Very interesting piece over on Salon, commenting on Jackson's 'ironic' approach to the story, & why its alien to the spirit of Tolkien's work
Quote:
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There’s a sequence in the most recent trailer for Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit” that worries me. It’s at the very end: The dwarves are tentatively emerging from the debris of some colossal battle or other, and one of them says, “Well, that could’ve been worse” — and then a Volkswagen-size goblin carcass crashes down on them. This is more Chuck Jones than J.R.R. Tolkien, and if there’s more of the same in the coming feature film — whose scope, as we already know, has expanded far beyond that of the original novel — it may not be just Tolkien’s lovely little picaresque adventure that gets swallowed whole, but its plucky, whimsical tone as well, consumed by modern irony.......... There’s another scene in the trailer in which Gollum, responding to Bilbo’s proposal of a game of riddles, hisses, “If the Baggins loses, we eats it whole,” and Bilbo thinks for a moment, then says, “Fair enough” — but in that “Fair enough,” we don’t hear Hobbity reasonableness, we hear ironic resignation. We hear modernity.http://www.salon.com/2012/12/02/the_...ed_with_irony/
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Perhaps that's the real danger of expanding the original story to the extent they have - not that you end up with Bilbo's journey being swallowed up in the epic sweep of the movies, till it just becomes one tale among many, & Bilbo just one character among many, but that it becomes too grown up & ironic & rather than celebrating the simple Hobbit values of the original story it ends up winking at them knowingly & then goes charging back into the 3D decapitations. Certainly there is 'irony' in TH, but its the irony of, for example, having a build up to a massive battle only for the pov character to get knocked unconscious at the start, miss all the 'heroic', bloody carnage & wake up among the corpses of his friends.