Orc related: I keep wondering why Azog didn’t speak English/Common/Westron. Every other orc we’ve seen across 4 movies spoke in Common, even in the books, and it was explicitly stated that Sauron tried to make orcs speak Black Speech but he failed. And it was a pain in the rear having to read Azog’s stupid dialog in subtitles.
Well, the theater audience did get a bit of a collective audible chuckle when Gandalf conked his head on Bilbo’s chandelier.
There was an excellent parody in paperback by the National Lampoon called Bored of the Rings. I loved it.
Even the Bilbo/Gollum/riddles scene was disappointing to me. I could only understand about two thirds of their dialogue.
“What has it got in it’s pockets?”
Blam! Blam!
He would have killed Goddamn, but pity stayed his hand.
“It’s a pity I’ve run out of bullets”, Dildo thought.
I was thinking of this during the key scene, where Bilbo had his chance to kill Gollum and didn’t take it. Difficult to explain the joke to the friend I’d gone to the movies with afterwards, since she’d never heard of Bored of the Rings.
I saw the movie yesterday and liked it more than I expected to, given all the things I’d heard about its length and recalling similar excesses in Return of the King and King Kong. There were places I found tedious–mostly to do with the one-armed orc subplot and especially the bunny-sled chase; I started making mental notes about where to hit the chapter-skip button when I have this on DVD, but I do intend to get the DVD when it’s available.
The parts I enjoyed most were the scenes that stayed closest to the original Hobbit story. I liked the Unexpected Party section, and the Riddles in the Dark was easily the best part IMHO.
Somewhat disconcerting to associate “Thorin Oakenshield” with “attractive.” The idea had never occured to me before. Also Kili and Fili. That family runs to some good-looking dwarves!
Does anyone else see a strong resemblance between Bilbo and Pippin? I’ve never noticed one between the two actors prior to this and wonder if it’s deliberate, to highlight Bilbo’s Tookishness.
What were the Goblin King’s last words? I didn’t catch them.
Something along the lines of:
“NOW what are you going to do, smarty pants?”
[Gandalf slashes his belly]
“That’d do it.”
Apropos of nothing, but still LOTR related, behold what my son gave me for Christmas. The geekery, it burns!
Saw it today, and overall I liked it. Although it had it’s problems, most of which have been covered.
I for one liked the intro sequence.
I actually like some of the changes to the troll battle, and not others. I thought how the dwarves were captured in the book was pretty stupid, so I was happy to see that change. I thought it was interesting they changed Bilbo’s motivation for trying to steal from the Troll though. Is it the wrong ‘feel’ for the character him to be actually pickpocketing a troll? ‘Oh we can’t have the hero being a thief!’
Overall I liked the changes to the dwarves, This is a group I could believe would go on a quest, most of the dwarves presented in the book were little better than the three stooges.
I didn’t quite get the need for the whole Azog subplot being there.
I thought Gandalf calling the Eagles was a nice callout to the LOTR movies. And while it is a departure the whole ‘just happened to turn up’ thing from the book bothered me more anyway.
My worst complaint from the whole movie was the running battle through Goblin Town. Ugh - totally terrible. Like I was watching some stupid platformer computer game.
The tone was obviously much lighter, and funnily enough, this is what troubled my wife the most. She hasn’t read any of JRRT’s books, nor does she read fantasy at all, but she really liked the LOTR movies. And her first comment was that The Hobbit wasn’t as serious as LOTR.
As an aside, never underestimate the stupidty of the movie going public. Waiting out the front of the cinema after the movie, my wife overheard a conversation “That other hobbit at the start looked so much like Frodo”:smack:
The little things are definitely something I appreciated. The dishwashing scene was great, the waistcoat buttons.
I definitely would have liked to get the song at the fir trees, but the battle was very important for the movie pacing. Since we’re getting the movies in 3 installments, it was necessary to establish Bilbo as being somehow useful in the first one. The troll scene was a bit of a help (in the book the delay until sunrise was entirely Gandalf’s doing) in establishing his usefulness, but without him saving Thorin, the audience would be left watching an entire movie of Bilbo being almost purely a drag and a burden on Thorin and Company. In the book, he doesn’t really start to become useful until Mirkwood, as far as I remember.
I do think that the lack of Glamdring and Orcrist glowing was one of my biggest points of confusion, while I was actually watching the movie.
I’m not real sure how I feel about the whole Azog plot. As far as I know it’s a purely movie addition, and there wasn’t even anything in Thorin’s backstory in letters and such suggesting such a foe…that I’m aware of. But…thus far I don’t particularly feel his presence detracted from the movie. Made it longer, but that’s not really a downside, to me; I have no problem with 3-hour movies.
I do feel as though they should have kept the conversation with Gwaihir and the eagles; the movies thus far have failed to make it clear that the eagles are intelligent and capable of speech.
