The point of an adaptation should be to make a movie that is better than either the original or the adapter is capable of alone. If Jackson believes the Hobbit can be improved by CGI bullshit that robs the film of any sense of danger, yet is too tedious to be enjoyed as eye candy, then he is unfit for his job.
Eh. I’d like to see you do better.
Sure. Just give me half a billion dollars, and I’ll get right on it.
Tolkiens books have been around for a long time and are beloved by a lot of people.
Some people feel PJ took too many liberties with his movies and are disappointed because they wanted to see something closer to the book.
It does seem like he’s going off the rails more with these latest movies than he did with LOTR, where IMO he nailed more than he failed but still screwed some stuff up.
From Chapter 12.
"They debated long on what was to be done, but they could think of no way of getting rid of Smaug - which had always been a weak point in their plans, as Bilbo felt inclined to point out. Then as is the nature of folk that are thoroughly perplexed, they began to grumble at the hobbit, blaming him for what had at first so pleased them: for bringing away a cup and stirring up Smaug’s wrath so soon.
“What else do you suppose a burglar is to do?” asked Bilbo angrily. “I was not engaged to kill dragons, that is warrior’s work, but to steal treasure. I made the best beginning I could. Did you expect me to trot back with the whole hoard of Thror on my back? If there is any grumbling to be done, I think I might have a say. You ought to have brought five hundred burglars not one. I am sure it reflects great credit on your grandfather, but you cannot pretend that you ever made the vast extent of his wealth clear to me. I should want hundreds of years to bring it all up, if I was fifty times as big, and Smaug as tame as a rabbit.”
Pointing out ‘Your plan is stupid’, is fine in a childrens book. But wouldn’t translate to film, changing the plot point to getting the Arkenstone makes internal sense and a better movie.
Forget the books and the history, these are just tedious films. They really are, they are 3 hours of action scenes that drag on forever and just end up boring. The third film is going to be a complete slog to watch which is a shame.
Take the battle of five armies for example, how can there be a thrill in seeing a massive battle like that when we have already seen about two full hours of people killing orcs and goblins? We have seen orcs getting killed in Mirkwood, on the river and even in freaking Laketown, you think there is anything exciting about seeing more of them getting killed at the end? Meh.
Saw it in 3D, and liked it more than the first movie, but still felt vaguely disappointed by the end.
Great summary of the differences between book and movie, Malacandra. I have no problem with departures from the source material if it’s actually for the best, such as to reasonably simplify the plot, improve the flow of the story or provide interesting backstory, but most of PJ’s changes seemed more like padding than “improvements.” I, too, would have preferred a much shorter, more stripped-down movie that was truer to the original text. A good screenwriter could adapt The Hobbit into a single, entertaining, briskly-paced two-to-three-hour movie, I think.
Good stuff: The opening flashback of Gandalf and Thorin meeting at the Prancing Pony was well-done. Ian McKellen and Martin Freeman were both fantastic throughout in their respective roles. Smaug looked very cool (although it did seem that his scale changed, King Kong-style, from time to time). Sauron as a shifting, whispering cloud of evil, and then his fight with Gandalf, protected by his white sphere of good magic… very impressive. I don’t particularly suffer from arachnophobia, but the Mirkwood spiders were realistic, huge and scary. The empty Nazgul burial vaults, high on the mountainside, were also cool.
Not-so-good stuff: Not nearly enough Beorn; we were, alas, deprived of the scene where the dwarves arrive at his door one or two at a time, and Gandalf has to keep placating Beorn as the dwarf count rises. The Legolas-Tauriel-Kili love triangle didn’t do anything for me. The actor who played Bard looked distractingly like Orlando Bloom without Elvish makeup. I didn’t buy that orcs could make it into Laketown and not be spotted by someone. I usually like Stephen Fry, but his Master fell flat, I thought. The looong action sequence with Smaug ineffectually chasing the dwarves around Erebor and starting the furnace with his breath was just too over the top, and it seemed to me that Smaug would be smart and quick enough to step back when the gold statue fell apart.
Sorry I didn’t spot Colbert and his pipe - I’ll have to look more carefully next time.
I too (just to help with the census) don’t have any problem at all with deviation from the novels.
I read The Hobbit when I was 12 and enjoyed it and never gave it much thought after that. If it made for a better movie they could turn Gandalf into a woman from Hoboken transported through a portal in her local laundromat and I wouldn’t care.
