f13.net

Trailer out for the last of the Hobbit trilogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSzeFFsKEt4

Didn't see a thread for it...

CGI:The Movie

At least post the main trailer too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVAgTiBrrDA

Good news for the 3 people on earth who still give a shit about LOTR movies.

I care, just not as much as I probably should.  He kinda missed the point.  Hugely.

Ill have to take my son to this. Good opportunity for a 3 hour long nap.

I hated the second movie so much that I think I'll wait for the remainder-priced DVD.

I'm surprised it took the 2nd movie to turn so many of you away. I thought the first was terrible and splitting them up into 3 was a blatant cash grab that could only mean lots of bullshit and nonsense thrown in, but accepted my stance as a minority. What a difference a year makes.

All I can say is I kind of enjoy these more than the original 3, but I am in the Randall (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKbyWSwd7hk) group when it comes to LOTR.

They're not great, but I still like listening to Ian McKellen do the Gandalf voice.  If I had my way, McKellen as Gandalf would narrate everything.

I could get behind that idea.

I Also Agree. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Mv7CE1XlZk)

Apparently, I'm weird.  I've enjoyed the first two just fine and am looking forward to the third.

One of us is broken and I'm convinced it's not me.  :oh_i_see:

Ditto.  I read the book so long ago I don't give a shit how true the movies are.  Other then the fighting rock giants in the 1st one.  That was fucking dumb.

But that would put Morgan Freeman out of work.  Freeman vs McKellen...who would win?

Freeman, no contest.

I'm also looking forward to this. The first two were clearly flawed, but not to the point of not being able to find things about them to enjoy.

Both are pretty old. Who will replace them - I can't think of anyone with such memorable voice.

(http://i.imgur.com/VNAspmm.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

Seriously though... No idea who will take the throne from Freeman.

Regardless of like or dislike:  The three LOTR movies looked like they should have looked.  The characters acted like they should have acted.  The battles went as the battles were meant to go.  They went to most of the places they were supposed to go.  Most events unfolded as they were expected to unfold.  There are some exceptions to all of these points, but I feel that they generally hold true.

In the Hobbit movies, absolutely none of the above is true.  The characters don't look right.  They sure as shit don't act right.  They places they go to do not look as described.  Battles do not happen they way they are supposed to.  Events are so differently portrayed that the source material might as well be something else.  This doesn't even begin to address the unnecessary stuff that has been included.  The whole tone of the movies is wrong as well.

Can't wait for the battle of five armies.  Wonder what side Smaug will be on!

While not as good as LotR, and although I have intentionally not re-read the Hobbit in the run up to these films, and despite acknowledging that they really are a bit long...

I still enjoyed the last two on their own merits, at least enough to pay to see the third. They are better than most of the geek oriented cinema that gets a dozen plus pages of posting in this forum.

I'm with the Monkey, though I'll still see it and (probably) enjoy it for the most part.  I just won't remember doing so, which is a shame.

COme on man, how can he on a side when Legolas sees him flying down towards the lake and kills him by shooting him 60 times in the same spot on his eye, driving a succession of arrows into his brain. Then with Smaug slain Legolas throws his cape back and flies off to fight injustice in another part of the world.

Also the girl elf and beardless dwarf travel back in time to escape oppressive marriage laws and their offspring form the beginnings of the hobbit race.

It could work if they use the sun to slingshot themselves around...

Me three, I did read The Hobbit right before the first movie came out and other than the rock giants, I quite enjoyed them. I'm looking forward to this.

I wonder if we're going to see some sort of Five Armies tabletop game come out of this.

Is that sarcasm? Because Games Used to have one in their specialist range as a 6mm game, and I remember reading that they were going to do one in their main LOTR scale line.

They just released a board game:  http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/135219/battle-five-armies

I agree with all of this. But... that is a nuance lost on the movie audience.

Hobbit movies are basically set in the same imagined world of LoTR for the audience of people who know the names but never read the books. And there's a lot of those people. LoTR is a slog, and while Hobbit is better, it's no Dan Brown or James Patterson. Short attention span theater still applies here.