No, I am very glad they stayed away from that. Talking animals always look ridiculous onscreen, especially if they don’t have lips.
Which actually makes me wonder how they will deal with
the talking Mirkwood spiders. Talking spiders are great in a book or animated film. Don’t know how that won’t come across as silly in a live action movie.
You’re quite right. Azog is mentioned in the book first at the tea party (as the killer of Thror; tangentially, Thorin says “we have long ago paid the goblins of Moria”) and in a footnote just prior to the Battle of Five Armies when Gandalf tells them “Bolg* of the North is coming!” (*Son of Azog, see p.34).
It’s gone into in more detail in the appendix “Of the Dwarves” in LotR. Thror in his later years went down to Moria with only a companion or two and walked in as if he owned the place. Shortly after his head was thrown out, and Azog yelled at the single dwarf still outside to go tell his countrymen that this was what happened to dwarves sticking their noses in where they weren’t wanted. He insultingly tossed out a pouch of small change as a messenger’s fee.
Thrain, Thror’s son and Thorin’s father, thought this over long and hard because he knew that war would be ruinous, but decided it was too big an insult to swallow. Over the next few years the Dwarves went through the various goblin warrens in the Misty Mountains. It was not a gentlemanly war on either side. Eventually it culminated in the big battle much as seen in the film, except that Azog is killed, not wounded, and not by Thorin but by Dain, the king of the Iron Hills dwarves (being moaned about early on in the film because he will not come and help fight Smaug). Thorin did indeed use an oak branch as a makeshift shield and got his name that way.
While this battle (Dimrill Dale; Nanduhirion in Elvish or Azanulbizar in Dwarvish) was indeed a colossal slaughter on both sides, it wasn’t quite as costly as the film makes out. It was, however, bloody enough that the Dwarves still wept at its mention, and the Orcs shuddered in terror, a century or two later. The Dwarves were forced to the unusual recourse of cremating their dead after the battle because they were too many to entomb (they did not bury their dead in earth graves) and in later years a Dwarf might speak of an ancestor as “he was a burned Dwarf”, meaning a hero of Azanulbizar.
I just saw it today; on the whole, I enjoyed it very much. There wasn’t really a moment, from beginning to end, where I wasn’t having a good time, even though I was often conscious of flaws or things that could have been done better. For the most part, everybody else in this thread has gone over those enough.
There are a couple things, however, which a lot of people seem to hate, and which I loved unequivocally. Those were 1) the constant scenery porn / New Zealand tourism advisory board inserts, and 2) Radagast. He had a bunny-powered sled. A bunny-powered sled, do you understand??
This was a part I sorely missed. Gwaihir’s “Fare well, wherever you fare, and may your eyries receive you at journey’s end!” was one of my favorite lines from The Hobbit.
Saw it last night (IMAX, 3-D). Pretty much met expectations. Not quite as good as LOtR, but still very good. It didn’t feel overly long, other than the fact that I have to go and see 2 more movies. The guy who played Bilbo was fantastic, and Andy Sirkis was great, as usual. I appreciated the upgrade in CGI that Gollum got.
This was my first 3-D movie, and I can’t say it really added that much. For a movie like this, I think I’d rather just see it in 2-D and not have to wear the glasses. I didn’t get a headache or anything, but viewing is necessarily a little fuzzy at the periphery.
I kept being startled by foreground things, especially if it was shadowy or dark, because it would come into frame and I’d think it was another moviegoer standing in front of me, in the theater.
Slightly off topic, but here are some videos of people who walked from the set of Hobbiton to “Mt Doom” (language warning)
Brian
I’ve only read “The Hobbit” once, many years ago. Could someone refresh my memory of how the Troll scene played out in the book?
Bilbo gets caught first, when the trolls ask how many others are nearby, he says “lots” first, perhaps trying to scare the trolls, then quickly corrects himself to “none at all!” in order to not give away the dwarves. This clues in the trolls to the possibility that he has allies nearby. Then the dwarves, waiting for him to hoot like an owl (Bilbo, of course, can’t hoot like any kind of owl), come to investigate, one at a time. The trolls catch them in sacks, one at a time. Then Gandalf shows up and gets the trolls to argue for the rest of the night by hiding nearby, then each time they’ve just about decided how to cook the dwarves, introducing confusion by mimicking one of the troll’s voices and starting the argument again.
Overall, I think the movie did it a lot better; the dwarves seemed like blithering idiots to have thirteen of them wander into the troll camp one at a time, getting captured, in the book. On the other hand, the delay in the movie seemed much too short for dawn to have been so close.
Thanks
I was looking forward to this for months. I fell asleep.
(Will revisit when the Rifftrax comes out.)
To be honest, in general the dwarves were blithering idiots …