Ok, full disclosure time. I like the prequels. They are in some ways better than the prequels. (like having light saber duels between more than just a cyborg and and old man/farmboy and yeah, Natalie Portman)/. Of course the hype that they generated could never be lived up to, fanboys are unpleasable and lets face it, there were a couple of questionable choices made by the film makers.
So, do you think the Hobbit is going to suffer the same fate. I mean it has all the advantages that the prequels had, a good cast, an anticipated story and a lengendary trilogy which preceded it? You would think that it would not.
I think at this point the only thing that could be reviled as much as the Star Wars prequels is the third installment, which is going to be the only installment where they’re going to have to do a lot of writing to fill in the gaps Tolkein didn’t.
Apart from being actually written before TLOTR, The Hobbit is a different story with some of the same characters. As long as they don’t try too hard to “set up” Rings, it should be fine. It even has a built-in hand wave for inconsistencies and continuity errors.
I trust Jackson and the rest of the returning crew enough to not make the Hobbit films a Phantom-Menace level bomb. I think a lot of the SW prequel trilogy’s problem came from the story, and that part’s all been set out by Tolkien already.
(I do expect there will be at least as many, if not more, liberties taken with Tolkien’s text as there were in the LOTR films, which will cause a certain amount of backlash amongst the fandom.)
I also think that the bar is set awfully high for these films to not be at least somewhat of a disappointment. But I’m hopeful they’ll vault it anyway.
Within the Lord of the Rings universe, “The Hobbit” was written Bilbo Baggins, and any differences between the books is due to Bilbo misremembering or changing things in his narritive, or from ignorance or personal perspective/point-of-view differences. I’m not sure how that will play out in the movies
Bilbo also outright lied. Thus the original edition, and after LOTR, the changes. He lied about how he acquired the ring.
That said, I’m dubious about getting three movies out of the Hobbit. It is a more traditional story form, an adventure, rather than an epic romance (LOTR), and that bodes better for turning it into a movie than the form of LOTR. It would make one good 2.5 hour movie. I don’t know how they are going to get three 100 minute plus movies out of the material without breaking up the narrative.
In Unfinished Tales, there was a sort of retcon in which Gandalf explains to Frodo the backstory of how he came to be involved in Thorin’s vendetta against Smaug, and how it ultimately tied in to the larger struggle against the Necromancer/Sauron. You don’t suppose they’ll take that route do you?
The first three Star Wars movies were directed by George Lucas (under reasonable scrutiny by the studio), Irvin Kirshner, and Richard Marquand. The second two also benefited by the talents of Lawrence Kasdan on the screenplay. The prequels, by contrast, were written and directed by an out-of-control George Lucas, with no studio to control his wild meanderings.
The three Hobbit movies will have the exact same creative team as the three LOTR movies. So I would expect to see the same level of quality.
There are a huge number of things that happen in The Hobbit, the only reason the novel is so short is that it’s told in an almost fairy tale style with relatively little being told in depth. I think that if Peter Jackson decides to film everything then he won’t have much trouble filling three films with minimal filler. I do think that it will change the tone of the story a significant amount, but I have faith enough in the creative team that it’ll be done with a healthy respect for the material and it’s creator.
Watch The People vs George Lucas. There is no deep, dark secret as to why the sequels sucked: Lucas views Star Wars as a kid’s & young adult franchise. At least in the twenty or so years between the trilogies that’s what he came to believe and want. And in those respects he succeeded. Jarhead Boinks is the most reviled character amongst adults, but he is literally loved & adored by little kids.
Peter Jackson (and JRR) are not George Lucas. The LOTR books & even more so the films were not made strictly for kids. They were all PG-13 sure, but a pretty hard PG-13 (only thing that kept them from being R was a lack of actual blood in the battles). Only Revenge of the Sith was PG-13, barely.
RoTK was nominated for freakin’ eleven Oscars, and it won all eleven including Best Picture & Director! The last (and only) Oscar-worthy thing Lucas did was American Graffiti, and that was 40 years ago.
Suffice it to say, I don’t see Peter Jackson getting seduced by the dark side anytime soon…
The endings of The Return of the King. Yes, I know it came from the book. But let’s face it - it was poor story-telling. The story ended when Frodo and Sam threw the Ring into Mount Doom. But the movie literally went on for another thirty minutes after that.
The recent announcement that The Hobbit will be released as a trilogy. That’s not justified by the stories. The Lord of the Rings was five times the length of The Hobbit.
These are worrisome signs that Jackson is succumbing to the temptations of bloat. A lot of authors and filmmakers fall so in love with their subject, they can’t bear to leave anything out. They even invent new things to throw in to keep it going. The result is stories that would be great in one book or film end up running through three mediocre books or films.
We need the Peter Jackson who was willing to be ruthless and toss Tom Bombadil out of the story.
No, we need the (non-existent) Peter Jackson who would be willing to be ruthless and not drag in all sorts of way cool stuff that he thought up himself, but we won’t get it.
My problem with the Jackson films (and I liked them for the most part) wasn’t the stuff he left out (e.g. the barrow downs), or even the stuff he changed (e.g. buttkicking Arwen) but the stuff he invented out of whole cloth (e.g. Aragorn going over the cliff). I’m worried that since the Hobbit is only about one fifth the length of the LOTR–and is destined for the same three-film treatment–that Jackson will be unable to resist the temptation to invent all kinds of crap.