But I don't mind Hobbit being in three movies. I actually thought LoTR could have been six easily. Shit, I've long felt it could have been at least a full season or two on HBO. There's less shit that happens over a shorter period of time in fucking Game of Thrones, and they'll drag that crap out for 10 years at least. They dumped out eight Harry Potter movies, and the amount of stuff actually covered in the books is about the first 1/4 of Fellowship   :-P

But it depends on the story you want told on the screen. The epic world defining Father of RPGs movie is what Jackson has tried and I think could have been extended even more. But Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer could tell the entire LoTR trilogy in 90 minutes :-)

Dude.  LotR and the Hobbit are two of the most read books of all time.  Patterson has sold 300 million books, across all his titles.  Tolkien has sold close to 500 million and that is almost entirely LotR and the Hobbit...  and that number is fuzzy because there was a copyright issue in the '60s and multiple publishers sold the book, not to mention a chunk of sales predated the modern sales record-keeping.  Also, the number of resales through used book dealers.

Sure, the movies are shooting for the non-book reading audience as well, but if there was ever an adaption that a good proportion of your audience is familiar with the source material it is a Tolkien adaption.  The other obvious answer is Harry Potter, and of those films I saw they pretty slavishly stuck to the book and didn't make major changes... though I didn't see the later ones.

Also, the Hobbit was written (and sold as) a children's book.  It's really obvious if you look for it, in the way that there are action or menace pieces arranged like clockwork so that young readers don't get bored and wander off.  You can't make a short attention span argument here as it was designed (and very successful!) to appeal to the shortest attention spans of them all.


What it comes back to is that Jackson futzed around with stuff.  That's fine, as long as it helps the adaption of the novel to film which entails different conventions.  The Fellowship adaption was generally spot on in what got changed or omitted.  The later LotR's movies to a lesser degree, and the Hobbit movies to a greater degree, make unnecessary changes that don't help the narrative and subtract from shit that book readers would enjoy without making it a better movie.


Overall I was pretty disappointed with the first two Hobbit movies, which were redeemed solely for the great Gollum scene in the first and the Bilbo/Smaug scene in the second. 

I am excited for this. It's not The Hobbit, the story told in the book of the same name, it's a movie about a series of events loosely based on those events and featuring the same characters. I will watch it and I will squee like a little girl continually. Afterwards I will note the many, many divergences from the version presented in the book and I won't let those affect my enjoyment of the film because they are not the same thing and it is possible to find mind-space for both simultaneously.

That's considerably mature and grown up of you.

...

Get the fuck outta here.   :why_so_serious:

Let me state for the records I don't care that the book and the film aren't the same. I'm good with that.

I care that the movies are CGI shit that went full pants-on-the-head camp and I just didn't enjoy the first one.  I gave it a shot, it was awful with a few good scenes. No thanks, you can have my money via HBO and Netflix, not via the Theater.

I'm ok with it, not enthusiasstic about it, mostly because of how little the camp/whimsy melded with the serious in the first two--it was often a very rough mix--and because the set pieces in both the first two movies were really way the fuck too much.

I'm mostly interested in what happens down in Dol Guldur, really. That's always fired my imagination since I was a kid and read the appendicies.

By mistake clicked this thread but Fuck You, Morgan Freeman will fulfill his destiny as the Narrator of All Life On Earth.

That was David Attenborough.

 :heart:

For a second there, all I could think of was Dave Attell.  Now that would be something.

Morgan Freeman lost his credentials when he lent God's Voice to the 10%-of-your-brain theory.

Morgan Freeman is not exactly picky about who he rents out God's Voice to.

Mainstreaming stuff like the Secret also serves for highlighting who you know shouldn't be trusted with complicated decisions.

Wow, so a lot of different points raised here, but I'll focus on your Hobbit one about the audience.

The Hobbit had a different literary audience than LoTR; however, the movie market is the same. Further, the Hobbit movies were only greenlit because of the success of the LoTR ones, in a time horizon typical for movies, rather than separate by 20+ years. Even if they punted to different directors like they did with Potter, it wasn't like they were going to have LoTR be PG-13 and The Hobbit be General Audiences, just because 70-90 years ago the source material was written that way.

Further, the Potter movies are not a good comparison, in part because there's a very clear living memory overlap between peak zeitgeist of the book franchise, the still-living author, and the movies, largely seen by all the same people who read the almost-as-recently-released books. Potter is kinda closer to Game of Thrones, in that the success of certain aspects of parts of the story telling (ticket sales, chosen talent, etc) absolutely effects how the author continues and closes out the series.

Tolkien didn't need to worry about the twitterstorm of outrage over killing off certain characters, and certainly doesn't have locked-in control over which elves they decide were actually alive and when.

Don't know about that. An entire subculture was born around objecting to Frodo going off to die at the end of LotR.

