Yeah, let’s discuss something serious, over a plate of really spicy Balrog wings! If they exist.
The Istari really seal in the flavor, don’t you agree?
Saw it yesterday in 3d, I didn’t check which frame rate it was. Some impressions:
Maybe it was just because I don’t watch 3d movies that much, but it looked really cartoony at times.
I kind of liked what they did with Dol Guldur. It’s not exactly canon, but I had visions of Radagast leading a bunny and squirrel army against Sauron, so it’s not as bad as I feared. I liked that the council showed some power on the Nazgul beat-down, for the most part they haven’t depicted anyone other than Elrond and Gandalf fighting in any of the movies. Also, they didn’t devote as much screen time to it as I feared they would after seeing the first movie. Also really liked that Radagast didn’t get much screen time after the first movie.
I also quite liked Richard Armitage’s portrayal of Thorin’s “dragon sickness”. I thought it would be cheesier and more eye-rolling, especially after the ridiculousness of the second movie, but I think it actually was well done.
I wish Dain had gotten a bit more screen time. He became King Under the Mountain after Thorin died, and I don’t think they even mentioned that. Or, as someone else said, the fate of the Arkenstone.
It would also have been nice to tie the two series together by having a line from Balin at the end about “maybe we can take Moria back at some point”. Maybe in the Extended Edition…
Still hate Tauriel and the forbidden romance angle, although I sort of understand that there aren’t a lot of female characters in the books, and that sausagefests don’t generally play well in movies. Also really weird to see Legolas looking significantly older than in the LOTR movies but I guess that couldn’t be helped.
Alfrid, like Grima, Denethor, etc. before him, was just too over the top for me. Why anyone would trust such an obvious snivelling coward is beyond me. Those are roles that should have been played with more subtlety. Alfrid seemed to me like he stepped out of a Monty Python sketch. Looked it too, I stayed for the credits just to make sure he wasn’t played by Terry Jones.
Overall, I don’t think it was as bad as the first two, but at this point (not having seen the Extended cuts of Hobbit 2 or 3), I don’t think any of the Hobbit movies are as good as any of the LOTR movies (which had many flaws themselves). In my opinion, the Hobbit movies overall are good but not great, and I enjoyed them for what they were. Since we’re never going to get anything close to a filmed scene for scene and line for line version of the books, rather than “based on” stuff like this, at least these movies will hopefully inspire some people to pick up the books and read them. And of course the movies aren’t taking anything away from the books.
It’s been an… interesting journey, Peter Jackson. Throughout, I have loved you at times, and hated you at others. You went a little off the rails there more than a few times and took my breath away more than a few others. The one thing I can say is that you at least attempted to bring the rich, complex world of Middle Earth to life. That you have only partially succeeded doesn’t diminish what you did accomplish. Now please go back to other movies and let someone else guide the Silmarillion (if it ever gets made).
Oh, did other stuff happen in the movie? I didn’t notice…I was too busy watching Thranduil. 
No, seriously, I liked it a lot. I know it had flaws (come on, Thorin, you’re supposed to be smart. Don’t follow the Orc under the ice. You should know he’s gonna pop up again!), and I thought it was a bit too long, but overall I found it a worthwhile end to the trilogy.
Would the Council as depicted by Tolkien in the books have basically used swords and staves to beat down the Nazgul? I had the impression that this kind of overt displays of power conflicted with the more subtle tone of magic the books presented. Like, they should have just walked in with a bit of a glow and the Nazgul would have been unable to touch them
Exactly what I was talking about in my post about subtlety. I can maybe forgive this one a little more since 1) A lot of movie-only viewers can get a glimpse of WHY the Council members are the most powerful beings in ME by wiping the floor with the Nazgul and 2) They were facing Sauron and the Ringwraiths, not middling armies of Orcs or even Balrogs. Sure it’s still a little overt as far as displays of power go, but at least there is a reason beyond “We need to show that this guy’s turned to the Dark Side, so lets make him act as over the top and obvious as possible, only no one around him can see it or call him on it”.
The physics-defying acrobatics made me wonder if I had stumbled into the wrong movie. That looked like some serious Jedi stuff. Do elves have midi-chlorions?
ETA: The closing scenes (old Bilbo) didn’t match up with the opening scenes. At the beginning of Hobbit I, old Bilbo is beginning to recount the story to Frodo. In the closing scene, he is not finishing that recounting with Frodo, and Frodo isn’t even there.
