One possible serious change that might be in the script is the compression of the timeline of the 2nd Age, so that events that cover hundreds or thousands of years happen in a much shorter time. I heard about this on a YouTube video (In Deep Geek) where the commenter says something like “the show runners decided to compress the timeline” as if it was now a known fact, The problem they are solving by doing this (if they are) is to avoid having to change out all the human characters for new ones from one scene to the next: elves live forever (unless they are killed by violence) but humans are relative mayflies, and if they are going to figure in the stories in any significant way they need to be around for more action.
I found enough in the teaser to be intriguing. What is the meteorite, and did that big gnarly dude arrive in it? And who is he? Was that a balrog in the battle scene? That could be fun. Do we see the death of Finrod? Is that a wizard with dirty fingernails and holding a Hobbit hand at the end? Where are the Hobbits at this time (there’s no record among hobbits from before the 3rd Age, I believe)?
Also, I don’t mind if they change some known details for the sake of a good story, or even if they compress the timeline if the resulting plot still makes sense.
A main theme of the books is how war changes you and makes men out of boys. Without seeing the scouring and how important Sam, Merry and Pippin became…we kind of lose that.
All that said, yeah we didn’t have time for all that.
No. Personally, there’s nothing that I’d characterize as an improvement. Jackson took a blowtorch to that book and that trilogy is an insult to the fans. I’m not sure how many people share this opinion, but for me the most egregious issue in a move of a lot of serious issues is how they made up the Dwarfs. They cast and outfit these guys so that they look like 2/3rds humans. Not like a stocky, hairy and unique race. Dwarfs are not pretty, petite men with long hair.
One thing I noticed about that is that three of Thorin’s company (Thorin, Kili, and Fili) could definitely be characterized that way, while the others seemed to be closer, in their design, to what we saw of dwarves (mostly Gimli) in the LotR films. And, for the most part, the more “dwarven” ones of the company were played for comic relief, while the more “human” ones were the heroic/romantic characters of the group.
Also, Thorin, Kili, and Fili are the ones who die.
Nah, it wasn’t just those three. Ori, Dori and Nori all have crazy hair and beards but all have the shape of men. Bofur just looks like a ugly man, so while he’s not the matinee idol of Thorin, Kili or Fili he’s not really dwarf shaped either. Bombur’s obese and not particularly dwarf shaped either but I suppose his roundness can pass for it.
Honestly I can’t fathom how someone looked at the LotR movies and when making the prequel decided…you know what’s missing, slapstick!
Slapstick and violence. There was a LOT of violent fighting in the movie. Much more than in the book. I felt that movie had nothing to redeem it. Well, the first one had nothing to redeem it. I didn’t watch parts 2 or 3.
Maybe, but it wasn’t notably more violent than LotR. Which follows some logic. I know that The Hobbit was basically a YA novel of it’s time, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to scale up the fighting to modern action movie standards or at least to the standards of the previous film.
What a fantastically bad editing choice…but I should probably stop there so as to not turn this thread into a shit on The Hobbit thread…we’ve already done that several times.
I do. I felt that completely ruined the story, it made it something really foreign to the book. I was okay with LOTR movie being a lot more violent than the books, because the violence was inherent in the story, and introspection doesn’t play well on screen. But that just wasn’t “The Hobbit”. It was some horrible action movie loosely based on “the Hobbit”
I agree, the Dwarves were all wrongly-proportioned and thus unconvincing. I liked both the dinner-at-Bilbo’s-house scene and the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum. Otherwise the trilogy was either frenetic (like a video game thrown up on screen) or just boring.