The Hobbit (2012/2013)

[Samwise]

So they're tacking on an entire extraneous movie to a fairly short story so they can add content that was never part of the story.

He'll probably have to remove/mangle one of the best scenes from the book to make it all work too.

I don't know which one yet; I'm just assuming history repeats itself.

[Ironwood]

Interesting;  what was your LotR mangler again ?

[Lakov_Sanite]

Interesting;  what was your LotR mangler again ?

It's always the hardcore screaming about Bombadil.

[Samwise]

A pretty stroke of fortune! A chance for Faramir, Captain of Gondor, to show his quality! Ha!

There were a lot of choices in the movies I disagreed with, but that was the one that made me yell "FUCK YOU, PEEJAY!" at the screen.

[Ironwood]

Yeah.  That wasn't one I agreed with either.

[cmlancas]

I'm a jerkoff and didn't read most of this thread, but I squealed in the theater when I saw this trailer during Dark Knight Rises.  I'm 26 years old.

Also, did anyone else try and see how many dwarves they could name?

[Khaldun]

The only mangler that really annoyed me on initial viewing of the expanded edition was fucking around with the sequencing of Gandalf at the gates of Minas Tirith, Grond smashing the gate, Witch-King riding in, darkness breaking up, horns of Rohan sounding. In the book, that is about as perfectly composed a cinematic sequence as you could ask for--it's a rare case, in fact, of Tolkien writing a very tight, cinematic action sequence.  I couldn't even begin to guess why Jackson didn't do it that way himself--there's really no reason for it except that he wanted the trolls to break in, the city get stormed, all that shit, I guess. I can think of other ways to get those sequences in without fucking with the perfection of Gandalf staring down the Witch-King at the gate and being interrupted by the arrival of the Rohirrim.

Now in the case of "Tauriel", if all the stuff she's involved with turns out to be the attack on Dol Guldur, then nothing she's doing takes away from anything as written. My fear is, though, that she's going to get introduced as Bilbo is creeping around the Elf-King's citadel with the ring on, and that she and Bilbo are going to work together to get the dwarves in the barrels. Which will very much suck if anything of that sort happens.

[Hutch]

Interesting;  what was your LotR mangler again ?

Helms Deep.

They did such a weird thing to me with that location. When I first saw the fortress on the screen, I was like "they read my mind, this is exactly how I pictured it."

Then a column of fucking elves comes marching in to help defend it, and I turned into a lore nerd. I don't know why; it's not like I have the books memorized. I don't know any Elvish. I can't read runes. Why would that one scene bug me so much.

That's not the only thing that bugged me in the 2nd movie, either, but it's the most prominent.

[Samwise]

Then a column of fucking elves comes marching in to help defend it, and I turned into a lore nerd. I don't know why; it's not like I have the books memorized. I don't know any Elvish. I can't read runes. Why would that one scene bug me so much.

It's because it's a classic example of just cramming as much shit onto the screen as possible in a desperate bid to keep the attention of the popcorn-scarfing masses.  Lots of things fighting lots of other things, that's how you make a successful movie.

It's so dense, every single image has so many things going on...
It's gonna be great.
It's gonna be great.
It's gonna be great.

[HaemishM]

Then a column of fucking elves comes marching in to help defend it, and I turned into a lore nerd. I don't know why; it's not like I have the books memorized. I don't know any Elvish. I can't read runes. Why would that one scene bug me so much.

Because it didn't happen, wasn't even remotely fucking hinted at in the books, and removed all the goddamn tension that made the Rohirrim's surviving the night so goddamn important? This is the coming of the Age of Men. The elves saving the men blew the air out of that sail.

[Salamok]

My biggest bitch with the LotR was the ending, not having the Hobbits coming back to save the shire w/o any big people backup was a huge let down for me.

[Malakili]

Then a column of fucking elves comes marching in to help defend it, and I turned into a lore nerd. I don't know why; it's not like I have the books memorized. I don't know any Elvish. I can't read runes. Why would that one scene bug me so much.

Because it didn't happen, wasn't even remotely fucking hinted at in the books, and removed all the goddamn tension that made the Rohirrim's surviving the night so goddamn important? This is the coming of the Age of Men. The elves saving the men blew the air out of that sail.

I think in the extra features Peter Jackson said they added the Elves because they felt too implausible to the Men to survive against the large Orc army.  I agree that it was a lame addition.

[Ingmar]

My recollection is that they said they did it because they wanted to keep the Elves more involved in the story, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing, iffy decision for sure.

[Tannhauser]

Actually the elves did defend Helm's Deep but they all died and you know what they say about history written by the victor. 

Also,  'Tauriel' plays a key role in the attack on Dol Gulder=OK.  Tauriel coming up with a plan to put dwarves in barrels=NOT OK.

[Sheepherder]

The entire fucking thing is dumb.