Apologies in advance, going to have to sirbruce (who has a reddit account you can search for, by the way!) this:


Don't understand this.  I never said nor implied that it should be a children's movie, just pointed out that it was written for the children's category of fiction in regards to the approachability of the work and the level of effort from the audience needed to grok the narrative.  Children's (and YA) books make excellent film adaptions.  They are structured more like film with more similar pacing and regular action or menace (or humor!) events to keep low attention spans engaged.  Emotions tend to be exaggerated, again like mass-market audience film.  Etc.

And also, just because something is written or sold as a childrens or YA book doesn't mean it can't be enjoyed by or popular with adults.  His Dark Materials was YA, for instance, and that has a large adult fanbase.


Tolkien readership has had a number of peaks, usually around every 20 years.  Big in the '60s, came back in the late '70s and '80s when Epic Fantasy became the genre leader and crossed over into mainstream bestseller lists, again with the films, etc.  LotR or the Hobbit regularly topped end of year bestseller lists in the '90s as people seemed to love giving those fancy special editions as Christmas gifts.

The Tolkien Estate is regularly dripping out those giant History of Middle-Earth things as well as Children of Hurin, which hit best-seller lists.  Fuck, the old rec.arts.books.tolkien newsgroup had massive amounts of activity in the '90s considering we were still using Mosiac or whatever as a web browser....  and a thread about if balrogs had wings would garner hundreds of responses in a matter of days.

Going into the LOTR films, Jackson knew this and really did a good job of engaging the large and rabid fanbase.  He co-opted the two most popular Tolkien artists (yes, that was a thing and people made a living doing it) to do the image work, consulted the experts or got them on the payroll, regularly gave exclusives to folks like theonering.net, etc.  He even managed to diffuse potential problems like when the more prominent role for Arwen leaked, or cutting Bombabdil (both of which worked very well), which created firestorms everywhere from Tolkien specific sites to AICN and movie gossip sites.

The Hobbit really feels like Jackson is only invested in a couple of the set-pieces, and he is far more open to either glossing over or heavily changing the rest in a rush to get to the next set-piece.


As for Potter, Rowling already had more success and money then she knew what to do with before the first movie.  She could have completely phoned in the remaining three books and they still would have moved hundreds of millions of copies.  If anything, I'd say its closer to her resenting aspects of the fandom in the way she handled the epilogue to the final book and things like the "Dumbledore was gay" comment she made after the series had ended.

Martin, on the other hand, is definitely a guy that is completely dependent on the TV series.  He only sold like 3-5 million books total across all his works before the TV show blew up, and since has sold about 30 million more.  The TV show is going to start to diverge pretty heavily as it is caught up to the books in many plotlines, and the remaining plotlines would be television poison to adapt (Dany does nothing for two seasons, than events reset, yah!)  There is no way Martin is going to squeeze out the remaining 2-3 books to stay ahead of the show, and HBO isn't going to allow their current number one attraction to languish while he gets his shit together.

I'm going to throw this out there:

I'd have no problem with radical departures from the book if I thought it actually worked as a film.  I've read some of the Constantine comics, and really enjoyed the film despite it being pretty close to an "in name only" adaption.  I love Dune, and enjoyed alot of Lynch's film despite the changes.

I was just kind of bored by the Hobbit movies so far.  The first had the great Gollum scene, and the second had the great Smaug/Bilbo scene, which redeemed them quite a bit... but the rest has just been pretty meh.  I just don't think they gel well as films.  The pacing feels off, Bilbo is the main character but he disappears or is sidelined from the narrative for large chunks, parts seem very awkwardly cut into the film, the action like Goblintown and the barrel ride feels without weight or consequence.  There is a real tone problem, where it bounces back and forth from super-cartoony to serious.

I have to agree with that.

Yeah, that's it exactly.  As a fanboi I am mildly annoyed by the departure from the source material, but the real problem is that the shit he makes up on his own is rather terrible.  The whole barrel scene is so rage-inducingly stupid and unplausible that no mere words can describe it.  Having Legolas appear is fine, but making him look like some airbrushed creepazoid from another plane of existence is not (let alone all the improbably arrow launching skills).  The first 2 minutes of the Smaug scene was cool.  The following 20 minutes of Smaug bumbling around being unable to munch a single dwarf or hobbit, despite having apparently never failed to munch dwarf in the past, was RETARDED.  Yeah, retarded.

And hot dwarves (dwarfs?)....FUCKING STOP THAT STUPID SHIT.