And for the most part I don’t have any problem with the individual components of the movie (except for the extended battle scenes being so cartoonish that there really is no sense of suspense, especially when three of the participants are people you know survive to the next trilogy) and it is really just the lack of restraint in how it is all put together (and that each element must be included) that wears me down. In that regard this one was a definite improvement over the first one as in that one I was bored halfway through the dinner at the beginning of the movie.
(Also: as a reminder as to why I saw the movie when I so didn’t like the first one. I had decided not to. But then my wife decided she wanted to see it and I’ve dragged her to enough movies she doesn’t want to see that our agreement is whenever she picks I’ll go without whining…to her anyway.)
Funny you should say that - this article about gender-flipping Bilbo and Gandalf has been making the rounds, and it’s kind of a cool idea.
By the way, did anyone else get a chuckle out of them including Evangeline Lilly and a smoke monster in this movie? 
I think it’d be cheaper. Just get me some scissors.
I’ve read “The Hobbit” aloud twice to my kids and LOTR as well. I’ve read the books a few times myself, the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc.
I thought The Fellowship of the Ring was perhaps the best adapted film ever made. I was annoyed about changes to The Two Towers, but after we saw it I went back and read the books again and found the changes to be less violent to the story than I thought at first.
A movie is going to emphasize spectacle, compress timelines and combine characters, that doesn’t bother me. I can see where PJ is going by emphasizing the Arkenstone (the ending of the book is kind of baffling, really, and this is setting it up to make it clear where we’re going – I actually liked playing up Arwen/Aragorn in LOTR because when I read the book the first time I wondered where Arwen came from).
I agree that it actually felt too long. I have the extended versions of the LOTR and I remember that the EE of FOTR actually felt shorter than the theatrical release. I can’t imagine feeling the same for these movies (I did pick up the extended version of the first movie, and don’t think it added anything, in fact it could have cut all of the fight with the orcs under the Misty Mountains, and the scrotum-bearded goblin king was just awful.)
The only part of the 2nd movie that I think will endure is the scene between Bilbo and Smaug. I enjoyed the barrel ride just for the silliness, but the gate sequence shouldn’t have existed. It felt to me that all character moments were edited out for more running (similar to Star Trek: Into Darkness). Being chased by orcs the entire way is unnecessary (side note, why did they bother having the orcs subtitled? To cut cost on non-English language dubs?).
I think in the end it feels like PJ filmed 10+ hours of footage for each movie, then decided to leave in all the extended action sequences at the cost of character development (one of my favorite scense from FOTR is Gandalf’s talk with Frodo about mercy in Moria). I can understand Tauriel teaching Legolas to have some compassion for non-Elves (I don’t see it as a love triangle, rather Tauriel having sympathy for a reified individual rather than the abstract hatred of dwarves generally). I suspect that will play out more in the 3rd movie, but it consumed way too much screen time for a sub-plot that has nothing to do with the book. At least the Arkenstone was played up in backstory and side conversation.
I agree that the lengthy scenes of the party of dwarves in Erebor against Smaug did diminish Smaug from The Terrible to “The incompetent exterminator”. I’ll still see the 3rd movie, but my expectations are pretty low at this point. The actual story of the hobbit from the Shire has kind of gotten lost in the spectacle.
[side note on preview: I think it was a good decision to cut the dwarves showing up at Beorn’s house. I enjoyed how it was done in the first movie at Bag End, but it would have been too much a retread in the 2nd. In the book, it’s fun to watch it play out, and when reading it to my kids they could enjoy the anticipation of it since after Bilbo’s house they were in on the joke. It’s of the deletions I agreed with in the film, along with Bombur’s falling into the water in Mirkwood and losing his memory–that was a good omission as part of time compression. ]
Does perhaps the closing dragon scenes work better for those who are not familiar with the book?
I’m guessing the percentage of dopers familiar with the hobbit is pretty high, even before you self-select for those interested in participating in a discussion about it.
Like pretty much everyone else, i found the whole ‘Smaug chases the Dwarves around why they try to kill it’ getting tedious really quickly, knowing it was pointless. Even when Smaug got buried in molten gold, i didn’t believe for a second that Jackson, was going to change things and kill him that way. In fact i wonder if the whole set up was Jackson trying to do something with the whole ‘Smaug the Golden’ name?
