You have a point on some of the complaints but a lot of the problems I had were not just the deviations but some of the silliness: Thorin dancing on the lips of Smaug?!? The dragon starts off menacing and ends up being ridiculous.
Count me as one who is disappointed at most of the departures from the main story. That said, I don’t have any real problem with the insertion of Tauriel except for the dumb love triangle. One plot point that I’ll give PJ credit is the role of the Arkenstone. The story hints that the dwarves are attempting to recover the Arkenstone as a way to call the dwarven tribes together to force out the dragon. This makes more sense than the Tolkien story where 13 dwarves plus a hobbit hope to vanquish a dragon that destroyed whole armies.
“Inspired by the Hobbit,” is exactly how I described the movie to my GF, when we were leaving the show yesterday. I knew PJ et al really changed the movie, but Malacandra’s recap is quite eye-opening. The thing is, I like the idea of fleshing-out some of Tolkien’s world—the boatmen of the Lake shouldn’t be thrilled at the idea of someone waking up Smaug, the Necromancer stuff should be shown in some more detail—I just don’t like how PJ did it in this case.
Smaug the CGI critter looked incredible. Although, was it me, or did Smaug keep changing sizes from one shot to the next? In one, he looks 100 yards long, just nothing but tail and body as far as the eye can see. In another, he looks like your run-of-the-mill Adult Red Dragon. Big, but not, ‘OMG! it’s Godzilla!’ size. As noted above in the thread, he acted unexpectedly from how he was described in the book. A giant Wyrm can’t do more than mildly singe one dwarf in 15 minutes of chasing them throughout the dwarven tunnels? And how is Thorin riding a wheelbarrow top on a river of molten gold and not being cooked alive? Like most of the extended action sequences in the movie, it just got silly and immersion-killing. At one point I started unconsciously making X-box controller gestures, as it looked more and more like a video game. ‘Let’s see: Hop onto this bucket, hit X to duck, right stick swings the ax…’ The same sort of thing I was thinking watching the action sequences in Attack of the Clones. This is not a compliment, by the way.
Oh, and can PJ decide once and for all whether the Dwarves are bumbling comic-relief dummies, or combat bad-asses? They get their asses handed to them on multiple occasions, then one of them gets a barrel for armor, and starts dual-wielding axes like a cross between Paul Bunyan and Drizzt Do’Urden. I can handle one, I can handle the other, but constantly jumping between the two is really confusing.
And the action stuff, or the clumsily hammered-in love triangle, would be alright, if they didn’t cut out stuff that was actually great in the Hobbit. Like Bilbo’s flattery of Smaug. In the book, it’s a fantastic bit of extemporaneous bragging, and faux-cleverness by Bilbo that ends up nearly getting his team killed. In the movie, yeah there’s some of it, but it’s primarily just an excuse for more CGI of Smaug and the Arkenstone slipping down the slopes of the treasure hoard.
I didn’t hate the movie. I did like this one a bit better than the first. But I can see where the fanboys have a point.
I didn’t think it was an obscure term - if Tolkien isn’t understood as “pure fantasy” I’m not sure what would be.
Elves, dwarves, swords, magic, gods, demons, no technology more sophisticated than ox cart wheels, middle-ages society and customs, archaic languages. I just can’t connect with this school of fiction. The inability to suspend my disbelief that far means it bores me no matter how spectacular or visually stunning.
(I am, however, a huge fan of Lawrence Watt-Evans’ Ethshar books, which can best be described as a hard-sf take on a world of magic. They meet every criterion I list above, but take such a rational, ordered view of things that I can enjoy them.)
(Yes, I’m perfectly aware that most sf, including hard-hard sf, has as many hand-waving and made-up elements.)
As an archer this one really kinda bugged me. Bard goes from “Bard the Bowman” to “Bard the Cannon Cocker.”
There were other quibbles, but it does show a distinct willingness to depart for the book just to make things bigger and flashier. Thing is, it makes Bard less heroic. A single man shooting that one perfect arrow is the stuff of legends. Manning an AA turret, firing something that looks like a fireplace poker, just doesn’t compare.