Okay, I'm going to come clean:

I love Lynch's Dune.  Fuck if I know why.  I mean, everything from Patrick Stewart carrying around the toy-breed dog to how hammy and weird and creepy (and obviously wanting Sting's package) Baron Harkonnen was.  The whole damn thing no matter how good or bad or ridiculous.

Yeah, I'll back you up on that.  I thought the whole voice-weapon thing was a nice departure from the book as well.  I never really got the hate for the movie.

Its awesome because it has great source material combined with Lynch in the prime of his weirdness. It's nothing like the book but it is still great. I bet there is some really, really good cut of that movie out in theoretical land that was never quite made because of the battles between Lynch and De Laurentiis.  I think Jodoworski's version would have collapsed under its own weight. Lynch is just sane enough to pull it off.

Yeah. The whole thing doesn't feel like Bilbo's story any more. It's like he got HIS SCENE at the end of the first film, and that's it. Forget him saving the dwarves in the forest, coming up with the barrels, being the guy who mans up with the dragon, and then mans up again with the Arkenstone. What Jackson decided to do, and it's way more subtle than the bad action setpieces, is make it so that all of Bilbo's decisiveness and maturation are a result of subtle corruption by the Ring. That just misses the point 100%. The dwarves don't count in the original because they're redshirts in Bilbo's story. Which is ok as long as it stays Bilbo's story. As soon as it's not, they'd better be more interesting than "Hat Guy", "Gay Dwarf", "Elf-Loving Pervert Dwarf" and "Fat Dwarf". Which they're not.

One of the more interesting things I read somewhere:

The Hobbit has the tone it does because Bilbo is the guy that wrote it down.  At heart, he's silly and goofy and generally a good guy.

LOTR is written by Frodo, who is serious and sad prematurely mature...  and the final happily ever after ending with Frodo getting to go off with the elves?  That has to be written by Sam, who is kinder and wants everything to turn out well and believes in fairy tales.  So in all likelihood, Frodo actually goes off to live with some elves in hospice care before dying prematurely from his wounds but Sam wrote him (and other members of the Fellowship) a happily ever after.

He's from the Christopher Walken and Samuel L Jackson School of Actors Gotta Work.

I'll go off and see Hobbit 3 with absolutely no expectations, then wait for the inevitable news that Peter Jackson is turning The Silmarillion into a trilogy starring Legolas.

He's already said that is not gonna happen.  Tolkien's family holds all the rights to anything not Hobbit or LOTR and they hate Jackson's work.

The marketing campaign for this movie is over the top, mainly in its posters. So much gravitas for a film no one will care about in a year.

Christopher Tolkien is around 90 years old.  Hollywood can wait and back dump trucks of cash on his kids.  Then we'll have 'Beren and Luthien: A Love Story' starring Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez.

YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH.

If this happens, there will be a reckoning, sir.

Luthien really does love him like a love song.

This. By the time Battle of Five Arms is on Netflix, it'll be time to remaster the then-15 year old Fellowship of the Ring in Avatar-esque 3D quality. That'll give another two years of someone to come along with a movie adaption of some part of the Simarrillion or even some part of LoTR dedicated to Tom Bambodil or Trolls or The Corsairs or whatever other shit they can define to the Nth degree based on some note spit in the margins of some other Tolkien script they dig up from Masada or wherever.

I don't care as long as the movies are fun. I only found Tolkien well after D&D, EQ and WoW, so I have no more love for that authenticity than I do Norrathian Legend  :awesome_for_real:

PISTOLS AT DAWN SIR!

That makes a good movie title.

http://www.eyeofthetiber.com/2014/10/07/peter-jackson-announces-plans-for-72-part-movie-series-of-the-silmarillion/

I suspect it has more to with Fran Walsh and Pippa 'Faramir-not-being-a dickhead-would-totally-undercut-the-power-of-the-ring' Boyens.

Even in LotR the screenplay doesn't quite trust Tolkien to be good at plot past about half way into Two Towers. It becomes more of a thing in each of the six films.

I'm still looking forward to this one though.

Don't get me started on Faramir.  That totally ripped the character in two.  It was horrible.

One could argue that is a valid interpretation.  I wouldn't argue that but it should not be discarded as completely outrageous.

No, it's nonsense.

He starts being 'proper' Bilbo long before he finds the ring.  It starts with the Trolls, for example.

The Ring is an enabler of him being a proper 'hero' (because, let's face it, invisibility helps him DO the shit he thinks up), but it's never, ever the Reason.

