Goblin mercenaries?
And of course, when they were lining that shot up, I was thinking, “Is the next scene gonna be him searching around in the rubble for his son’s head?” Bowstrings do not work like that!
The the movie universe where do we learn the number of years between FotR and Hobbit 1?
In the beginning of Hobbit 1 - where it flashes text at the bottom of the screen to “60 years earlier” and we find Bilbo smoking a pipe on the bench - saying “Good Morning” to Gandalf.
Also - while the FOTR makes it seem like only a few days had passed while Gandalf was off studying the ring - that doesn’t mean that 17 years hadn’t actually passed in that time frame - its simply not stated.
I don’t think that anyone that has seen just the films quite understands how much time passes during the events*
*outside of about 12 hours, of course.
According to this -
Aragorn is 10 when Bilbo finds the ring.
Well, I’m late to the party. I just saw it last night. I must say, I was very disappointed.
Basically, here’s the problem: It’s not Tolkien, it’s Gygax.
Seriously, this whole movie is the transcript of one of those all-night D&D games that you played in college over pizza and beer. By the time 4 am crept around, you’re exhausted and drunk and you’re like “Dude, my elf can’t die just because the bridge is collapsing. He jumps up the rocks as they fall! Look, I rolled a 20, see?” and the other guy is like “My character says ‘Why does love hurt so much?’ Quit laughing, dumb-ass, I’m roleplaying, not just roll-playing!”
:smack:
- Martin Freeman acts the fuck out of the character, really, even with the limited screentime he gets it’s magnificent.
- A bit too much action like in the previous two, but no surprises.
- It bugged my that Thranduil’s sylvan elves aren’t that sylvany, they are not wild enough; too “Rivendelish”.
- I’m not sure on the goat/pig steeds, but Billy Connoly with a giant hammer on a pig might’ve crossed a line.
Like the other two movies in the Hobbit trilogy, I thought it was overstuffed and almost frantic. Too often, it was more like a video game than a work inspired by Tolkien. The battles were interminable and hard to follow. The sneaky one-note Albert was shown more than Bilbo, I think, or at least it seemed that way. The scene where Galadriel expels Sauron from his fortress looked like something from a Sixties psychedelic movie. Thranduil on an elk made me cringe. And why would Thorin let himself be foot-jabbed by an orc under the ice? Sheesh.
I did like Billy Connally as King Dain Ironfoot, truculent on his war-pig, and Gandalf’s exasperated comment that he had always found Thorin more reasonable. Smaug flying over the town, breathing fire, was also very cool.
Favorite moment: after all the battles, all the commotion, all the rushing about, Bilbo and Gandalf sit side by side and the wizard cleans out his pipe. Quiet, intimate, and just right.
That was a good scene. I was expecting Gandalf to start teaching Bilbo how to make smoke rings.
I dont get while Beorn barely has any screentime while in the book he’s a major factor in the battle?
Concerning Gollum. Are we to assume he just sat in a cave for 70 years without going out to try and find Bilbo?
Well, you know, Jackson had important stuff to concentrate on. In the book Beorn plays a major part by personally killing Bolg, but Bolg and Azog both get their come-uppance elsewhere in the movie. That doesn’t leave much for Beorn to do.
He emerged only a year or two later, but he hadn’t a clue where to begin looking, so he wandered around for decades without ever coming near the Shire, becoming a bogeyman to the woodsmen on the edges of Mirkwood as a ghost that drank blood and stole nestlings and cradle-babies alike. Eventually the growing power of Sauron summoned him to Mordor, where he was captured, interrogated, and turned loose to look for the Ring once more, and shortly after captured again by Aragorn and questioned by Gandalf.
I am told that the extended version of The Desolation of Smaug does better by Beorn, in the part when they meet him at his house. That was already one of the better parts of that movie, though abridged in favor of dumber stuff.
I’ve noted that when commercials for the Hobbit – BOTFA come on TV when I’m not paying much attention, both the dialog and the acting make me think it’s an ad for the latest Blizzard video game. So yes, there’s something very video-gamey about the movie.
I did just see the movie and … what everyone else said. Too much padding, weird pacing, and Alfrid looked like a Rowan Atkinson Black Adder clone. I was particularly annoyed that after Thorin recovered from his madness, there was still a bunch of strolling out of the mist, leisurely bro-hugging and manly speeches while people were being ground to mincemeat just outside the gates. Where’s the sense of urgency?