Funny - I actually liked that (my archery cred is not that high - I play with bows and am making my own longbow - but I am not that good). The “black arrow” of the book never mean much to me. Seeing the huge ballista style iron arrow made to be fired from a huge launcher makes more sense to me than one archer with a longbow sending “the black arrow” into Smaug.
Obviously YMMV - but I thought I would explain what I liked about that.
Saw the movie last night with the extended family (Seeing a Tolkein flick has become a Christmas tradition for our extended clan). We had a great time, lots of fun, willing to argue book differences. Final statements:
Legolas continues to be a bad-ass.
Tauriel is now on my list of 5 (my wife smiled at me for that one, she gets Legolas)
Wanted more time with Beorn - he is cooler than he got in this one IMHO
Agreed. But I guess PJ would never have captured the nuances of that scene: Bard, who has previously been seen only as a permanently miserable doomsayer, urging all the archers to fight to the last shot, and finally down to the last shot in the quiver - an arrow that’s been handed down from father to son, that has never missed, that has always been found and re-used, that may (Bard does not know) even have been forged by the Dwarves of Erebor in the days before the Dragon… and he’s just got the clue he needs thanks to miraculously understanding thrush-speech as the Men of Dale used to. “Here you go, arrow, for the last time - now’s your chance to avenge the murder of the people who made you.” What good is that next to an extended action sequence with yet another ton of CGI?
Have not yet seen it, but heard a lot (and read this thread): the thing is, PJ made Smaug really really huge, much bigger than he seems to be in the book. To kill him with a puny little arrow would be… well, dare I say, unbelievable? So I’m not surprised at a giant catapault. Besides, it’s an homage to Ray Harryhausen and THE SEVENTH VOYAGE OF SINBAD.
More importantly (in regard to archery in these movies), PJ has firmly established that no good guy ever misses with a bow and no bad guy can hit anything other than the side of a barrel with one.
So, to have a good guy missing the dragon with a bow wouldn’t be possible. Had to change weapons.
They neither hoped nor expected to vanquish the dragon - only Gandalf had any inkling that it would even be possible to do so. They were hoping to steal back a fraction of the treasure Smaug had taken from their ancestors, and I’m not even sure Thorin knew for certain that the Arkenstone would be there.
The point of the quest was the quest itself, not the success of it. Dying heroically was considered by the Dwarves as better than continuing to live in ignominy - and in the book, Tolkien does a good job of showing the foolishness of that worldview, with the rather reserved and decidedly unheroic Bilbo doing far more than any of the Dwarves, and the grim and pessimistic Bard being the Hero in the classical sense.
I don’t intend to see the film, being a “whining fanboy”, but my impression is that it removes far more of the subtleties of the source material than Lord Of The Rings.
More or less, I agree with you. However, I don’t think a goal to kill the dragon is so flawed. After all, there are plenty of things - even in real life - that you can do with a small team working under stealth that you cannot do with an army. And in Tolkienland, all you need is the right hero to vanquish the mighty evil. Gandalf vs the Balrog, for example or Eowin vs the Ringwraith. If Thorin thinks he’s the man to take out Smaug, then a little discrepancy in size isn’t going to stop him - as we see with Bard, who does kill Smaug.
I don’t know that anybody has really tackled this question. In this section he removed a few things:
The business with Beorn and introducing the dwarves one at a time. The remaining Beorn section seemed very abrupt.
The business with Bombur falling into the Mirkwood river and falling into a deep sleep.
The trip through Mirkwood in the book took, what, weeks? The dwarves were running out of food by the end of it. In the movie it seemed to take a day or so.
In the book, the dwarves were imprisoned by the elves for a substantial period of time, and Bilbo had to spend that time joylessly burgling the elves to survive. It took him a while to even FIND where the dwarves were imprisoned.
I suppose you can argue that none of this was left out, it was just compressed.
