No, that wouldn’t make any sense. One of them’s got to be “nameless elf #1”, and then you’ve got #2 and #3 and #4 and so on.
But seriously, in a movie, named characters are narratively expensive, and The Hobbit already has over a dozen of them (18, by my count) that absolutely cannot be done without, plus several others that would leave a hole. Now, a couple of them (Gandalf and Gollum) benefit from being already introduced in the Lord of the Rings movies, and Smaug is pretty well characterized as “the big nasty dragon”, but that still leaves a whopping fifteen humanoids, each of whom needs at least some nominal character development. When you’ve already got that many characters you need to develop, it’s folly to add more without damn good reason.
Yeah… but really at root it’s just a fantasy adventure story and you’re treating it almost like a creationist regards the King James Bible. At some point in the future I fully expect we’ll have LOTR hermeneutics.
Historically movies based on noted books are rarely to an author’s liking. Peter Jackson has a number of audiences and stakeholders to satisfy and the movie has to stand on it’s own as a work. A movie rigidly faithful to the text would not likely be commercially viable despite what LOTR fans might want to believe.
I feel pretty safe in saying that, after the LotR smash success, Jackson could have done a pretty faithful two-part* Hobbit film that would also have been a big hit.
Two parts being necessary to do it pretty faithfully, without the substantial abridgement seen in the first trilogy.
Oh dear, now I’ve been compared to a creationist. My argument is invalid.
I’m not sure where your likely lack of commercial viability comes from unless you’re seriously arguing that all the chase scenes, martial-arts movie stuff and smouldering glances between red-haired elf-maids and handsome young dwarves are indispensable to getting bums on seats, but it’s my contention that telling the story Tolkien told has not been tried and found wanting; it’s gone completely unattempted.
That’s kind of how I’ve felt as well. Two parts for sure but I’m not sure where to make the break. Somewhere around Mirkwood, but I’m trying to decide if it’d be better to do it at Beorn’s house, after they’ve been captured by the spiders, or after they’ve been captured by the Elves.
Heck, I think you could even make it a trilogy and bring in the White Council and Dol Guldur based on the extra material and make it work. Clearly Jackson did not, and the movies are hurt by everything from chase scenes to invented characters and whole-cloth inventions of plot lines.
There’s got to be a mid-point between the Rankin-Bass Hobbit and the Jackson Hobbit that would make a good movie.
I’d actually cut it right as they went IN to Mirkwood, myself. It’s ominous but not OMG CLIFFHANGER!
Yes.
Also, sorry astro, but you can wave around ungracious comparisons if you like, but when you get right down to it, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for fans of a work to expect a DERIVATIVE WORK to bear more than a strictly superficial resemblance to the original. There must have been SOMETHING in that original that was worth having, and thinking “Hey, I’m a hotshot movie director/scriptwriter, so clearly I know better than this author and all his fans” is usually a way for movies to BOMB. Allow me to direct you to, say, the film adaptation of The Dark is Rising, which is an imminently filmable book but which was changed eight ways from Sunday to make it more “easy for kids to identify with” or something.
In general, you should have a damn good reason anytime you change something from the source material. A lot of the time, that reason is “We’ve got to fit this all into two, two and a half hours, tops.” and that’s fine. But clearly that wasn’t what PJ was wrestling with here.
It looks like I am unique in being a Tolkien nerd who isn’t upset by PJ’s depiction of Radagast. I might have done it differently but I didn’t have any problems with it.
No, you’re not the only one. I have no problem with PJ’s adaptations. They’re movies, not books. They’re going to be different. Although I’m not a huge fan of them, either. I only saw the first one and haven’t really felt an urge to see either of the other two.
Of course, I also don’t mind the Rankin-Bass adaptation, either. In fact, that’s still the most evocative one for me…all I have to do is see the characters from that one and the whole story comes back, along with the feelings the story gave me when I was a kid.
I’m with ya, Deeg. Would I have done things differently? For certain. Did that keep me from enjoying seeing PJ’s vision of M-E? Heck no!
Saw Hobbit 3 for the 2nd time in the theaters just the other night, with elfbabe and her husband, and enjoyed it yet again, while noting further spots where PJ extrapolated from canon, brought in obscure JRRT stuff that only the geekiest of us would get, and made other stuff up out of not quite whole cloth. But his films have provided me with the most JRRT fun since the last volume of HOMES came out.
+1 to this. The current movie makes Rankin-Bass even more impressive. It’s over 35 years old and has less than 1/4th the run time of the trilogy, yet the characters are far more developed, the plot is almost directly from the book (despite leaving out Beorn and maybe the Arkenstone), and it has the better Smaug voiceover and a better Gandalf portrayal.
Theaters should just start showing it in protest of PJ.
I wouldn’t say that I’m upset by the depiction of Radagast per se. The information we get about Radagast is pretty limited. While I personally would see him as being “regal” like the other wizards, I suppose I can live with a wizard who is a bird-shit crazy hobo.
If there’s anything I’m upset by, it’s that the movie would have benefited greatly by omitting every scene with Radagast in it. It’s unnecessary and cartoony. Forget staying true to Tolkien… it’s just plain bad movie-making.
I can say the same thing about Legolas. The character of Legolas is more or less fine. It’s just that he is also unnecessary and cartoony. Omitting every scene with Legolas would also have been an improvement.
I wasn’t really all that crazy about the last Hobbit film but I’d be okay with a movie that was just two hours of Lee Pace as Thranduil in his fancy clothes eye-fucking the camera. I don’t suppose I could get anyone else onboard for that, though.