An Unexpected Journey, or the morning after

[Boromir88]

Originally Posted by davem

Well, if it doesn't sell tickets its certainly a 'bad' film from the filmmakers' point of view. TH, as with LotR before it, had to appeal to a broad audience. What has to be admitted is that Jackson could have done a lot worse, and been a lot less respectful of the material than he was. There were a number of places in all the films where he messed up (less, to my mind, in AUJ than in LotR), but a straight page to screen adaptation wouldn't have worked - why no Cirdan at the White Council? Simple - the general audience would be asking 'Who's the beardy-weirdy Elf over there?' So you'd need screen time accounting for who he is and why he's there and why everybody is showing him respect.

AUJ, like the LotR films, have to make profit or they don't get made. In order to make profit they have to appeal to a wide audience. So, given those restrictions, I think AUJ is a 'good' film. And if I was your average film goer, or even just someone who'd read the book few times I'd be more than happy with it. Actually, I suspect I'd be happier with the LotR films if it wasn't for the BBC Radio version, which showed it is possible to adapt the book faithfully and make it work.

(written on a phone, so bear with any mistakes)

For me, I think part of it is, with the LOTR trilogy, it was very good cinema. For the most part the changes seemed to have an understood and logical cinematic reason behind them. Even the change to Faramir's character was made to create a short-term antagonist so the main phyiscally seen antagonist (Shelob) could be moved to ROTK. Therefor, Faramir wants to prove his worth to his dad, particularly after it's learned favorite Boromir is dead.

The problem here, is generally I think the LOTR trilogy carried the impression "well for the most part it was accurate to the books, besides a few changes here and there made by Jackson...like having an elven army show up at Helm's Deep." But there are many more, harder to spot alterations if you're not quite familiar with the books. The representation of Sauron as a literal Eye for instance, led to one of my friend's reading the books after the movies, and thinking that the talk of Sauron's "reach" and the references to his "black hand" or that "he will come when all is won" were the actual metaphors and the Eye was Sauron's real, physical representation, since the Eye is talked about much more frequently.

For the most part, the changes to LOTR though were good cinema. I mean, Tolkien says about TTT, that Treebeard and the Ents are far more important than the battle of Helm's Deep, so if he was to cut something out, it would be Helm's Deep. This would have been disastrous, cinematically, if Helm's Deep wasn't hyped up as the larger, more important, and climatic moment of TTT.

With An Unexpected Journey, I at least went in without the expectations of a good adaptation. It's been well established the type of director Jackson is, and since The Hobbit is a far shorter, and less complex story, the changes are much easier to spot, even to the casual "read the Hobbit a few times" fan.

Cinematically it wasn't as good as LOTR though, because a lot of it appeared too...how shall I say, forced? Formulaic? I absolutely loved Freeman's Bilbo, and Armitage's Thorin, but their tension in the films was just way too forced. It was like "We need to have a narrative growth with these two characters...um here let's just insert Thorin being mean to Bilbo, now!" "Ok, so now to show their growing friendship, Bilbo will step between Azog and Thorin...holy cliche city, batman!"

Instead of just letting it happen as I believe what the LOTR trilogy showed between Gimli and Legolas. The tension was clearly established, and seemed natural at the Council. As the Fellowship journey continues you can just see the budding friendship, without forcing in inserted tension/let's be friends moment. Gimli is talking about being grieved at departing Lorien, and Legolas smiles...that's all you really need.