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Graphite wrote:
Brilliant. Hobbit 2: Hobbit Harder is a massive improvement on Unexpected Journey. Not quite up to the standards of the LotR movies in their eventual, full length DVD versions but definitely up to the level of The Two Towers and Return of the King at their cinematic release.
Hobbit 3: The Hobbiting should be astounding, but still seems unlikely to live up to Fellowship of the Ring.

I genuinely think There and back again is going to be epic- there have been no complaints whatsoever about the straight-up fight scenes (rather than the silly goblin-town and barrel-riding) or Smaug, and this one is going to have the destruction of dale, the fight with the necromancer and the battle of five armies.

Uhm, I think that the fight scene with Smaug at the end and the fight scenes in general were pretty bad actually.

The biggest problem with the Smaug scenes was how they diminished his threat. If Bilbo had been invisible for the entire thing and still terrified, it would have worked far better. As it was, Smaug seems incompetent because he can't kill a single dwarf or hobbit, even when Thorin literally falls onto his mouth.

The way the Dwarves outwit him with silly "Oi, over here!" schtick is really lame too, and leads to the bizarre ending where he abandons them with his treasure and flies away rather than murderising them.

It made far more sense in the book. To be clear, I'm not such a purist that I think no changes can possibly be made from the source material (cutting Bombadil in the LOTR movies was absolutely the correct decision for example) but almost every change or addition they made made the movie worse in this case. The parts that followed the books and the dialogue lifted from them is by far the strongest.

Da Boss wrote: leads to the bizarre ending where he abandons them with his treasure and flies away rather than murderising them.

He did that because he realised Bilbo cared for the people of lake town, and he knew if Bilbo had to watch them die first, it'd be far worse for him.

Da Boss is my voice.

Shrike, I understand the motivation the writers gave him for it but I don't accept it because it doesn't make any sense. It would have been far better (in my opinion) to more closely follow the events in the book. You could even have had some sort of action sequence on the mountain side as Smaug comes around to destroy the hidden door, much as it was in the book. I'm sure that could have been an exciting climax. And Smaug, thinking the Dwarves dead and buried, could have winged his way to Laketown in exactly the same way. Sure it might have cut 20 minutes out of the film, but there's no law saying it had to be 160 minutes long!

 Da Boss wrote:
Shrike, I understand the motivation the writers gave him for it but I don't accept it because it doesn't make any sense. It would have been far better (in my opinion) to more closely follow the events in the book. You could even have had some sort of action sequence on the mountain side as Smaug comes around to destroy the hidden door, much as it was in the book. I'm sure that could have been an exciting climax. And Smaug, thinking the Dwarves dead and buried, could have winged his way to Laketown in exactly the same way. Sure it might have cut 20 minutes out of the film, but there's no law saying it had to be 160 minutes long!

I do agree with you there- if it were as it was in the book, it would've worked fine, and probably better, but Smaug's reason for leaving Bilbo wasn't entirely illogical.

I think this is an example of trying to humanise an inhuman character to gain appeal. They tried to give Smaug human motive so he'd appear more human and be popular, but in the book, tby the things written here at least, he acts at the more bestial levels of "kill intruders, eat people, burn stuff"

 AegisGrimm wrote:
I fully enjoyed this second movie.

The way that I am justifying the differences between the trilogy and the book is that when we are reading the Hobbit, we are reading it as penned by Bilbo Baggins, who added lots of fluff to it to make it more of a "fairy tale". He left out the parts he wasn't there for, and added stuff to other portions, like the songs, a large part of meeting Beorn, etc.

Imagine as if he was thinking, "Hmm, yes. Young Frodo would really like this part if I embellished it a bit more."

Going to have to agree with you on the whole thing about the hobbit. The story is being told by bilbo and there will be embellished parts, which makes it overall better.

Watched it. Felt it was a really really long and boring film, even without getting into whether it was true to the book or not.

I really disagree with Da Boss. The book does a very poor job on this issue. It tells us the dwarves have an ancient grudge against the dragon, is all about them crossing the known world to somehow confront him, despite having no real plan to do so, and they ultimately never even see him. Instead, some guy the author never bothered to tell us about suddenly appears and kills the dragon with ease. Womp womp.

I like the Hobbit but it's no literary gold standard for plot or pacing. The movie would not have been better by more closely following the book in this instance. Not saying what Jackson et al. went with is great but it's certainly better than the anti/forced climax of the book.

