I don’t remember where Tolkien had mentioned the tunnel worms, I was really confused when I saw them. The only thing I could think of was a line from Fellowship, when Gandalf was talking about how the dwarves delved too deep, and there are ancient things in the deep places of the world
The silliest part of the movie for me was Bilbo killing (or at least knocking out) orcs by throwing rocks at their heads. I thought orcs were at least a little stronger than that!
I agree with pretty much all the common complaints, especially about Alfrid. I also found myself snarking in my head at some scenes. My snark at this line was “you just got tossed around and beaten on by a giant orc/goblin thing and then you fell down a cliff with him. You probably have several broken bones and liquified internal organs. How are you even able to talk?”
Also, her “I want to bury him”, :smack: … he was basically a prince so he needs to be laid to rest with his people, HIS FAMILY, not somewhere chosen by some wood sprite whom he just met.
I think the better payoff of Tauriel’s character would have been for her to die with Kili. Tolkien had plenty of tragic love stories in the Silmarillion, it would have fit right in.
There was a lot of this. Tauriel probably contributed to Kili’s death by calling out to him like she did.
Still, I am always happy to see Tolkien’s works on film. I do wish there had been less changing of stuff but I still liked it well enough though this film would be my least favorite of them all. In the end it felt too rushed. Also I really wished he’d gone out with a bang and knocked us out of our seats and that didn’t happen.
There was no continuity between the various battle scenes, for the most part-no overarching strategy or recognizable tactics-the dwarves for example were far too quick to abandon their shield wall tactic.
Overall the film was okay-loved Galadriel’s Sauron-ass-kicking freakout, and Thorin’s redemption, and the tragedy of the brothers…I’m guessing that Alfrid gets his comeuppance in the EE. Knew there would be more Legolas silliness-and I was right. And I HATE how he looks in this film-the face, the voice (now an octave lower?), all “off” from how he was presented in LOTR. I liked the character then; not here.
I never understood why the hobbits couldn’t have been shown to have been adept with the sling. Maybe it is too silly-looking a weapon…
Well, he was pretty good at Conkers, if you must know…
Would you mind helping me with the math? How does the movie cut 17 years?
I saw it last night and I think you did a pretty good job of summarizing my opinion. Generally I enjoyed it, I’m a fanboy after all. I think I enjoyed it more than the second one, tougher call versus the first, but it could have been great if it weren’t so damned over-the-top all the time.
I have the same gripes as everyone else. Alfrid was a waste of screen time. Legolas was generally absurd. Dain’s headbutts were cool the first 2 times, then less so. Thorin and Dwalin versus a 100+ orcs was too silly. The constant deus ex Eagle, even though canon, was not treated well on screen.
I’m not sure what Jackson’s problem is. There were parts of the original LotR battles that were too cartoonish, but tolerable. I’ve been in theaters were people cheered after Legolas scaled the Oliphant, so I get it. In the Hobbit I think Jackson got drunk on that reaction and shoehorned 3 scenes like that, each trumping the other, into each movie.
I found a lot of the heroes’ invincibility to be too eye-rollingly over the top and really it didn’t need it.
I think my biggest problem was that in the effort to trump up the final battle through set pieces and pacing they ultimately turned it into a confused mess. Compare Eowyn killing the Witch-king in RotK to Durin killing Azog, which one felt more organic in the context of the battle? WTF was going on in the main battle while Legolas, Tauriel, Thorin, Bilbo, Dwalin and Kili and Fili were fighting Azog and Bolg…did everyone just decide for forget about all their captains for 30 minutes of screen time?
The battle in the book to my recollection is actually pretty awesome and is described in good detail. It was dramatic and the tactics were actually logical. The timing and momentum shifts on the arrival of the 2nd orc army and then the Eagles actually made sense. Of all the things they changed from the book, this was probably the one that hurt the movies potential the most…since it’s practically a 2 hour battle sequence. This was no Helm’s Deep.
That rant out of the way, I will break from the crowd a bit and say that I didn’t mind Tauriel’s addition too much. The forced love story with Kili was groan-worthy, but I get the need to have some female characters on screen and Kate’s still a delight to look at. Plus it was at least a plausible excuse to get Legolas into the story. He wasn’t needed, but I get the motivation there too. If they’d have trimmed the fat elsewhere in the movie they could have actually made these characters’ arcs compelling.
Of course I loved the opening with Smaug, great to watch. The Bard-son bow was goofy, but whatever. Great eye candy, though I think it could have been better as the finale of the 2nd movie instead of the start of the first.
The White Council was all kinds of awesome. Would have been good to build a little more menace there, but cool to finally see the ringbearers in action. I was a little confused by what was ailing Galadriel and why she was suddenly able to over come it. Could have used some better exposition.
I wouldn’t have minded if they’d have spent some more time on the various negotiations prior to the orcs arrival. I think a good bit of drama was lost there. Then again some more focus on the reconciliation and sharing of the treasure after.
Seems like they dumbed it down a lot and they really didn’t need to.
This bugged me as well in the movie. Anyway, in the book Frodo and Bilbo have the same birthday, September 22. It also happens to be, along with Bilbo’s 111th birthday, Frodo’s 33rd birthday (and the traditional coming-of-age for hobbits.) Between the Birthday Party and Gandalf showing up to make the final test of the ring, seventeen years pass with minimal comment in the text. One of the parallels between The Hobbit and LotR is that both Bilbo and Frodo are both 50 when they start out on their respective journeys.