They already did the forbidden love angle, in a movie that plot-wise happens after this one, with a far less improbable pairing.  It's fucking bad when you're not only shitting on Tolkien's work, but your own as well.

[lamaros]

I don't really like the books (broken record, right) but I hated what they did to the Ents. They cut out pretty much every subtly from the book, which didn't really have that many to begin with, and while the scouring of the shire and whatever made a lot of sense for a movie things like the Ents really grated.

[Khaldun]

Lore freaks get all cunty about the idea that the Ents aren't really tree-people, but I've read the books as fucking often as the lore-whores and I'd be willing to get into an exegesis knife-fight with them and argue that the visualization in the Jackson films is reasonable enough.

What's not reasonable is the retarded I-just-got-my-MFA screewriter paint-by-numbers rewriting of the Ent segments to make Pippin and Merry the prime dramatic movers of the attack on Isengard. I can completely see the dumbshit writers' meeting that led to that rewrite and it's simply WRONG.  I'd use the Luthor-wrong GIF from Superman Returns only fuck that movie in the earhole. It's not necessary for drama or cinema to make Treebeard and the rest of the Ents into ignorant shitwhistles who need to be conned by a pair of lead-paint-eating hobbits into going south in order to understand Saruman = bad. This isn't lore, it's storytelling. There's nothing wrong with Treebeard and the rest of the Ents saying, let's kick some tree-killer ass. Jackson had actually set that up with TWO lengthy scenes of Saruman raping the earth and doing INDUSTRIAL CAPITALIST SHIT and all that in movie 1 and 2. In many ways, having Pippin and Merry sit on their asses and be victims of circumstance right until they get to Rohan is absolutely perfect and then suddenly make two impulsive decisions (to pledge to Theoden and Denethor) is freaking perfect in terms of cinematic drama. It makes them the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of LOTR, minor characters who suddenly vault into the dramatic center, which is pretty much what I think Tolkien had in mind. Turning them into con artists who can somehow sell band instruments to the oldest beings in Middle-Earth is a dumb and unnecessary shift.

Which sums up all the bad decisions of Jackson & Co. So so many smart decisions about how to translate the story--in the case of Eowyn and Aragorn, for example, I think there are massive enhancements. But the bad decisions are so ill-advised and hard to understand that you can't help but be nervous. Maybe I'll love Tauriel in two years' time. But I wonder.

[lamaros]

What's not reasonable is the retarded I-just-got-my-MFA screewriter paint-by-numbers rewriting of the Ent segments to make Pippin and Merry the prime dramatic movers of the attack on Isengard. I can completely see the dumbshit writers' meeting that led to that rewrite and it's simply WRONG.

Yeah, that's what I'm referring to.

[Sir T]

The Ents looked great. What Jackson did with them was retarded.

One of my "WTF???" was the last fight with Elowyn and the Lich King. That was perfectly scripted as a great scene. The Bad guys laughs and said that no man can hurt him, she laughs and points out that she is a woman, Bad guy is shocked, feels vulnerable, loses his nerve and as a result dies. In the films they have a big fight and then when he is dead she whips off her helmet and says "I ain't no man!" which was utterly completely and totally stupid. Seriously, I was waiting for that scene all movie and Jackson fucked the whole thing up as he had watched too many episodes of Xena.

[Khaldun]

It's pretty much what she says in the book as well. "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman." And she whips off her helmet in the book before saying it.

And in both the book and movie, she says it before she (and Merry) kill the Witch-King and directly after he says no living man can kill him. The only difference is the book has mentioned the prophecy that the Witch-King is repeating once or twice before we get to that moment, so it's been foreshadowed.

If you don't like it, your problem is with JRR, not Jackson.

[Ironwood]

Actually, if you have a problem with it, you have a problem with Shakespeare.  From whom the whole fucking scene is ripped off.

[Khaldun]

Yup, and with an even lamer loophole.

[Ironwood]

Can't trust witches.

If ya got womb-ripped problems, I feel bad for you Son, I got 99 problems, but a witch ain't one.

[Kitsune]

Some problems with the movies:

1. Bombadil.  Yeah, a bunch of people think he's just retarded and fine to cut out.  I on the other hand consider him to be insanely creepy and an awesome part of the world.  You have a guy sitting in the woods with his girlfriend, just hopping around and molesting forest creatures and not giving a fuck, when in fact he's an enormously powerful avatar of the planet and could kill everybody.  A decent screenwrite could have driven that point nicely home.

2. Scouring of the Shire.  The third movie's plenty long without it, but it was hands-down one of the best parts of the story, showing that nobody was proof against the reach of the war.  It also illustrated the growth in Merry and Pippin from fairly useless bumblers to hardasses when a 'mere' two hobbits drove out Saruman and his men on their own.

3. Random elf appearances.  Especially when the elves just got chewed up by orcs.

4. Retarded ents.  The ents should not have been so clueless to what Saruman was doing when he was busy eating forests.

[Ingmar]

I don't think Bombadil is retarded at all - far from it. In a miniseries you probably leave him in. But that section would really derail the narrative in a movie of vaguely normal length.