Yeah, I was a fan of the Jackson movies right up until the exact instant that they fucked up Faramir, because that was one of my favorite scenes in the book and there was absolutely no reason to get it completely wrong.

Of all the fuckups, it was the most heinous.

Bear in mind, I still am a fan of the movies and I'm not a frother - I don't care about many of the changes they did, indeed some I like.

However, they utterly missed the mark with Faramir (no pun intended), as he was meant to be someone who shows Aragorn isn't the only 'Good Guy'.  Instead, everyone apart from Aragorn was a cunt.

I am glad there's other people who absolutely hate (or at least strongly dislike) the handling of Faramir in The Two Towers.

I'm sure I've said it before, but the only things the movies got right were how long and boring and obsessed with landscape they were. They missed/changed a lot of things that collectively distorted a lit of the things I found more interesting in the books.

Noting that I am not really a fan of the books though, so I don't really care that much. But one has to post about something.

The problem is Book Faramir has no arc.  Noble Faramir falls over himself to help this strange 'hobbit' on his way to Mordor with the Ring of Power. "Best of luck!  Have fun storming Mount Doom!"

Movie Faramir starts as a suspicious jerk.  He threatens Frodo, nearly kills Gollum and drags them to Gondor.  Why?  So maybe his dad will say 'good job' as he gets his mitts on the Ring.

Faramir wises up and frees Frodo, knowing this will incur even more ire from his dad.  Sure enough, Pop sends him on a suicide mission and off goes Faramir to the meat grinder.  Faramir would die to gain even a small amount of love from his father.  Movie Faramir represents the strength of the Men of Gondor.  Not Boromir, fatally tempted by the ring and certainly not Denethor who thought he could withstand the gaze of Sauron. You need Movie Faramir to show Gondor was worth saving, that there still was strength and nobility in the land of Men.  It also makes it more plausible that Aragorn can lead the Gondorians all the way to the Black Gate, to almost certain ruin.

Controversial? Sure, I was surprised too but I understand very well why they changed him. 

I agree, Movie Faramir is a giant unlikeable pussy.

Let's face it.  The characters in the books are a bit thin.  Good films need strong characters for the audience to sympathize with or despise.  Jackson had to add some stuffing to the characters or the movies would have played hollow.  The Watchmen demonstrated this.  The movie hugged the story as drawn but did not effectively incorporate the parts of the book that were not visually depicted.

Was everything Jackson added to the characters necessary? Hell no, but no single man's vision is going to mesh with every other man's vision.  Jackson managed a powerfully presented trilogy that made a billion dollars by pleasing the fans enough and engaging the ignorant as well.

I'm totally ok with the changes to Faramir.

Faramir in the books isn't just thin, he is the primary carrier of Tolkien's creepily uncomplicated hard-on for "noble blood". I get that high fantasy is going to have elements of pseudo-medieval celebration of aristocratic bloodlines etc. but Faramir doesn't have to earn one iota of his nobility. It's just the blood of Numenor proving true in his pale, fair-haired, Nordic body. Even Aragorn has to struggle with the fact that his ancestor screwed the fucking pooch with the One Ring back in the day, though in the books he is less conflicted about that compared to movie Aragorn. But book Faramir is boring no matter how you slice it. 

So, just watched a press screening.

People who liked the movies to date will like this one. People who didn't may find it slightly more annoying than the other two. More Jackson directorial quirks (playing with focus knob, playing with slow-mo, playing with weird zoom in-zoom outs, a little too much floating on the part of elves, a couple of moments of misplaced humor) that started to rub me wrong after a while.

But it sets up the first trilogy nicely, and was a fun ride. My daughter, a 17 year old who cries at movies, cried three times. As a benchmark, that is also how many times she cried for Big Hero 6. :)

I can think of two obvious spots where tears might flow during Big Hero 6, but I'm having trouble with that third spot.  So many to choose from...

The three were

Just got out of the true IMAX version (in a museum).  Not that great of an IMAX movie really, as the fight scenes are mostly close up...  as typical with the Hobbit series.  Still well worth seeing on a bigger than normal screen, however.  It's the most combat heavy of all the Tolkien movies, just not on an epic scale. 

I second the tearjerker elements.  A lot of geeky girls around me were crying; but I think that was more due to the fact the journey is over.  Boyd's "goodbye" song got a few tears too.  I must say I was pretty sad at the end.  It's been an 18-yr journey.  Honestly, I'd rather play some more in Tolkien's world rather than start seeing all the pretenders we're about to inevitably see...  7th son?