And what happened to the battle once all the heros climbed the inexplicably high hill that no one had noticed was there before? It really would have been a better, tighter movie if Thorin had just died fighting in the thick of the battle as it turned instead of the strange video game boss fights.
And I was mostly fine with Tauriel, except for her plot-driven incompetence fighting Bolg. For 99% of the movie, Tauriel is an orc-decapitating elite ninja elf, but for the sake of tragic romance, she has to get her ass kicked by some thug.
The less said about Legolas climbing the falling rocks, the better. When you’re filming a Tolkien movie and you’re stealing ideas from Kung Fu Panda, you’ve clearly lost your way.
So yeah, I’m looking forward not to the director’s cut, but to the fan cut where some Tolkien fan with a lot of free time edits the trilogy down to one good three hour movie.
This. So much this. The rest of your post was pretty much spot-on too.
I completely agree (and our roleplaying group wouldn’t allow jumping off falling rocks…)
A couple more things popped into my head that I recall making me irrationally angry during the movie.
There’s a training montage before the battle where we see the ragtag bands of fishermen arming themselves with old weapons and armor, including helmets. The dwarfs also raid the armor stores in the dragon’s horde. No one in the damn battle wears a helmet except the orcs. OK, I get it – you can’t hide the face of your actors and it’s hard to emote when your head is covered with solid, well, fiberglass, probably. It’s still stupid.
More cogently, we know that the elves are highly trained archers. We’ve seen them nail orcs in the eye while doing backflips. There’s a set piece where we see 1000 elves do a precision drill and aim a thousand arrows at Thorin. So…when the orcs first charge and the dwarfs correctly form a shield wall with pikes, what do the idiot elves do? They balletically leap over the shield wall where they can be chopped to mincemeat by worgs and goblins. Where’s the Agincourt-like rain of arrows dropped from behind the safety of the shield wall? Haven’t these idiots been in a medieval battle before?
Saw it today and liked it quite a bit. In fact, I really like the entire trilogy and think Peter Jackson did a great job. I would have liked to have seen it directed by someone else, but it worked out to be a very good trilogy.
Can’t wait for the extended cut in 11 months.
I agree, mostly. No one else could have done it. They talked about Guillermo del Toro but he’d have made it far too dark.
I am really looking forward to the extended version.
Now yes- they added some unnecessary over-the-top-action, and I would have liked more Beorn. But Gandalf and the White Council vs the Necromancer was a fantastic addition. It made the film.
Taurial? Meh. They did need a strong female. So, that’s Ok.
Ha!
Okay, I saw the movie last night. (Hey, I wait for movies to get to the cheap theaters.)
I agree with what others have said (in some cases, stuff that was predicted before the the first Hobbit movie was released). Filler, filler, filler. There were times I was sitting in the theater thinking, “They should have cut this scene and this scene should have been trimmed down to a five second shot and this scene should have been left for the DVD.”
And the weird thing was there were scenes that should have been in the movie and weren’t. Others have already mentioned Thorin’s funeral and him being buried with the arkenstone - that would have been a great scene and would have helped the narrative.
But the battle against Sauron? Shouldn’t have been there. It was a set-up scene for the Lord of the Rings and had nothing to do with the story in this movie. It also felt like the characters in that scene were appearing as cameos because they had to be included. Like Stan Lee.
The opening fight with Smaug didn’t work. The ending of the last movie set it up as a major event and then this movie blew it off too quickly. Too much antici for the amount of pation we got. The attack on Laketown and Smaug’s death should have been the climax of the second movie rather than the opening scene of the third movie.
There was a general sense that the timing of events was off in this movie. How long did the events in this movie supposedly take? How long was it from the day Smaug attacked Laketown to the day of the big battle? A day or two? A couple of weeks? A few months?
Overall, I’d guess it must have been months. We had a handful of people conducting a long search through an entire city and Thorin slowly descending into madness. We also had the word about Smaug’s death spreading throughout Middle Earth and armies being gathered and marched across continents. This makes it easy to believe that months had passed.
But at the same time, we had the Laketown people arrive at the mountain the night before the battle. So how long were they marching? All summer to walk between two locations that are within sight of each other?
It was pretty convenient that all of these different armies traveling all of these distances all just happened to arrive at the same location within hours of each other. What would have happened to Thorin if the dwarf army had arrived the day after the elf army did? Or if one of the orc armies had arrived a day earlier?