The Desolation

[dancing spawn of ungoliant]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

I mean I don't expect The Hobbit movies to be as morbid and dark as Thrones where the Hound has his spat before the Blackwater about all the boys he's killed...but not depicting violence as a fun game with cool spinny moves would be appreciated.

The thing that is quite unique in GoT is that it’s not easy to say who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. The story is told from everyone’s perspective and we get to know the characters’ backgrounds and motives quite well. In Middle-earth it seems to be more black and white: orcs and their ilk are pure evil and that’s it. In a sense, it's not "necessary" to feel sympathy for their death. (I find it more disturbing that killing has been viewed as a fun game in real life - gladiators come into mind.)

Also, an orc attack is a plausible reason why Legolas and Tauriel can’t just bundle the darwes back into Thranduil’s dungeons from the barrels or from Laketown. Even though the attacks contained a lot of swashbuckling, I felt the action flowed quite nicely and was choreographed creatively.

On anoter note, this thought came into my mind after watching Puccini’s Turandot the other day. The story is just several paragraphs long, there’s hardly any character development, the musical themes are repetitive and the whole thing lasts about 2,5 hours. Yet no-one seemed to complain that the opera was dragged out. I thought it was quite excellent, actually, but maybe I’m just easily entertained.

ps. Hi, Kuru and other old friends as well!

[Aganzir]

Originally Posted by Boromir88

But we start seeing some Denethor in Thorin.

You mean, "If this is to end in fire, then we shall all burn together!"?

Originally Posted by dancing spawn of ungoliant

Also, an orc attack is a plausible reason why Legolas and Tauriel can’t just bundle the darwes back into Thranduil’s dungeons from the barrels or from Laketown.

I think drunkenness would have been a funnier reason though!

[Brinniel]

Originally Posted by Zigur

One thing I'm not seeing a lot of people mention here (and elsewhere) is Bilbo. Is he as badly sidelined as all that? The lack of focus on him at points in the first film was troubling enough.

Bilbo was great. Martin Freeman does a wonderful job portraying him just as the first film. Sure, there could've been more of him, but at the same time, I didn't feel like he was missing from the story.

Originally Posted by Boro

AUJ was done well with Thorin, Balin and Kili. There were smaller interesting moments where we got glimpses into Dori, Dwalin, and Bofur and I was expecting DoS to just keep going with some of the other dwarves (there is the moment where Gloin won't give his money and when Legolas sees a picture of Gloin's wife and Gimli), but it just doesn't happen.

Thorin's development takes several steps back. Dori, Dwalin and Bofur stagnates. In nearly 6 hours of film Bombur and Nori have had no dialogue and all Bifur can do is inaudibly grunt because PJ wanted to have a funny pun with "Bifurcate." I'd say only Balin, Kili and one bit with Fili ("My place is with my brother") are done well amongst the dwarves.

I would've like to see more characterization of the dwarves too, though I do realize with 13 of them, being able to feature them all is no easy task. As spawn mentioned, Tolkien didn't give them much personality in the books, so I'm grateful that they at least made an effort to create individual personalities for the films. I found that by watching the special features on the dvds for the first film, I got a much better sense of who each character was (there's a whole hour featurette dedicated to the dwarf characters).

Originally Posted by Kuru

However, that is not what we are seeing Jackson do here in his hexilogy. He has repeatedly tinkered with characters, changing the nature of who the character is, altered storylines and events in ways that can charitably be called strange, and added storylines and set-pieces straight out of his own mind to the point that it overwhelms the original story.

I've seen enough good adaptations to know that Jackson did not have to do it this way and be successful.

That's your opinion, which is perfectly fine. I'm not happy with all the changes either and think the film would've been better without some of them. But obviously PJ thought otherwise. What I'm saying is I think every change in the film was made because he believed it would draw a bigger audience, not necessarily because it would improve the original story. And of course we're free to agree or disagree with those decisions.

Writing for the screen is difficult enough; adapting a beloved story to the screen is an even bigger challenge. I woke up this morning with a random thought in my head: If you were to write the script, how would you do it? What would be cut, what would stay, what would have to change to make the story flow visually, and can you do all that while keeping it under three hours? There are many roles in the making of the films I would've loved to take on, but writing is certainly not one of them. While PJ's films are a far cry from perfect, they really could've been a lot worse.