In the movie it feels like Gandalf shows up the next weekend with his suspicions of the ring and gets Frodo leaving the Shire right away–much like Bilbo is suddenly thrust out onto the road in The Hobbit. In the book, there’s a long bit of text where Frodo sells Bag End, moves across the Shire to a small house, and it’s not this sudden mad chase by the Ringwraiths.
You’re probably right, but I heard this line as “they want to bury him,” and thought it was maybe her being upset and confused that dwarfs treat their dead in a different way than elves.
The actual battle in the book is incredibly short. Three pages from the arrival of the orcs and the hurried Man/Elf/Dwarf alliance until the arrival of the Eagles and Bilbo being knocked out. Then another page and a half describing what happened while Bilbo was unconscious. So no matter how you cut it, stretching that into 2 hours was going to involve inventing a lot of material.
The other movies were so bad I won’t see this one until I stumble upon it on some tv channel.
Bolding and emphasis added by me, on the off chance that I’m not the only winter-stupid person who had to read this three times to realize Asterion was actually answering Omniscient’s question.
To rephrase slightly, the film played fast and loose with the “investigation” process (remember the scenes in the movies where Gandalf heads to Gondor and does research in the musty library?).
They also (IMHO: I don’t think there’s any filmic or directorial official note about it) made hobbit ages more in line with human ages - hobbits at 50 are supposed to be equivalent to humans in the mid 20s, and hobbit 33 is essentially like human 18. In the movie, they sort of did away with that tidbit, so they simply made it appear that Frodo was much younger, to make the casting of Elijah Wood appear more sensible to the average movie-goer.
Therefore we lose 17 years, making the whole shindig much more compressed, with the odd resulting ret-con of Strider being old enough to be a seasoned Ranger during the Hobbit. Although, given what little we hear of the Dunedain, I would seriously not be surprised to see a 10 year old heir to the bloodline getting experience in the wilds by tagging along on less dire missions. At 10, my stepfather in rural southeast US was already regularly hunting in the swamps alone for the family’s meat.
Since you haven’t seen the movie, this thread is obviously not directed toward you. You’re headed right in the direction of threadshitting here. Knock it off.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
(Bolding, mine)
I wasn’t sure if I was the only one, but he looked like his face was digitally enhanced a bit (does Orlando Bloom have wrinkles now?? The horror.), and they didn’t do a great job with it. In the earliest scenes of this film they had him with Tauriel and he looked like he was a computer-generated animation (with a little brown eye shadow-I swear), compared to how she looked more natural. And the script gave him very little to work with; he didn’t seem nearly as cool as he did in LOTR, like he was just set dressing to tie the two films together. I understand, he wasn’t in “The Hobbit” book, but if he’s going to be here, why not make him a bit more interesting than just an animated ninja-elf?
And even my 13 year old son made a few comments to me during the film that were spot on: “Looks like Legolas with his never-empty quiver, again” (OK, it *eventually *empty), and “That guy [floating under the ice] isn’t dead. He’s gonna jump up and fight some more.”
That is lamest fan retcon/wank I’ve ever seen. Aragorn is 17 years older in this movie because thirteen years ago (our timeline) Jackson cut out some chapters of book-FOTR from his first movie?Seriously?
Is Rosie a tween or a MILF or dead or not born in your universe?
Uh. How would YOU do the math? If it’s supposed to be 77 years from the end of The Hobbit until the Two Towers, but 17 of those are supposed to happen during the timeframe of the movie and DIDN’T, how do you propose to connect things together?
nm
All right, let me back up here. Are there any other crazy stupid retcons that are solved with “it’s supposed to be 77 years from the end of The Hobbit” than “why isn’t Aragorn 10 years old”? What am I missing?
You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
There is no fanwanking, no retconning.
In the peter-jacksonian Middle-Earth universe, the events chronicled in the red book, as written down by Bilbo, continued by Frodo, and finished up by Sam and the gang, the timeline is 17 years shorter than it is in the book version. This isn’t a fanwank - it was purposefully done by them to streamline events and make ages work better for film. Whether I agree with it or not, it is what it is.
Despite lacking those 17 years, Aragorn tells Eowyn in the Two Towers movie that he is 80 years old, which matches his age in the books. So, for that to work out, he simply has to be 17 years older by comparison to our hobbit framework characters.
We don’t know of any other ages that are specifically stated, but there are implications that the situations in Rohan and Gondor degenerated much more quickly for the films than in the books, and likewise Saruman’s trip to the dark side was pushed back further into the past to give him the requisite time to build his uruk hai army.
So no: that’s the only one.
My opinion stands. Proudly.
And, yes: retcon. A pointless, silly one. Why bother? Why not just say that PJ miscalc’d? The line was misspoke? All kinds of things? Why say an entire universe was created… so Aragorn wouldn’t be ten. years. old.
Seriously?
What the heck are you talking about? Seriously.
If Aragorn is born 17 years earlier in the “film universe” who CARES? It’s NOT “big” it’s NOT “crazy”, it’s not even “weird”. You are blowing this SO FAR out of proportion it’s not even funny.
Seriously. We have two facts. Aragorn’s stated age, and the known time between FotR and The Hobbit. From this, we deduce that Aragorn was born earlier than he was in the books. So. What. WHY exactly are you treating this like it’s some crazy time paradox or something?
In a film universe that has some MANY messed up discrepancies compared to the books, why is this EASILY EXPLAINED thing such a big deal?