If they dust off Silmarrilion it'll be nice to see someone besides PJ do it.  A Nolan version of that story would be instant gold.

Squee moments:

Note: they did NOT use Beorn at all really, though PJ has said Beorn will feature in the DVD.

 :oh_i_see:

Didn't Beorn arrive to save Head Dwarf when he was getting his melt kicked in ?

I really don't wanna see this movie anymore

Wait the fuck. It's 144 minutes of battle after building this thing up to three movies and he couldn't find a way to make the sudden appearance of a guy who can change into a fucking bear and disembowel orcs happen? Like, the one who in the book keeps Thorin from getting insta-gibbed?

Well, no one likes druids anyway...  :why_so_serious:

So glad I haven't paid a dime to Jackson since the first Hobbit. What a clusterfuck this has become.

Not a bad spolier, but
edit:
Like I said, PJ caught a shitton of heat for that since the movie was screened.  His defense is the usual; needed to edit it down, it wasn't paramount to the story, and "buy the DVD."  Truth be told, PJ has this obsession with the DVD medium...  as everyone knows.  They make a pretty coin on those collectible boxes, though most people dont really even use/watch DVDs/bluray anymore.

Just... Fuck Off...

(Not anyone here, I mean.  In General.)

Well, everyone was mad that the movies were 3hrs long.  This one is 2.5.  Something had to get shaved.  Connolly is obviously gonna get his screentime as Dain, and Lilly hers as a girly elf; so there's not much left after that.  The reality is, this movie needed a Blackhawk Down type of director (it's rapidfire combat).  It's a military film; PJ, Del Toro, etc. are not military guys.  The flow between the battlefronts is neglected, most of all the eagles' airquake and Beorn.  It's a footnote, yet it changed the battle.

What you get instead is a lot of Lilly struggling with love and Thorin's obsession with gold.  The movie beats you over the head with those and neglects the cool parts.  Good movie, but an obvious missed opportunity for the sake of excessive melodrama.

It's a bit like if (hypothetically) in the Two Towers PJ spent half the movie talking about Theoden's curse instead of effectively depicting the siege at helm's deep.  A mistake to be sure.  He didn't make it there, but he did here.

I think this nails it.

I mean... why? Why did... why... um... really? REALLY? We're focusing on this or that instead of this really cool-ass inherently cinematic moment that just begs to be filmed?!

Billy Connolly was great as Dain. I liked the individual fight scenes for the most part. The rest was just confusing to watch. Not bad, just really really weird.

Well, to be fair, the gold sickness was true to the underlying myths. And it made Thorin's story much more powerful. In the end, this movie was basically Thorin's. Bilbo is more a bystander. Tauriel's plot is big and huge and seems to exist mostly to set up Legolas' friendship with Gimli in the other trilogy. The battles are literally played as beats in the arc of Thorin's character, not as plot points in their own right.

I did enjoy Thorin's conversations with the other dwarves. Those were very moving. And I didn't think I'd like getting inside Thorin's head, because that got a little weird and psychedelic, but it conveyed the emotions well enough. But WHERE WAS THE
/weep

Great movie with some flaws.  Holy cow that ultra-high resolution was crazy!  Had two people leave very early, maybe they had problems with it. Theater not crowded at all.  Nice end to the franchise.  Richard Armitrage did a great job as Thorin, everyone else was OK.  The CGI orcs didn't bother me as much as in the past. Maybe I'm used to them moving like crack-addicted ninjas now.

I wasn't expecting much from the Hobbit flicks, but the 2nd movie where they talked about FISH POLITICS is where I checked out of even caring like a good Tolkien grump. This shit is just too silly to even bitch about.

I'll catch this one on Cable someday when I'm bored and there's nothing better to do.

Holy shit, but I was ready to kick Peter Jackson in his junk after about the fourth or fifth time that the fucking Son of the Master of Lake-Town got more attention than GODDAMN BILBO BAGGINS in this movie. Seriously, I would wager that their total screen time is not all that far apart. "Oh, my, I didn't have enough time for Beorn, I was too busy paying attention to the Benny Hillesque cross-dressing hilarity of a guy with bad teeth trying to get away with gold in the middle of a battle".

Plus the goddamn asshole padding of sending half the cast away from the rest up on the mountain so they could all have mano-a-mano individual battles in perfect isolation from the rest of the scrum. It was completely like watching a bunch of QTE in a video game you aren't controlling. Endless QTEs. Endless. The only saving grace is not having to replay Legolas doing elven wire-fu twenty times until the whole thing is done.