He was writing the letter/book to Frodo - he was not ‘telling’ it to Frodo aloud -
When Frodo picked at the papers he was writing on -
Bilbo told him “To keep his sticky paws off, its not ready yet”
Ready for what?
Ready for*** reading***…
So, he was narrating his wrting to himself and us - not Frodo.
Just saw it today and i liked it. Of the six movies, it is the only one that doesn’t feel too long and is my second favorite of the six (The Two Towers is my favorite). My main gripe was the first twenty minutes of this one should have been the end of the previous one.
May I ask:
With the brothers and Thorin dead…who took over the Dwarf Mountain? Thorin’s cousin? (was that in the book?) Did the humans live in the mountain or the edge?
Saw it Christmas night with my son. I liked it best of the three, but it was really damned depressing.
I liked the use of the megaloceras as an Elvish warbeast. Nice use of a prehistoric animal in a prehistoric setting.
I thought the levelling of Laketown by Smaug should have been included at the close of the last movie…it felt shoe-horned into this movie, making everything else anticlimactic.
The acting felt better and more natural to me in this movie than the first two and I was happy to have no incessant chase scenes with way too much CGI.
I would be interested to see a cut of this movie that included only what was in the book.
I liked it, but this was the worst of the six movies by far. Way too long, way too little content, and way too much stupid stuff. So many of the previous posts covered many of the stuff that bothered me.
It felt like they were phoning it in on the CGI. So many of the figures moved in exactly the same way in serial (the dwarves forming the wall of shields, the elves leaping over the wall of shields, the troll-things with the rocks swinging in their backpacks)!
Related to the massive imbalance of power, it made no sense that the dozen or so dwarves coming out of the cave to join the battle would have made a lick of difference to the battle. Ooh, they rallied!
Also, every mounted fighter is somehow able to drive through ground troops without breaking stride or losing a lick of momentum. I don’t care how big the horns are on your sheep, it just doesn’t make sense that they can run through orcs unhindered as if they were a field of wheat.
There was just way too much meaningful shoulder grabbing and meaningful gazes. It was especially frustrating when we were supposed to be feeling tension from the battle being waged outside or around them and characters take minutes to grab shoulders (or in one case, rub noses).
Ugh.
Dain II Ironfoot, the King of the other group of dwarves. Dale was a city right outside Erebor, the Lonely Mountain.
You’d have about enough to make a trailer. And not a lengthy one.
I quite enjoyed watching the White Council kick butt - including Saruman, fighting for the last time on the side of the angels even if only out of tainted motives. Galadriel’s banishing of Sauron was pretty damn badass and her kiss to revive Gandalf was nicely done and made a fair amount of sense in context.
Bard’s shooting of Smaug was right out of Guards! Guards! in terms of making it as difficult a one-in-a-million shot as possible. Shame to leave out the bit with the thrush, and instead have this ridiculous thing where he jams the two halves of a broken longbow into a wooden pillar in order to launch a missile designed for a far more powerful double-bowed arbalest, using his son’s shoulder as a rest, in order to hit the one spot missing its scale as the dragon charges them. Oy vey. :smack:
Jackson gratuitously drags out the hapax legomenon “were-worms” and decides “hey, no-one said they weren’t gigantic tunnel-boring rock-devourers that could drill an entire hundred-mile cave system to march an Orc army through, so let’s say they were”. I shouldn’t be surprised any more.
The battle scene would have needed less made-up stuff to pad out the film to the required length if Jackson had actually followed the evolution of the battle from the book itself, although this needs the armies on the Good side to not be handed the giant-sized idiot ball and the Evil side not to have the deus ex machina from the previous paragraph to allow a few thousand Orcs to pop up at the edge of the world and the battle to begin at thirty seconds notice. In the book it runs much like this:
- The bulk of the Good armies deploy on opposite spurs of the Mountain
- A “forlorn hope” opposes the Evil armies in order to slow them down and bunch them together
- The Elves charge and hit the flank of the Evil armies as the “forlorn hope” breaks
- The Dwarves and the Men (who can muster more than “two hundred angry fishermen”) charge on the opposite flank just as the Elves are losing momentum
- The Elves rally and mount a second charge. The Evil army appears on the point of breaking
- A detachment of Orcs successfully scale the Mountain and themselves flank the Good armies
- The Good armies are driven back
- Thorin and Co appear from the Mountain and rally Dwarves, Elves and Men alike for a desperate assault on the Bodyguard of Bolg
- This assault is brought to a halt and it appears only a matter of time before the desperately outnumbered Good armies are beaten down. Bilbo stands with Gandalf and the Elven-king where it seems like the last stroke of the battle might fall.
