Please clue me in, I’ll watch for them when I see it.
Oooh, I did not catch them. I think my wife mentioned seeing Peter Jackson, but I don’t remember where. Colbert, I did not see.
Anyone know? I wonder if Colbert was an elf at the beginning of the movie(in the prologue).
Oh, and Roger Ebert has yet to see it, I assume because of his recent(non-cancer-related) health issues. He tweeted to mention that he has not seen it.
It was needed to explain what was going on in Dol Gulder (“the old fortress”) as that will continue to be part of the plot of upcoming movies, and these elves and wizards will be involved in it. That said, I didn’t think this scene worked all that well in the film. It was also rather clumsy to have Galadriel lay down a promise to Gandalf, telegraphing that she’ll be the one who will unexpectedly pull his acorns out of the fire once stuff goes south in some future movie. I was also half dreading they’d start making out.
Gandalf…plays for the other team.
My own two cents: ending with the death of Smaug will have many viewers saying, OK, it’s over. Kind of like at the end of RETURN OF THE KING, may people were dismayed that there was more film after the ring was destroyed. I suspect (my own guess) that film 2 will end with Smaug flying off to destroy Laketown, and the dwarves at the cave. That will be a cliff-hanger ending, in a way that the death of Smaug would certainly not.
I do have to say that I thought there were way too many battles. He added a battle with the trolls, and an extra battle with the orcs before they go underground. By cross-cutting “Riddles in the Dark” with the Goblin-town, the effect is that Goblin-town and the tree-climbing is one very lonnnnng battle sequence with very little interruption. I fear that the Battle of Five Armies will be left as ho-hum. It’s a criticism I have with the LotR movies, too – the battle sequences go on for too long, at the expense of the character development.
The Witch King is his dominatrix?
Could be. I don’t know much about that stuff, but I thought Gandalph would, er, be on top, as it were.
Just saw this in HFR 3D! On the big, big screen (Cinemark XD), too!
Wow! This movie was, IMHO, a nearly perfect stinker. It was awful. No way I’m seeing the other 2, and no way I’m buying the Blu-Ray to watch at home.
This was a bloated, painfully slow over-acted poorly conceived piece of crap. The dialogue was almost uniformly poorly written and poorly delivered.
The first 30 or 40 minutes of the film is like having to watch the beginning of Fellowship all over again.
If I never have to hear that goddamned musical theme from LOTR one more time, I’ll die happy. WTF, you couldn’t afford to pay someone to write a new piece of music for this film?
Everything that happened in Rivendell looked like a stage production that was filmed. The actors looked like they were striking poses and Galadriel was the worst of the lot. The dialogue here was stinted and self-important. All of the clumsy attempts at making sure we saw how the events of this story tie in to the LOTR were unnecessary and overbearing. Much of the time, I kept thinking that Jackson must have spent hours if not days coming up with ways and reasons to re-use people from LOTR (did we really need Elijah Wood? Srsly? We had to have Frodo in the fucking movie? :dubious:).
The 3D was a non-factor, contributing nothing to the visuals. The HFR was annoying most of the time, and the lighting was crappy about 60% of the time. Jackson or his DP or his Gaffer or someone involved must have a patent on the sunrise/sunset look that is used SO often, because OMFG they use it as often as possible. Many of the scenes looked flat (again, as though they had filmed a stage production) because of the crappy lighting.
Someone else mentioned the slingshot: I agree it was utter crap. It made me want to punch the dwarf.
Thorin was too young, IMO. And the rest of the dwarves were so poorly introduced and so poorly written that I couldn’t tell you who any of them were. I can’t even remember which one was the #2 dwarf, the old one. Was that Balin? It doesn’t matter; they aren’t really characters, they are just screen filler so the movie isn’t about just a trio (Gandalf, Thorin & Bilbo).
The humor was so poorly written it might as well have been nonexistent; I never heard anyone laugh at even the things that were obviously intended to be funny bits.
The action sequences were, as others have noted, drawn out and tame. There is no sense of peril of tension in any part of the movie.
The book tells a terrific story. The movie bloats and mangles that story. And the way that Jackson is beating us over the head with the fact that these events take place before, and have something to do with, LOTR makes the ending of Citizen Kane look subtle.
As I said, this one was, IMO, a stinker.
ETA: I forgot to mention how annoying the “helicopter travelogue of New Zealand” shots were. Seriously, there’s a couple of shots that have no actors in them at all, just hills or mountains. One is even done in the middle of an action sequence (when the warts are chasing Radagast). Worthless tripe.
Bo: I won’t argue that this was a fantastic movie. It wasn’t. It has so, so many problems, and I agree with a lot of what you said.
But: “perfect stinker”? I saw Skyfall just a couple or so weeks ago: a terrible film, an awful terrible film, given quite ridiculously positive reviews. I also saw Prometheus earlier this year, an awfuller, terribler film. Those two are much, much huger stinkers. The latter perhaps a perfect one.
This one was bush-league stinker at best. Perhaps not even.
I would agree that Prometheus was a worse movie, in every way. It had no real story, no real characters, no real tension and no real climax. It was utter crap.
But, I never said The Hobbit was a perfect stinker, as your quote implies.