That said, Da Boss's point does apply to other scenes. I think Beorn is the most obvious. Staying at the Carrock in the book was wondrous but the movie boils it down to weird. And of course the less said about elf-dwarf romance the better.

I like the elf/dwarf romance! I thought they had great chemistry.


And the rule 34 will be amazing.

Blargh!

I agree that Bard randomly killing Smaug in the book is a bit of a WTF moment in terms of pacing, but I really like the fact that the Dwarves never confronted the dragon in the book. To each his own, I suppose!

I actually liked the changes to Bard to make him more interesting, and changing the black arrow to something a bit more hefty fired from a bolt thrower is a cool idea, and makes a lot more sense than the random black arrow (that always bugged me as a kid).

I also like that they've been clearly foreshadowing the icy cold lake and that Smaug doesn't like lots of cold water.

But that end sequence was pretty bad however you slice it.

I actually liked the ending. I didn't like the bit with the dwarves running about, but I suppose we had to get them in there.

The one silver lining in the dark cloud, that is the Dwarf fight with Smaug, is that the audience was able to see a lot more of the beauty of Erebor. It was prettier than Moria.

Movie needs a better editor. Or a team who understand "tone" and "tension".

The main positive I got from it was the change to the 'Black Arrow' man the discussions that part of the Hobbit (book) has gleamed over the years round my way is staggering.

Oh and yeah, I've always been in the 'I hope that arrow was an artefact otherwise it was a cheap way to kill the Dragon' camp.

JB wrote:The one silver lining in the dark cloud, that is the Dwarf fight with Smaug, is that the audience was able to see a lot more of the beauty of Erebor. It was prettier than Moria.

To be fair, smaug didn't really want to do a whole lot other than sit on his pile of gold and chill, while moria was infested with goblins, trolls and the balrog.

Haven't gone through the thread extensively, but I did catch the hobbit last night.

+ Lovely architecture, dat tomb, dat dwarf secret door vertical path
+ Barrel armor!

- movie was less about a hobbit and seemed more about legolas
- they left out the scene of the dwarfs finding the areas of light on the forest

The silliness of the barrel escape/fight, the elvish parkour/fighting, and the overweening incompetence of the Lake Town Lord did detract a bit from my immersion in the do-or-die of the entire premise.

That said, I was very happy that we got nearly an hour of dragon interaction and/or fighting. The way he moved was very much what I imagined a dragon to move.

 Necroshea wrote:

+ Barrel armor!

Glad I'm not the only person that absolutely loved this.

 mega_bassist wrote:

 Necroshea wrote:

+ Barrel armor!

Glad I'm not the only person that absolutely loved this.

While the rolling scene before it was a tad overdone, I really don't see how someone could complain about a dwarf using an alcohol barrel as armor in a movie about jovial adventure. Some people just hate fun though so yeah.

 Necroshea wrote:

 mega_bassist wrote:

 Necroshea wrote:

+ Barrel armor!

Glad I'm not the only person that absolutely loved this.

While the rolling scene before it was a tad overdone, I really don't see how someone could complain about a dwarf using an alcohol barrel as armor in a movie about jovial adventure. Some people just hate fun though so yeah.

I agree with you in that though it was OTT, it was great fun to watch.
I disagree with you in that people who didn't like it don't dislike it because it was fun, but because it was too unrealistic.

Not everything in the Hobbit can be as realistic as talking spiders.

But everything could have been at least as interesting.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Not everything in the Hobbit can be as realistic as talking spiders.

This reminds me of someone I heard at the theater complaining about how Smaug was completely unbelievable because his wingspan wasn't correct for his bulk.

~Tim?

Details like the barrel armour don't really bug me at all because they're quite inconsequential.

Saw it last night.

Enjoyed it quite a bit. There were a few eyerolling moments but overall it was nice.

One of the things I was joking about with my wife, which goes all the way back to Moria in Fellowship.

What is the deal with Middle Earth and the pathological fear of railings on walkways and stairs!!! I swear that they are a 3rd age invention, as every ancient ruin or settlement that appears in the movies has huge deadly drops to either side of thin little walkways with no railings, lol.

Manchu wrote:
But everything could have been at least as interesting.

I thought the movie was easily twice as interesting as the book. In other words, it was decent. Enjoyable, even.

But then, I read the book after I had grown up and formed my tastes for fiction, so I didn't care that Beorn met the dwarves wrong or the dwarves were participating in their quest wrong or that Smaug was incompetent wrong or whatever.