Three Times The Hobbit?

[Inziladun]

Or so says this article. And it wasn't even the script!

[davem]

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

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/

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.

[Nerwen]

Thanks for the link, davem– and a good point about there being different forms of irony, of which the ubiquitous (and increasingly tiresome) "wink wink" routine is only one.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

Or so says this article. And it wasn't even the script!

To be fair I feel ill with any 3d being astigmatic but I can imagine that improving it might increase the nausea.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

To be fair I feel ill with any 3d being astigmatic but I can imagine that improving it might increase the nausea.

To be even fairer, I get nauseous from most Peter Jackson films.

[Mithalwen]

There is that factor.

[davem]

Its interesting how both LotR & TH end with an anti-climactic battle - LotR doesn't end (as with the film) with the epic battle & the fall of Sauron, but with the Scouring, which is a nasty, brutal fight between ordinary Hobbits & a bunch of thugs - and as SF writer China Mieville put it, you end up with a broken Saruman only capable of doing a little mischief in a mean way (as Mieville put it, 'You can't even get a decent Dark Lord any more').

Of course, the Battle of Five Armies is a devastating conflict, but it happens off-stage so the heroics go mostly unnoticed, & the main impression we are left with is of carnage & loss as Bilbo is lead through the corpse-strewn field to the dying Thorin, whose final words are to tell Bilbo that he was right after all, & that its the Hobbit's values that really matter, not battles or treasure. And yet, its fairly clear that what Jackson cares about are those very things - battle (on-screen) & treasure (profit).

If you re-tell LotR without the ugly brutal wastefulness of the Scouring, or depict the Battle of Five Armies on screen, then you don't get Tolkien. The Scouring shows us the ugly reality of war - not glorious battles, where heroes fall in noble self sacrifice to save the world from evil personified, but where ordinary people die in the streets & fields they grew up in, in front of their spouses & children, in order to make their little corner of the world a bit better for those they love.

Bilbo's lying senseless through the BoFA & only awakening after its all over, to then pick his way through the blood, stench & hacked up corpses, to watch his friend die an agonising death while telling him that, after all, it was all a bit bloody pointless when all was said & done, & that Bilbo's way is better, is to give the reader the death without the having given him even a glimpse of the glory. As far as Bilbo is concerned the dead might have been killed in an eruption of the Mountain, or by mass suicide. Death without glory is the way both books end when it comes to war.

And that is clearly what Jackson misses. Still, I'll be going to see the spectacle, because as with the LotR movies, I reckon something of Tolkien will come through. What is sad is that many people will see the film & not read the book, or if they do go on to read it, they will do so in the light of PJs take on it.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

Its interesting how both LotR & TH end with an anti-climactic battle - LotR doesn't end (as with the film) with the epic battle & the fall of Sauron, but with the Scouring, which is a nasty, brutal fight between ordinary Hobbits & a bunch of thugs...

...And that is clearly what Jackson misses. Still, I'll be going to see the spectacle, because as with the LotR movies, I reckon something of Tolkien will come through. What is sad is that many people will see the film & not read the book, or if they do go on to read it, they will do so in the light of PJs take on it.

Very well said, davem.

Additionally, I think that movie-goers didn't get to see the growth and maturation of the hobbits in Jackson's LotR, particularly because the Scouring of the Shire was omitted. The brilliance of Tolkien's original story is that the hobbits must fend for themselves once they return home. They must become the leaders, without the aid of wizards, dwarves, elves, glorified Anglo-Saxon horsemen or legendary kings.

Likewise, the enemy is no longer a Dark Lord with demonic orkish minions, wargs and balrogs; instead, as you said, they must face mercenary thugs, mannish brutes and vagrants, and Sharky, wounded, old and treacherous, bereft of divine power, but still able to commit appallingly petty acts of vengeance. And they must overcome the evil inherent in even unassuming but greedy hobbits. Thus, Tolkien offers a foreshadowing of the wars of the 4th age and onward, where the foe we fight is ourselves and not a supernatural enemy.

Jackson caught the cinematographic spectacle of the story, the huge sweep of vast armies and the marvelous edifices of lost empires, but he failed utterly in capturing the heart of the story and the nobility of the individuals involved. How else can one explain Frodo abandoning Sam, the savaging of the tragic hero Denethor, the befuddlement of Treebeard, and the trivialization of Aragorn's peer, Faramir?

Aragorn commits an ignoble act of treachery by beheading an ambassador under a flag of truce merely for a cheap one-line pun, and simply for the sake of added spectacle and CGI overkill a legion of undead scrubbing bubbles destroys Sauron's army, all but eliminating the need for the valorous and lethal charge of the Rohirrim. Frodo whines throughout the movie, Merry and Pippin never progress past boorish louts, Elrond is cynical and bitter, Gimli is a walking dwarf joke, and the character with the most depth isn't even human but a CGI replication.

I know Tolkien eschewed allegory, but woe to all of us if Jackson decides to make a movie about the Bible: Jonah would be swallowed by a CGI leviathan of Jurassic proportions, Noah's ark would be nuclear-powered, Moses would not inflict ten plagues on Egypt (he'd have at least twenty, including zombies, dragons, spiders and flying monkeys), and a wise-cracking Jesus, ably assisted by his 12 ninjas, would call down the heavenly host to smite the Romans. Because, after all, one must use creative license, and the original scripture needs tweaking to appeal to modern audiences.

[davem]

Just a quick acknowledgment and thanks for all the positive rep for what was a very rushed post. There are certainly numerous points in the films where you get the sense that Jackson just doesn't get Tolkien's point, where the story becomes for him so completely unintelligible, that all he can do is invent an alternative. I so wish the Hobbit movie would follow the book and build up to the BOFA, with the audience expecting another Pelenor Fields, only for the screen to go black when Bilbo is knocked unconscious and the viewer to see nothing of the battle at all. That would be being faithful to Tolkien. But it won't happen, obviously. We'll basically get rehash of PF, a 'glorious' epic battle, with eye popping effects (and probably some few pratfalls to lighten the mood), which will overwhelm and undermine Bilbo and Thorin's final farewell. Anyway, too rushed again - and typed on a phone ( I was tempted to leave in the 'eye pooping effects' that the predictive text threw up back there.....)