“Nearly perfect stinker”, not “perfect stinker”. By which I mean that there may have been fleeting moments when I wasn’t bored or repulsed by what was on the screen. Prometheus had no such moments.
Heh. And on that basis, I find your response nearly perfect as well. 
I’m not sure I’d go as far as you down the trail of This Movie Sucks, but I do get where you’re coming from. This film had good moments for me, interspersed by huge stretches of tedium. I wanted to like it more, but I just don’t. I may even see it again, since I’m a huge LOTR fan, but I can’t say I’m eager yet.
That was Bofur. I think.
I first read The Hobbit when I was 10 years old. I got the LOTR box set for my 12th birthday. I’ve read each of them at least 20 times. I’ve plowed through the Silmarillion 3 times, with countless re-reads of specific parts to check up on stuff as I re-read LOTR. I loved the LOTR films, despite the liberties that Jackson took with the story at times.
I think it’s fair for me to say that I am also a huge LOTR fan.
This movie is less faithful to the story of The Hobbit, and a whole lot less fun to watch, than Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 animated film.
If this had been trimmed down to about 105 minutes (cut the shit with Frodo, cut the Rivendell powwow, cut the ridiculous exposition about Moria and the dwarves, etc.), and FFS put the troll scene on film like it is on paper, and this would have been a fun film.
As it is, you nailed a large part of it’s suckitude: it’s tedious as hell.
FFS, did we need to see Bilbo standing in the invis world doing nothing but staring at Gollum or at the dwarves, without speaking, for like 4 minutes of screen time? Hell, you could cut that and the “Fabulous New Zealand” travelogue helicopter shots and already you’d get the movie down to 160 minutes (from 169). It ain’t much, but it would be a start. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Jackson would have decided to include fanboy sank material like the Rivendell powwow or Radigast in the theatrical release. Save that shite for the Extended Extreme Director’s Cut home release, ya know what I’m sayin’?
I agree that the B05A might be ho hum, but for different reasons, as I liked the battles in Jackson’s LotR movies. It’s just that, like you, I noticed too many battles in the first Hobbit movie. I think there are at least 3 more battles to go before Bo5A and that’s before any that Jackson might insert completely out of the blue, so that the Bo5A might seem like nothing special once it does happen.
The “shit with Frodo” took 10 seconds of screen time and established the link between the two movies, reminding people who don’t have the story memorized who Bilbo is and how he’s connected to the events in the second movie. It also gives the movie the same opener as LOTR (Bilbo in the Shire, writing of his adventures further establishing continuity.
Unless you’re talking about “the Fall of Erebor” bit that shows how the dragon came to the lonely mountain in the first place and drove the dwarves out. And I’d argue that but is essential to explaining what’s going on.
In either case cutting bits of the opener wouldn’t have saved much screen time and made the audience more confused.
I personally loved the scenery shots. I thought they were beautiful and really helped define Middle Earth and gave the events a background to be set against.
The movies are going to include bits set in Dol Guldur and deal with the Necromancer. Leaving out the “Rivendell Powwow” blindsides people with it in the 2nd movie. Introduce your characters in the beginning. If you’re going to ask why put Dol Guldur in the movie in the first place, well, why not? It was part of the story, a major adventure for one of their party (Gandalf), happened at the same time and was alluded to in the hobbit book, affected the War of the Ring in a major way, and gives us a more in depth look at Middle Earth and its rich detailed history.
Ehh, you can have your 90 minute movie, or a 10 minute You-Tube version of it, or whatever. If they filmed the entire Appendices and stuffed it into the film I’d love it. People criticize PJ for bits of the film that are different from the books in a way they don’t like (including myself), but I don’t think people understand the sheer amount of attention and detail they put into these movies and how many awesome things they did (check the LOTR EE documentaries). For everything they screwed up they got 15-20 more exactly right. It’s not a perfect vision of LOTR and the Hobbit, but such perfection might not be achievable. Maybe YOU could have filmed the troll scene exactly as written but would have screwed something else up. The book wasn’t intended to be a film and would require heavy adaptation and cutting for any screen.
P.S. Was that Thranduil (Legolas’ dad) at the beginning where the Elves turned away? Was he the ‘Elf King’ that captured the dwarves in Mirkwood? He’s not named in the Hobbit, at least not the one I have but that would have to be him (right?)
Yep!
I’m pretty sure that in The Hobbit (book) the party is explicitly taken to Thranduil’s Hall.
Ah, so what you want is a prequel to LOTR. What I wanted was the story of Bilbo and the dwarves going to the Lonely Mountain to defeat Smaug, which, as you prolly know, is what The Hobbit is about.
Can’t it be both? Because this movie is both.
Does this look familiar? http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2010/08/doug_jones_in_pans_labyrinth__2_.jpg
This is from “Pan’s Labyrinth”. Face is so similar I immediately recognized it. He even copied the spiral patterns. This annoys me. It is unoriginal to so closely copy an unrelated creature from another movie. Looks like they just reused an abandoned creature design from Pan’s Labyrinth. Why couldn’t they use the orc design from the LOTR just to stay consistent?
Bakshi didn’t do The Hobbit. And the movie he did do was a perfectly awful, seriously bad work.
Anyway. Did you enjoy Jackson’s LOTR movies?