Instead focusing on the negative, I appreciate what they do include from the books and Tolkien's world, which is still quite a bit. And I'm not just talking about the writing, but also the little details...in the weapons, the makeup and costumes, the sets. If you ever watch a behind-the-scenes featurette, you'll see there's so much effort made into bringing Tolkien's universe to life. Many people like to just look at the bigger picture, but I love the details. To me, that's what sets PJ's films apart. That, and the fact that everyone involved in these films has so much passion; it's not just another job to them.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Brinniel

That's your opinion, which is perfectly fine. I'm not happy with all the changes either and think the film would've been better without some of them. But obviously PJ thought otherwise. What I'm saying is I think every change in the film was made because he believed it would draw a bigger audience, not necessarily because it would improve the original story.

But this gets back to my fundamental problem with what the film series has turned into. If Tolkien's stories themselves are not enough to stand up on their own without all this re-writing, why not have the courage to do your own script and put your own work out there as your own? I think that would be infinitely better than savaging the work of another.

While PJ's films are a far cry from perfect, they really could've been a lot worse.

That is true, but they could have been a lot better as well.

Basically I have the sense that Tolkien fans are being cheated with a sub-standard product and there is no real reason why it had to be this way.

Part of me hopes that with this trend of accelerating re-boots to film franchises somebody will come along and do a better job with Tolkien's world...although that hope is partially hypocritical on my part as I'm not too fond of the accelerating trend of re-boots...but still...

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

But this gets back to my fundamental problem with what the film series has turned into. If Tolkien's stories themselves are not enough to stand up on their own without all this re-writing, why not have the courage to do your own script and put your own work out there as your own? I think that would be infinitely better than savaging the work of another.

Indeed– but these days studios greatly prefer to back adaptations of books (best-selling ones, naturally). They’re considered to be more marketable and generally safer than original screenplays.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

Indeed– but these days studios greatly prefer to back adaptations of books (best-selling ones, naturally). They’re considered to be more marketable and generally safer than original screenplays.

Indubitably, however, if they are going to not have enough confidence in their own work or defer to the work of another artist as their setting, then they ought to treat the work of the other artist with respect and not trash it.

I think it is a biting condemnation of DoS that even people who are reviewing the film favorably are admitting that Tolkien almost certainly would have hated it.

[Diamond18]

According to Lommy I am missed around these parts. At her suggestion I'm going to reproduce something I wrote on Tumblr a few days ago, which was just my very off-hand comments and impressions about the film. As it was a really hastily written entry for my blog I apologize for lack of depth. Anyway....

I have to say I think that the movie was really, really awful.

It’s not that it digressed from the book. I loved the first Hobbit movie, and that certainly digressed from the book. It’s that as a film, it was awful. The action scenes were far too silly to fit the otherwise super serious tone of the film and overall, as a movie, it felt really bloated. Like, it felt like the rough first draft of something where you pour everything into it, before you go back and edit the great stinking pile into something decent.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy parts. I think the spiders were magnificently creepy and horrific (though I missed Bilbo actually, you know, taunting them) and generally the whole getting lost in Mirkwood bit was well done.

I genuinely loved Tauriel as a character and I appreciate the attempt to make The Hobbit less of a sausage fest by having her in it. But I disliked that the romantic subplot between her and The Hot Dwarf was so… badly done. I’ll hold off on having an opinion whether a Dwarf/Elf romance works outside of Gimli/Legolas fanfiction because that’s not really the case here. The Hot Dwarf made an inappropriate joke about his trousers and then they had a nice conversation about mothers and stars, and suddenly it’s “Do you think she could have loved me?” That line really put me over the top. I mean, let’s not have any subtlety at all. Just in case you were unsure that there was a romance subplot, DO YOU THINK SHE COULD HAVE LOVED ME?

Also Legolas. My God. Jealous brooding love triangle glowering does not look good on him. What the hell was up with his eyes? They were brown in LOTR and now they’re a sickly shade of cataract covered blue. My boyfriend says this was on purpose to illustrate that the elves of Mirkwood are plagued by evil, and I guess that makes more sense than anything else. But it was still weird and unnecessary.

(Sidenote, I didn't expect a real answer to this on Tumblr but if anyone on the Downs knows, what actually was up with Legolas' eyes? Has Jackson made any comments about them?)

I really liked Bard and his family. Beorn was awful. Smaug was fun to watch, but the entire sequence still suffered from the bloated, unnecessary, “we must stretch this into three movies” syndrome that Hobbit #2 suffers from far more than Hobbit #1 did.

I went to see An Unexpected Journey twice in theatres but needless to say I have no desire to watch The Desolation of Smaug again.