I’m wondering however, if you come into the film cold, not knowing how the book pans out at all. Does it work better, was it exciting, and the dragon not dying a dramatic moment?
If not themselves, did any doper see it with somebody else who didn’t know the book, and what they thought of it.
I’ve read the book, but I’m not intimately familiar with it, nor am I a serious Tolkienian like many folks here. The dragon scenes didn’t bother me too much, but I’m an easy audience, most of the time; once my disbelief is suspended, you’ve really got to screw things up to lose that. I was more irritated by one-shot :smack: scenes, like the rolling dwarf in a barrel taking out ten or so orcs, or Legolas reprising his (in)famous shield-surfing scene, this time on a corpse.
My comment when Smaug flew away coated in molten gold (before he shook it off like a wet dog) was “Smaug the Fabulous!”
My thanks – however, I don’t have the world’s worst case of spider-phobia. Reading the book,I was perfectly comfortable with the Mirkwood spiders and the talk among them – it’s just that big / giant spiders give me the jitters visually (and I’m not keen on being walked on by them). Lasciel in post #16 gives precise instructions re the points in the film at which to close eyes, and open them again.
That bit seemed to me to be designed for the video game tie-in.
Personally, I found that bit kind of disappointing. Gandalf’s magic is usually portrayed as being quite subtle, precisely not the D&D fireball-throwing kind, where magic just plays the role of mystic artillery. That scene I felt came too close to this sort of thing, effectively having him conjure up a forcefield.
Mostly in LotR, the magic is VERY subtle; less so in THE HOBBIT. However, a movie can’t be subtle. The book can say, “As he lifted his staff, a ray of sunlight seemed to flash through the clouds” (I don’t have text here for exact quote, when he chases off the Nazgul from the field before Minas Tirith) and be fairly subtle. A movie has to SHOW, and subtlety is lost.
I’d like to also note that the “fanboy” stuff is of two sorts:
- There are people who dislike the movies exactly because they vary from the books; but
- Most people, like me, IMHO, enjoy discussing differences between book and movie, and perhaps analyzing WHY the movie chose this route to handle that problem. However, that’s got nothing to do with whether we enjoy the movie. I enjoy (or not) a movie on its own terms, but I find analysis of differences can be instructive and interesting.
Quick example: In the book, the dwarves have no real plan to deal with the dragon. The dwarves are not played as heroic; to the contrary, they’re mostly comic and often cowardly characters, dominated by love of god. That won’t work for a movie, so PJ has them plan be to steal the Arkenstone, unite the dwarvish arms to fight the dragon. That solves the problem of making them more heroic (or more sensible.) So, that’s a change from book to movie, but it’s an interesting one that helps the movie overcome a problem.
Second example: In the book, the arrival at Beorn’s house has one or two dwarves coming at a time so that Beorn lets them all in (where he would have rejected so many if he knew the true sum.) For the movie, that’s almost identical to what happens at Bilbo’s unexpected party; it would be boring and repetitious. So they needed a change, and thus …
Those are two examples that I think work quite well. So, I enjoy the discussion of book vs movie, but that doesn’t affect whether I like the movie. I take the movie on its own terms, it’s a very different art-form from a book. I similarly don’t judge music like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scherezade with how well it matches the Arabian Nights story. 
Well, Gandalf did do the same thing against the Balrog in Fellowship. The subtle magic is because, in the words of the G-Man, Gandalf has agreed to abide by certain… re-stric-tions… while on Middle-Earth. He’s supposed to help out, but he’s not supposed to use his full power as a Maia.
However, the Balrog and Sauron are also Maiar, so one might presume those restrictions don’t apply if Gandalf has to go mago a mago with them.
My wife and I went to see this last night. Not much to add to what has already been said. The movies really do drag quite a bit and I think they would have been better as either three 2-hour movies or two 3-hour movies. Stretching a small book like the Hobbit out to the same length as the three LOTR movies is really pushing it.
The Smaug CGI was really well done, I thought, but yeah the whole “chasing the dwarves around for half an hour” thing got a little tedious after a while.
Saw it over the weekend. I meant to reread The Hobbit after the first film but never got around to it. Still, I don’t remember a lot of this stuff being in the book. This latest, second film seemed way too long.