Peter Jackson just took his place alongside George Lucas. At least PJ only seems to have done it for the money rather than for some colossal egotistical bullshit control over his vision or whatever, so that's lightly forgiveable.

Sometimes it seems like PJ is trying to fuck with the inevitable 'just what was in the book' fan-edit by not putting people where they're supposed to be for certain scenes. But maybe it's just me.

--Dave

But this wasn't about fucking with people, it was about making a movie where you take a sequence that was one beat in a big scene and making that sequence into an hour-long QTE just to burn time. Said QTEs weren't absolutely wretched, but the instrumental need to streeeetttttch it out was the main logic of it all. Even Tauriel, it turns out, isn't there to keep it from being a sausagefest as much as she is to make all of them loooooooonger. I remember thinking, "I bet he can make them longer somewhat artfully" before I saw the first one. Well, not so. Not at all.

I mean, try this on for size:

The Hobbit, original text:

"Suddenly there was a great shout, and from the Gate came a trumpet call. They had forgotten Thorin! Part of the wall, moved by levers, fell outward with a crash into the pool. Out leapt the King under the Mountain, and his companions followed him. Hood and cloak were gone; they were in shining armour, and red light leapt from their eyes. In the gloom the great dwarf gleamed like gold in a dying fire.

Rocks were hurled down from on high by the goblins above; but they held on, leapt down to the falls’ foot, and rushed forward to battle. Wolf and rider fell or fled before them. Thorin wielded his axe with mighty strokes, and nothing seemed to harm him.'To me! To me! Elves and Men! To me, o my kinsfolk!', he cried, and his voice shook like a horn in the valley.

Down, heedless of order, rushed all the dwarves of Dain to his help. Down too came all the Lake-men, for Bard could not restrain them; and upon the other side came many of the spearmen of the elves. Once again the goblins were stricken in the valley; and they were piled in heaps till Dale was dark and hideous with their corpses. The Wargs were scattered and Thorin drove right against the bodyguard of Bolg. But he could not pierce their ranks.

Already behind him among the goblin dead lay many men and many dwarves, and many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood. And as the valley widened his onset grew ever slower. His numbers were too few. His flanks were unguarded. Soon the attackers were attacked, and they were forced into a great ring, facing every way, hemmed all about with goblins and wolves returning to the assault. The bodyguard of Bolg came howling against them, and drove in upon their ranks like waves upon cliffs of sand. Their friends could not help them, for the assault from the Mountain was renewed with redoubled force, and upon either side men and elves were being slowly beaten down."

I mean, Tolkien is not the most cinematic of authors, but I can really see that scene in my mind, and it's a good 15-20 minutes of action if you do it right. But Thorin and Fili and Kili are in this integrally connected to the shared action and fate of all the rest, not isolated off for set-piece action sequences.

So here's how the sketch of a written-up version would look for PJ's Battle of Five Armies. As prose it would probably go on for ten or fifteen times as long as that sequence does in The Hobbit and be more unreadable than the worst fanfic:

"If this is love, why does it hurt so much?"

"Because it was real."

CHALLENGES

"I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth".

Two hours of meh. Hasn't been a truly great one since the Fellowship of the Ring

I dunno.  I thought that was a touching scene between Thranduil and Tauriel.  And I was baffled by that romance.  Didn't care for it at all.  It felt out of place, wasn't remotely mentioned in the book, didn't make the slightest bit of sense in Tolkien's world.  Ah well, I guess it was Jackson's way of setting up the bromance between Legolas and Gimli?

I thought Thorin's performance kept the movie from being completely meh.  Very well done.

I do wish Beorn had gotten more screen time.  His arrival was pretty crucial in the book, here it was ten seconds, then that army was kind of never seen again.  I think.  It was hard to tell with all the cuts.  Removing that jackass (The Master's deputy?  Or whatever.) would have let there be more screen time for much more deserving characters.

I do think that the end of the second movie should have had Smaug's ending.  Then showed the leaders of various forces determined to move to take the mountain.  Sets up a very different cliffhanger, but one that's resolved during the course of the entire movie.  Rather than one that's rapidly dispensed with at the beginning.

I do want to know where those goddamn rams came from though.  We're still bothered by their sudden appearance.  Where did they even come from?

