You always take their side.
Agreed. History will not be kind to these films.
We’ve already established that critics’ ratings were not stellar, as they were for LOTR.
Box Office, Shmox Office. This thread is about the artistic failures of The Hobbit movie,as per the OP. And, anyway, lots of shitty movies do great at the box office, as you well know.
3 books, 3 movies = good
1 book, 3 movies = not good
True. "Not stellar’ and no where near as good as LotR. Already conceded.
But still good nonetheless.
Why does everything have to be crap or creme? 
Why can’t it just be Good, when it’s not Great?
I don’t think we can blame the source material here. The Rankin-Bass animated THE HOBBIT (with a wonderful Richard Boone voicing the dragon) is enjoyable and amusing and has moments of emotion, and tells the story from Bilbo’s perspective.
I think the blame here lies in making it too long. As noted, the dwarves in the book are almost indistinguishable, and that’s fine. I can understand why Jackson tried to give them individual looks, weapons, personalities: he thought that the movie needed to be visual and to distinguish them from each other. But there are too many, and the result is confusion and boredom, and it takes the focus away from Bilbo.
As I’ve said before, I don’t mind varying from the book, most of those decisions were made for cinematic purposes. I do mind that Bilbo is a minor character (and one of 15 minor characters.)
But I think most of what’s wrong with the film could be handled by severe editing and shortening (especially battles and chase scenes.)
I agree with a lot of the reasons said already. It tries too hard to be both an epic prequel to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and an adaptation of Hobbit the children’s book. Should have stuck with one or the other. The jokes about dwarves farting and bird poo wizards end up clashing with the epic battle against evil.
I do not agree that it is good, and neither do many of the people who have posted in this thread.
:rolleyes:
The average of critics’ ratings for the Hobbit movies is mediocre, but I think many of us in this thread would rate the Hobbit movies lower than the critics’ average. I would. I would say the movies are quite poor, or, as bucketybuck said, “…padded, turgid rubbish.”
That does not mean that for us all movies are either “crap or creme.”
More precisely, one might say that the Hobbit movies are actually rather overrated.
Which was stated in the opening post, which you were already told to read back when you started this threadshit. Why are you determined to find something wrong with the entire concept of the thread, to the point of making up strawmen about what it’s about?
The subject of the thread is: Why is the Hobbit not as good as the LOTR? Try to read for comprehension next time you feel the need to try and ruin a thread you don’t like.
Sorry, got DrDeth mixed up with DMark, who was the one clearly threadshitting.
DrDeth, do learn to read the OP. He said the Hobbit was good, just not as good as LOTR. Don’t follow DMarks footsteps when he clearly thought this thread and the topic was beneath him.
True, the OP did say that, but his title was also “Why did Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies succeed & The Hobbit fail”. My point is the Hobbit has not "failed’ in any meaning of the word except "not as good as the first three’ and there is no way in hell it could have been.
But I wasn’t just responding to the Op. We also have* “I think that the The Hobbit has been a failure of film making.*” and “…padded, turgid rubbish.”
I agree, but I also think that the thread title is a bit ill-chosen to convey that subject.
Making a binary opposition between the LOTR movies “succeeding” and the Hobbit movies “failing” doesn’t suggest a thoughtful comparison of their quality so much as a blanket endorsement of the former and a blanket rejection of the latter.
I wouldn’t. I like 'em. They’re not as epic, in any sense of the word, as the LOTR movies, and I’m not saying I didn’t have my share of eyeroll moments while watching them, but ultimately it was still a Middle-earth I could believe in. And that’s plenty good enough for me.
Ah, I disagree. I went to see it and I was disappointed. The friend I saw it with said, more or less, “That movie was just like The Hobbit, except in every way.” So there’s a way in which the Hobbit has failed. And apparently a lot of people agree with me.
I don’t think you can judge the success of a book like this on box office, because there are some movies that everyone is just going to see, even if the result is mediocre.
What about Tauriel, and that completely unnecessary love triangle with Legolas and Kili? Elves looked down even on men (considering them a lesser species). In thousands of years, there were only two elf-man unions (Luthien-Beren and Arwen-Aragorn). From the elvish point of view, dwarves would be one step lower than even humans. So would Tauriel really fall for Kili?
My only problem with FOTR was that they cut out the Old Forest, Bombadil, and Glorfindel, and instead turned Arwen into some sort of superheroine. I mean, do you really think Elrond would let his precious daughter ride single-handed against the Nine – especially after what happened to her mother? Also, they should not have dropped the scouring of the Shire in the last movie.
