The Hobbit


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The Silmarillion would actually be amazing if they ever had the chance to do it. It would have the opposite problem of The Hobbit, that being that there's actually too much story content to deal with—which would put it in a similar position to the LOTR films. The thing is that the film rights to The Silmarillion still rest with the Tolkien estate, and they've been adamant about holding onto them.

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A copy/paste of my thouights on this film-

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies- Fuck off with this. I feel bad saying this because they're packed with talented folk and incredible production design, but this was a good 70% battle scene and not in a good way. No kidding, I honestly think that number is legit. The main problem is that the already loose structure of the original story in no way accommodates a three-film version. The simple nature of the original story doesn't bond well with the complications added to try and make it match the tone of the original film trilogy. This feels like the conclusion, middle and beginning of three different stories in that order. The only thread I was able to really hang on to was my guessing game about who was going to Sean Bean this time.

On top of that, the 70% of the film that is battle is just mind-numbingly boring. I got the same hollow dull expression that resulted from watching Transformers: The Dark of the Moon. I couldn't find it in myself to give a shit about so much of what was going on. There are unintentional highlights, I think everyone in the theatre laughed when Billy Connolly showed up just as a reflex. On the flip side of that stuff that's supposed to be funny like the former servant of the master is just painful.

Also, fuck off Legolas. He's like John Virgo on Big Break now, saying "I bet I can get all three balls from here" and then doing it. It's so predictable it's long since stopped being impressive. Whoever pointed out the escalation from surfing down some steps on a shield to taking down a war elephant was totally right, and that course of that curve remains unaltered.

The ten minutes of Freeman we get remain the best thing but the movie hardly hinges on him, he's minimised to the functional aspects of his character. I wish they'd found a way to double or triple his screen time, but in some ways the fanfic love story gets more than he does.

Final thought- I think if Peter Jackson made a film about the NFL where the Browns made it to the Superbowl against the Patriots, Philly would still come in at the end and score the winning touchdown.

It's a bad movie, and I didn't even come close to saying that for the last two

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"Peace, asshole dad, I'm out."

"You know son...*wink*...you should go find a ranger...*wink*...his name is Strider...*wink*...and his true name...*wink*...you'll have to find out for yourself."

"Cool. Hey dad, did you see all those sick Matrix moves I did?"

"Yes son. That shit was as awesome as Elrond kicking Nazgul ass."

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That actually bothered me.

There's no basis in the fiction for her going "dark" like that, other than her speech in Lorien where she says that if she took the ring, she would then become an evil queen. It was neat in the FOTR film to visually illustrate it with her transforming, but to actually take it a step further in this one and show her turning dark on her own, without the ring's influence, was too much. Galadriel is actually known as one of the most righteous and pure characters in Tolkien's legendarium; having her turn dark not only contradicts the morality of magic (which is a huge deal in LOTR), but it's honestly just a reference to something that happened only in the movies anyway.

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It really sucks. Normally when people ask me where to start with Lord of the Rings, I say that the easiest and best way is to start with the extended cuts of the LOTR films, then read the books afterward. If they're heavy reader-types then I reverse those. But with The Hobbit, I'm seriously just going to say to skip the movies altogether. Unlike the LOTR films, which did a great job of expressing the main ideas of the books in a dramatic fashion, the Hobbit movies add nothing good that wasn't already there.*

*Except the "Misty Mountains" song/theme in the first movie; that was pretty great. But the lyrics of it were already in the book, so...

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Agreed on that. The strongest portions of this trilogy by far were the Bilbo parts, be it deciding to join the quest or confronting Gollum or Smaug. He was barely there in the third film, all he did was smuggle out the Arkenstone. I'm not asking them to make a bunch of shit up, but as we've been saying this is why you wanted the two-film structure, the story can't support more.

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