's about 40 pages per hour by the way) is an inappropriate choice in a film carrying the same name as the book. Were the film (films) named Middle Earth, The Early Days they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with the license. Using "The Hobbit" and then presenting something with huge changes is dishonest. They're using the brand name of the book to drive sales.

As for Mr. Jackson's caring about his films, well of course he does. I'm not questioning his judgement, I'm questioning the motivations of the people that lent him a quarter of a billion dollars to produce the films. If they want a broader audience they get it, and Mr. Jackson understands that compromises will need to be made. Elves fall in love with dwarves suddenly, which would have amused Tolkien to no end. Making this into three films (and making the last Potter book into two) is about increasing the per-patron revenue. The Hobbit could have been (in fact has been) made into a single film. For Christ sake War and Peace was done in a single film. These are commerce decisions pure and simple. If you want to call it nerd rage that's fine, but more than a few literary geeks are rubbing the back of their necks over this as well. Tolkien's writing is the best in the genre and garners a lot of respect outside of nerd-dom.

These movies are the LCGs of the film industry, specifically designed to continually hit you up for an annual payment. It would not suprise me at all to see The Book of Lost Tales carved up into films at some point in the future.

S.

Jackson didn't have a choice in the three movie deal. He was told three, he originally planned for two. Given that situation, he did what he could and added some stuff to link the series together. I'm not sure what else you guys think he could have done in that circumstance.

The Hobbit wasn't a perfect book. It was written well before the Lord of the Rings was fully conceived as an idea, so some adjustments were necessary to keep the two movies consistent. If Jackson stayed true to the books, the movie would be worse off for it (except within the vocal nerd echo chamber). I swear, nerds are worse than bible-thumpers when it comes to canonical purity shit.

The Book of Lost Tales and the Simlarilion have already been milked by both JRR Tolkein and Christopher. Anything Jackson could do wouldn't be worse than what already exists.

I haven't read a single book by Tolkien. So there's that.

I really liked the Jackson LoTR Trilogy. The first two Hobbit movies are better than the LoTR movies.

The LoTR Trilogy had some great scenes sprinkled with New Zealand tourism shots featuring Hobbits. The "Oh look they're walking a really long way" shots of LoTR took me out of the movie more than the "Oh look it's HFR 3D" of the Hobbit movies.

The LoTR Trilogy introduced a a new world. You can't do that twice. You can't expect the Hobbit movies to give you that same grand feeling in the same grand way that you're being exposed to an entirely new place. But the side-plots and interesting things put into the Hobbit movies makes the LoTR world more interesting and fleshed out, and that's something a good prequel should do. The Hobbit movies let me spend more time thinking about what makes Middle Earth tick and less time looking at Elijah Wood being exasperated and desperate-looking.

The characters in the Hobbit are more interesting than LoTR. The LoTR cast and characters were great, but often one-dimensional and/or predictable. I'm more interested in what happens to Thorin, Tauriel, and Smaug than I ever was in Aragorn, Frodo, or Saruman. Suaron was and still is awesome. Gandalf is Gandalf, but in the Hobbit his relationship with Bilbo, Thorin, and Radagast is more interesting than his protector role in the LoTR films. Legolas is more interesting in the Hobbit by far.

The Hobbit creates a great foreboding tone without having to have the ringwraiths explicitly chasing the heroes. It builds on things we know like the corrupting power of the Ring without making such a spectacle of it. We get to see the effects of the Ring becoming more powerful as Sauron becomes more powerful, and we don't have to watch Frodo have a mini pain-gasm every time he takes the ring off his finger. Since we know the Ring is "bad" but it isn't so overtly so, the Ring almost seems creepier in the Hobbit movies.

The "bumbling dwarf / elite elf" action sequences in the Hobbit are just as good as the "bumbling hobbit / elite elf" action sequences in LoTR. The Hobbit hasn't matched the epic LoTR battles, but I don't know that it needs to or even should. Those sequences are what makes the LoTR the "closer" of the entire series.

Like I said at the start I haven't read the books, so I can't comment on how faithful Bilbo's and Smaug's meeting in the film is to the original story. I can say that the film's take was extremely good; there were several "Oh man how is Bilbo not going to get torched any second" moments in that scene.

Long story short: LoTR Trilogy was great, but with a strong 3rd act The Hobbit Trilogy could be really great.

I don't think we'll be seeing any more Tolkien movies after this . I am pretty sure the estate has not licensed any of his other material for movies/games etc.

Msample wrote: I don't think we'll be seeing any more Tolkien movies after this . I am pretty sure the estate has not licensed any of his other material for movies/games etc.

No, and that was how Jackson justified the presence of a third Hobbit film, because that would be it for Middle-Earth film-making (Silmarillion et. al. aren't licensed/optioned).

Can someone explain to me, preferably Sag or Shellhead since they seem the most adamant about it, why it would be interesting to see the exact same thing as what you read only on a screen instead. Because that is something I will never understand.

For me (not being a huge fan of Tolkien's writing to begin with, I honestly think no one would even know of him if it wasn't for his world and his imagination because his writing is not that interesting on it's own) there is zero point in making a film identical to the book. Because you can just read the book. After Sin City I never wanted to see anyone do it again. I feel like enjoying that film is tantamount to admitting movies are better than books, because honestly who would read a book that was identical to a movie they love?

It has to be different or it's an insult to the audience. It has to be very different. LOTR didn't go far enough in my mind, although I enjoy it because I don't plan on reading those books again, The Hobbit is more in line with my thinking on what movies should be when being adapted from a book.

As for Sag's "it's called The Hobbit it should be the Hobbit" argument. Do you mean to say that if it had a different title you'd be ok with it? Like if they called it "The Hobbit, an interpretation by Peter Jackson" would that be ok... because that's what I already expected going into this.

I believe I offered Tales Of Middle Earth or something similar to that earlier. It would seem to me personally to be more honest, and were it me I would have presented The Hobbit as one tale, and others (even if wholly new) under other names. Make as many movies as you want. It just seems disingenuous to me to call it The Hobbit then present something else. I appreciate that things need to change because the medium changes, but this one appears to be about financial, not medium challenges. "The Hobbit" carries sales and that trumps.

My daughter said she and her friends were joking in the theater during the film -- "this thing has to end somehow, right? We don't stay here until the next one is released?" Sounds like two movies would have been a better choice.

Regardless, they can do whatever they want as far as I'm concerned. I'm not going to pretend their choices aren't about commerce though. Go twice, the economy can use the help. But I can't help but wonder if anyone during the read-through mentioned the inter-species romance and bleated.

S.

If you have a movie/trilogy primarily about a hobbit named Bilbo, a group of dwarves and Gandalf going to Lonely Mountain to kill a dragon named Smaug where they have adventures with goblins, get rescued by eagles, Bilbo finds a magic ring involving a game of riddles with a creature named Gollum, get imprisoned by wood elves and then escape in barrels and then titling it something else would be disingenuous.

There may be some stuff added and some stuff altered, but the core of the story is still The Hobbit.

Sure. Give me a thrilling car chase and I'm happy.

I guess I'm not arguing as much as I'm asking. You CAN do it, maybe you even SHOULD do it. But in hindsight did it make it better? Made it longer.