More like reach first on an error.
You’re just being precious…
Actually the behind the scenes stuff with Gandalf and the Necromancer was occurring, is critical, and adds a lot.
Adding extra hot elf action was not.
Radagast not played entirely for laffs, as in his first scene would have been fine. Mind you, he is supposed to be overly rustic and concerned for animals.
Worse than that, a love triangle. I’m fairly certain that the only named female character in any of the movies who isn’t in a love triangle is Shelob.
Personally, I think they should have killed two birds with one stone and made a couple of the dwarves women. It would give them more room to differentiate the largely interchangeable dwarves without descending into farce.
I see what you did there.
The Necromancer sub-plot is only critical in the big picture, as a lead-up to LOTR. But to mix it into the Hobbit movies in this way is pretty distracting. It’s like… let’s say you have a 1930’s gangster movie, and they kept cutting away to show the rise of the Nazi party. Sure, Hitler is important. But he’s not relevant to the actual story we need to be telling.
For The Hobbit (i.e. Bilbo’s story), the Necromancer is only important as a way to explain why there are spiders in Mirkwood and why Gandalf can’t help kill Smaug. That’s it. Frankly, I think the Necromancer sub-plot would have made a great bridge movie between Hobbit and LOTR. Do it as a stand-alone movie and I’m a happy guy.
As for Radagast, the books and extended material clearly portray him as rustic, but there’s a long, long way between Radagast and Gandalf/Saruman. When those two guys enter the room, you instantly think “Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.”
However Jackson chose to portray Radagast, I feel that statement has to be true of him as well. It’s not hard to imagine a nature-loving rustic who knows more about the forest than you know about yourself and who will kick your ass if you start raising the dead there. He shouldn’t be portrayed as a birdshit crazy, panicky, little kid brother of Gandalf.
Perhaps they ran because a small weakened and unarmored party of 15 fighting an entire community of goblins in their own mountain doesn’t make sense. The books portrayed goblins as dangerous and the dwarves were not cast as “super-warriors”. It was the trilogy movies that cast the goblins as weaklings. Seeing the dwarves cut through the goblins/muppets like butter seemed completely ridiculous.
Because “The Lord of the Rings” was an actual trilogy, whereas “The Hobbit” was a single book?
There is such a cut floating around out there, called The Hobbit: The Tolkien Edit. Runs about 4 hours long. Not hard to find if you know what I mean.
He was great in HOT FUZZ, though.
Actually LotR was six books, bound into three volumes.
It’s not that it sucked. It’s that it suh-huh-HUUUUUUUCKED.
Huh. I guess that was one of those points when I was almost completely uninvested in what was on-screen, because I didn’t even notice it.
Whether you call them “volumes” or “books”, LOTR had three and The Hobbit had one.
It depends on what you mean by “book.”
I’ve been enjoying the Hobbit extended versions much more than the screen versions. The extended version is even more about the Hobbit as a prequel to LOTR, but has the additional contextual matter to make that coherent story. Editing that out to make a coherent cinematic Hobbit that stood on its own [or rather the book’s merits] was not ruthless enough.
Ultimately the screen release movie failed by being too big for Hobbit [book] and too trimmed down for Hobbit [LOTR prequel].
The LOTR prequel through the extended disks is monstrously long [~9+ hours], but if the action and battle scenes were cut back you’d probably have a very satisfyingly solid two parter.
What most people mean by “book” is a thing with a bunch of pages that you can hold in your hand and read. Tolkien could just as easily have called each half of the three LOTR “volumes” “Part I and Part II” as he could have called them “Book I and Book II”. Which makes it all a silly pedantic hijack.
Whatever you call them, LOTR was a trilogy and the Hobbit was a … unogy.
Probably because the death of the dragon isn’t the climax of the story. I’m guessing that when they laid out the story that for non-readers the orcs in the Battle of Five Armies come out of nowhere and it sort of becomes the the climax. Adding Azog helps lead up to the battle. I didn’t have a problem with the addition of Azog but he got too much screen time.
I liked the addition of the Necromancer in theory. To people who know the whole Hobbit/LoTR story arc the actions of Gandalf and the White Council are important parts. My issue was that so much of it was ham-handed, like the death of Gandalf. Saruman comes across as a babbling fool; why would Gandalf later trust him with the news of the emergence of the ring?
I’m apparently one of the few who didn’t mind Radagast but I agree he could have been portrayed better. To me the biggest problems where the bloat, the love triangle, and the insipid fight scenes (someone already mentioned the dance on the dragon’s teeth).
How do you know they didn’t?
Why do you think Kili is the only dwarf without a beard? Why do you think Kili is so much prettier than all the other dwarves?
Only because the publisher interviened. JRRT considered it one novel and intended it to be published as a single volume as it has been many times. I should know as I have one of them bound in red leather with a slip cover.