- The Eagles arrive and dislodge the Orcs from the upper slopes, allowing the Good armies to reunite for a last effort, though still outnumbered
- Beorn arrives, bursts through the Orc lines and crushes Bolg
- The Evil armies rout. Thorin has been mortally wounded and Fili and Kili have died trying to defend him.
As written though the Good side didn’t even try to employ any recognisable strategy, such as using the heavily armoured Dwarves as an anvil to allow the mobile Elves to attack the Orcs in flank or, gasp, loose a sustained barrage of missile fire - instead they leap over the Dwarves for a surprise attack that would be worth a whole thirty seconds of WTF? from the Orcs, before the Dwarves break their formidable formation to join in a wide-open brawl. It rather reminds me of something I read about 300, where they spend a lot of time talking about their impenetrable phalanx and then, when the fighting actually starts, they carry on like a bad martial-arts movie.
The Madness of King Thorin was well done in its way, but the middle of a battle is the wrong time for what felt like fifteen minutes of angst.
The solo fight scenes up on Ravenhill went on for far too long and included too much of Tauriel and Legolas being implausibly bad-assed - and that pair were able to get to and from Mount Gundabad far too quickly. (And Angmar? Jackson dragging in stuff from elsewhere in the legendarium, again. :smack: )
The Arkenstone business wasn’t wound up satisfactorily, nor the subsequent ownership of the Mountain - neglectful, when maybe thirty seconds more screentime with Dain and Bard would have done the necessary, and when, per the gratuitous backstory at the opening of Desolation, the whole point of the business was to recover the Arkenstone and reunite the Dwarves.
The cherry on top is the part where Legolas is sent off to meet Aragorn about seventy years too soon. :rolleyes:
So I saw it, and it was OK, but I have a question - how the fuck did Stumpy McFlailfoot the siege troll actually get anywhere with those prostheses?
Oh yes, and just to demonstrate that the goodies didn’t have exclusive possession of the idiot ball: If the were-worms could tunnel all the way from Mount Gundabad to Erebor, why didn’t they go the extra half a league and come up inside the Lonely Mountain? Azog gets to sic his entire army on Thorin and Co., nab the treasure for himself and get his hands on an impenetrable dwarven fortress.
What does an orc need treasure for?
I saw it yesterday and was disappointed. If I look at the three movies as an arc, the first movie was closest to the spirit of the story as a children’s book, and I almost pulled my son out of this one. Not that I didn’t find the ridiculous chase scenes in the first movie silly, but they met the requirements - they were light hearted romps. Almost cartoon-like at times. The dwarves at Bilbo’s house were the same. You could see the roots of the story were meant to appeal to the young at heart.
The second movie was darker, but I could still see traces of the kid appeal in the barrels.
This one disappointed overall. Largely because it was so dark. I did enjoy a few things, like the Council’s battle. I liked the depiction of Thorin’s madness.
I also regretted some of the editorial choices that Peter Jackson made in the trilogy. For me, one of the most impactful things about the book was the conversations that Smaug and Bilbo had, and the cat and mouse games they played. That was cut out almost entirely.
All in all, like most others, I was left feeling like it was all too long and that the spirit of the book was lost. Unlike others here, I thought that this entry was the weakest of the three, although it did wrap things up.
What does a dragon need treasure for? Canonically, they don’t do a damn thing with it except pile it up and play Dog In The Manger, and they don’t know good craftsmanship from bad although they can tell an expensive item from a cheap one. Just being in sole possession of the greatest hoard of the dwarves and the knowledge that he could keep the dwarves from enjoying their own would be incentive enough for Azog - sheer playground spitefulness writ as large as possible. It’s not like the Orcs needed to live in Moria after all, which they didn’t build and presumably didn’t enjoy any more than any other random hole in the ground.
The Orcs didn’t want the gold. There was a line from Gandalf that the fortress would be a gateway to conquering more lands.