The Desolation

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by MCRmyGirl4eva

As this movie was a Peter Jackson film, with a book he was stretching into three films, I went in with low expectations and therefore was able to enjoy it. The only thing that really irked me was the scene with the spiders.

Jackson, Boyens, et al are simply inept screenwriters and would be flayed alive if they wrote fan-fiction on some of the writing sites I have submitted work on. Bilbo, ostensibly "The Hobbit" as the film title implies, has been so minimized and shunted from his status as main character that scenes like the spider attack and his dialogue with Smaug were so modified as to make them virtually unwatchable.

Originally Posted by MCRmyGirl4eva

Bilbo was supposed to save them there, that was his big scene when HE felt that he earned his way into the company, and that was taken from him. That really irritated me, because the whole first movie revolved around getting the dwarves to accept him, so they should have left the scene where he accepted himself.

Crucial points in the book, like the spider and dragon scenes were completely denuded of the humor inherent in the story, and that is a literary crime. Bilbo did not get to insult the spiders, nor, as you made clear, actually "save" the Dwarves, that was kept for the character-insert Tauriel and her beau Legolas (who behaved in such a Matrix-like fashion that someone in the audience yelled out "Neo is the one!"). The dreadful Mirkwood set (the worst fake trees in movie history) only took about 5 minutes to get through (add 10 for the spider fight), and skipped the poisonous river sequence, sleeping Bombur, the white hart and deer, the silvan feast and other points of interest just so that Jackson could belabor the story with his own inane plotpoints.

In addition, the movie completely ignored BASIC TOLKIEN: DRAGONS 101. What does one never do with a dragon? Never maintain eye contact! Bilbo stupidly kept taking his ring on and off and revealed himself to the dragon. What a stultifying idiotic turn. Let's not even mention the entire dialogue between Smaug and Bilbo was lost in tobogganing around on mile high piles of coin (which were actually the billions of skulls left over from the City of the Dead scene in Return of the King painted gold), and then a half an hour worth of more insipid chase scenes around Erebor culminating in pouring molten gold (enough to fill the Nile from the Sudan up to the Suez Canal) on a dragon with a furnace for a belly.

Dumb. Just plain dumb. What a waste.