The problem with including Tom Bombadil is that he appears early on as a powerful force that saves the Hobbits … then disappears.
You can afford to do this sort of thing in a book that people spend weeks reading (and rereading), but not in a two hour film.
Also Tolkien didn’t put in many female characters and modern movie audiences like to see some.
Elrond sent out many messengers (e.g. Glorfindel) to help Aragorn - it was just a coincidence that Arwen (Glorfindel in the book) met up with the hobbits.
Arwen wasn’t intended to ride against the Nine. She had a superb horse and provided she could get back the Ford of Bruinen, she would be safe.
I too like the Scouring of the Shire. Sadly (as pointed out above) there wasn’t time in the film to include it.
Remember that the movie audience (who may not have read the books) probably think it’s all over once the Ring is destroyed. There already follows 20 minutes of finales and farewells (e.g. “You bow to no man!”; Frodo leaves to the Undying Lands; “Well I’m back”) and adding the Scouring would have baffled these folk about when the movie would finish.
The Hobbit filmed lacked some key elements from the LOTR films:
Shield surfing Legolas
Dwarf tossing
Scrubbing bubbles
There have been only those two marriages between Men and High-Elves, but I’m not sure this covers Silvan Elves as well. Recall that Prince Imrahil of Belfalas is sometimes said to be descended from the Silvan Elf Mithrellas, one of the companions of Nimrodel.
If you want to really push the boundaries, recall also that even Hobbits are hinted at as possibly having some kinship with Elves, at least in the Fallohide branches. The Hobbit says that it was rumored in the Shire that long ago one of the Tooks (a Fallohidish clan) must have taken a “fairy wife”, i.e., married an Elf.
Moreover, while Elves and Dwarves definitely have a long-standing feud, I don’t think Elves see the different “speaking-peoples” in terms of some kind of racial hierarchy, as you’re suggesting. All the peoples seem to perceive each other more like aliens from other planets than like “lower animals”: not your own kind maybe, but not in any sense your natural subordinates or inferiors.
So yeah, it didn’t faze me that much to think that a Silvan Elf might fancy a Dwarf.
The first Hobbit movie was fairly true to the book, but the Desolation of Smaug took too many liberties. While it aims to expand on the book to lengthen it into a movie trilogy, it ignores much of the detail within the book itself. For example, the Mirkwood forest episode seems like a lengthy journey in the book, but like a day hike in the movie. There’s no dream sequences with feasting elves. Finding the entrance to Smaug’s lair is a challenge in the book, but briefly attained in the movie. If the book was adhered to more closely, the movie wouldn’t need to rely on ninja elves as much.
OK, good point, she was even more shoehorned that Radagast. In any event, she wasn’t included because of her popularity in a previous movie, either.
I don’t know; I thought that that was the one place where the movie actually improved on the source material. Tolkien’s conception of “Durin’s Day” just doesn’t make any astronomical sense. The movie’s still has its issues, but making the “Last Light” be that of the Moon rather than the Sun fixes a lot of it.
I think “Durin’s Day” is supposed to be when the autumnal equinox coincides with the first day on which the crescent moon of a new cycle is visible. This happens once every 823 years and is called Money Bags. The book scene works just fine - the dwarves no longer have the astronomical skill to predict moon phases accurately enough to know if Durin’s Day will come in any given year, so are sitting on the doorstep when they suddenly hear a thrush cracking snails. None of this “oh bugger, we got here on the last hour of the last day but the prophecy’s wrong so let’s wander off in despair” business in which PJ demonstrates yet again that he thinks dear old Tolkien really didn’t know how to tell an interesting story at all.
I feel about the Hobbit movies much as I do about Disney’s cartoon Jungle Book - which was amusing kids’ entertainment with some epic songs, but made no attempt whatever to tell the story Kipling wrote, and even the characterisation was way off never mind the story elements. If you want to make a three-movie series all about how there’s these dwarves, right, and they travel to this mountain, yeah, where this humungous dragon lives, and all the way there they get chased by orcs all the time, okay, 'cos the boss orc was wounded by the dwarf king like a hundred years ago, and there’s a chase scene every ten minutes, and then this hot red-headed elf totally falls in love with the dwarf king’s nephew, and they have this big scene where they trick the dragon into getting drowned in a thousand tons of molten gold, only it doesn’t work, and the man who everyone thinks is going to kill the dragon with this roof-mounted double-sprung arbalest is locked up in prison although he’s worked out that the dwarves are going to bring ruin on their town… well, it might make an acceptable action-adventure movie, but what is the point of even pretending that you’re telling Tolkien’s story?