Kind of weird how it wasn't really covered how things fell out.  As I recall, the Arkenstone was laid on Thorin, Thranduil got his wife's jewelry, Dain became King Under the Mountain, etc.  Instead we get a five minute long view of Bilbo's trip back to the Shire, with the silly image of him carrying a chest that's full of gold, under one arm.  Maybe, once again, more stuff for the Director's Cut?

There is a shot in the trailer of a bunch of guys on the rams, so likely a cutting room floor bit that will show up on the DVD.  Baffling that he didn't have the killing of Smaug as the climax of 2 (it was too long as it is so probably pushed it into 3 considering it was all just battle). Tried to have a Wormtongue Jr. but it just distracted from all the other shit going on. Thorin's arc was the key to the film (and I agree, very well acted) but was somewhat buried in all the other stuff.  Really should have been 2 movies like PJ intended without the dumb lady elf crap (I see Boyen's hand in that) and Legolas could have been ejected entirely (in fact it undercuts some of the initial hostility in FoTR).  Once the DVD's come out there will be a kick-ass fan edit down to about 2 hrs 45 of the the whole thing.

The last time you see Bard? It's to tell Mrs. Wormtongue, "Your slip is showing". All the stuff that's been set up about his fear of taking power? Forgotten.

Last time you see Dain? In the battle. Nothing about him becoming king, which has some uneasiness to it in this version especially, considering that Dain refused Thorin's plea to help retake the Mountain, or so we were told way back in the beginning. That's why Thorin went off with a motley crew of craftsmen rather than a Special Forces squad of dwarf ninjas.

You don't see Thorin placed in his tomb nor the Arkenstone laid on his chest.

But you do get probably twenty minutes of screen time and tons of dialogue for a subpar semi-comedic henchman. I just don't understand Jackson's thinking unless it's literally to make more money by withholding stuff people want to see (that also makes for a tighter dramatic narrative) so he can make money off the Extended Version. Which is like crippling a game release so you can sell first-day DLC.

The only closed arc you see is Thranduil, Tauriel and Legolas, and that's hamfisted on every level.

About the only thing I'd always wanted to see that was actually pretty well done was the White Council's assault on Dol Guldur. Ties in even to Tolkien's notes, which suggested that Saruman went off into the East, met with the Blue Wizards, and maybe made his pact with Sauron then, before Sauron made his way back to Mordor. Galadriel is the last of the Noldor in Middle-Earth so I thought Jackson did a fairly good job at showing what that really means.

This is the first thing anyone's said that's made me want to see this movie in theaters.  AKA I'm a huge nerd.

Well, it's really just one line, and knowing what it references. I almost wonder if Christopher Lee didn't insist on saying it, because he's a colossal Tolkien nerd who has read all the of stuff Christopher Tolkien has published.

I saw this today and while I enjoyed it, this series certainly isn't on the level of 1st 3 movies.  Even at 2.5 hours, it felt really rushed.  Having Smaug killed in the first few minutes was a strange decision.  I agree with others that it should have been in the last movie at the end.  The whole Legolas doing bullshit Legolas shit was really over the top.  I face palmed when he was running on the falling stones and lots of people around me just laughed.  Hard to believe it could get more out there than his ride on the elephant.  The whole love story seemed tacked on and out of place.  Handsome dwarves???  WTF??? It will be interesting to see what was left out and what makes it onto the dvd.

I really don't get why everyone is so against any good-looking dwarves.

It tears at the very fabric of what is acceptable and proper in the world (Middle Earth).   :why_so_serious:

The race of Dwarves were created by Aule the Smith, not Iluvatar as were Men and Elves.  So of course they appear ugly to our eyes, as do the Orcs who were created by Melkor.

Actually Melkor didn't "create" Orcs as such. Orcs were originally elves that he twisted and tortured into their present forms. He wanted to "improve them" and create a better race and wound up with these half crippled things

And technically Iluvatar had to breath the breath of life into the Dwarves, otherwise they just stood there doing nothing if Aule wasn't thinking hem onto doing stuff.

Well sure, I was just trying not to get too technical.  Anyway, all Iluvatar did was blow on the Dwarves for good luck.  He didn't make them prettier.

I just hat an image of pretty anime dwarves. I now need therapy.

I just assumed that the pretty ones were all the girl dwarfs.

Female dwarves are almost indistishinguable from male dwarves by non-dwarven eyes.

Just got back from seeing it finally and I loved it.  I also had the benefit of reading this thread beforehand so I went in with that info and I'm pretty much all right with how things happened.  No, it wasn't all canon but it did tie in with the LOTR movies just fine, which is what I think was ultimately supposed to happen.