[Samwise]

Bombadil is a sad omission, but at least an understandable and defensible omission because he's "flavor" and doesn't have much to do with the larger plot.  And you couldn't do a short version of his scene, because first you have to set up the wights, and then have the scary business where the hobbits are in danger, and then have Bombadil come out and chase them off, and then do some exposition to explain who the fuck this weird guy is, and then get the story back on track, and all that takes time.  It'd work great as an episode of a miniseries, as Ingmar suggested.  Shit, I'd love to see more good fantasy books get the Game of Thrones treatment.  Fuck movies.

I'd have fewer problems with omitting the Scouring if so much time hadn't been wasted on slo-mo bed-jumping in its place.  The frustrating thing is that on the one hand there are cool things that were cut because there wasn't time for them, and on the other there are all these scenes that just drag on and on for no good reason.  

That's why I get increasingly twitchy when I hear hints of romance subplots and shit in the Hobbit.  You know that shit is going to stretch on and get padded until something actually GOOD has to get cut out to make room for it.

[Ratman_tf]

My recollection is that they said they did it because they wanted to keep the Elves more involved in the story, but in the end it all amounts to the same thing, iffy decision for sure.

I heard* that was when Arwen was going to show up and join the battle, but then Liv Tyler kept sucking as an actress and they punted her, but had already filmed the big fight with lots of elves, so they had to keep it or reshoot.

*Read a message board post, probably wrong but rumors are fun!

[Ratman_tf]

What's not reasonable is the retarded I-just-got-my-MFA screewriter paint-by-numbers rewriting of the Ent segments to make Pippin and Merry the prime dramatic movers of the attack on Isengard. I can completely see the dumbshit writers' meeting that led to that rewrite and it's simply WRONG. 

I got lots of little nitpicks, but that one's a good one.
Also, Aragorn fucking falling off a cliff. So mechanically hollywood that it has no tension whatsovever.

[Sir T]

It's pretty much what she says in the book as well. "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman." And she whips off her helmet in the book before saying it.

And in both the book and movie, she says it before she (and Merry) kill the Witch-King and directly after he says no living man can kill him. The only difference is the book has mentioned the prophecy that the Witch-King is repeating once or twice before we get to that moment, so it's been foreshadowed.

If you don't like it, your problem is with JRR, not Jackson.

In the version I saw, She said it after the witch king was dead. Which is also when she ripped off her helmet.

I'd have fewer problems with omitting the Scouring if so much time hadn't been wasted on slo-mo bed-jumping in its place.  The frustrating thing is that on the one hand there are cool things that were cut because there wasn't time for them, and on the other there are all these scenes that just drag on and on for no good reason.

Like the 15 or so fade out and fade back entings. Well it felt like 15 anyway...

[lamaros]

It's pretty much what she says in the book as well. "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman." And she whips off her helmet in the book before saying it.

And in both the book and movie, she says it before she (and Merry) kill the Witch-King and directly after he says no living man can kill him. The only difference is the book has mentioned the prophecy that the Witch-King is repeating once or twice before we get to that moment, so it's been foreshadowed.

If you don't like it, your problem is with JRR, not Jackson.

In the version I saw, She said it after the witch king was dead. Which is also when she ripped off her helmet.

IIRC that's true. Also it is lame either way, but more lame if she says so afterwards.

[Khaldun]

It's pretty much what she says in the book as well. "But no living man am I! You look upon a woman." And she whips off her helmet in the book before saying it.

And in both the book and movie, she says it before she (and Merry) kill the Witch-King and directly after he says no living man can kill him. The only difference is the book has mentioned the prophecy that the Witch-King is repeating once or twice before we get to that moment, so it's been foreshadowed.

If you don't like it, your problem is with JRR, not Jackson.

In the version I saw, She said it after the witch king was dead. Which is also when she ripped off her helmet.

Which version is that? The imaginary one you have in your head?

In the film (both theatrical and extended), they fight for a while with Eowyn keeping her helmet on. That's the difference between the book and the film: in the book, Eowyn takes her helm off and says her "no living man am I" speech right at the beginning of the fight, even before she kills the mount. In both book and film, Eowyn eventually has her shield shattered and is knocked down. In the book, she struggles to rise. In the film, the Witch-King picks her up, chokes her and monologues, including saying "no living man can kill me".  In the book, Merry stabs the Witch-king while Eowyn is down, which is what gives her the chance to rise for one last blow. In the film, Merry stabs the Witch-king while he's choking and monologuing, leading him to drop Eowyn and fall to his knees.

He is not dead at that point, in neither the book nor the film. That's the whole point of Eowyn needing to face-stab him. He's hurt (in the book it's made clear that this is because Merry has a sword from the Barrow-Downs that was forged for use in the wars against the Witch-King). He is not dead.  In the film, this is when Eowyn takes off her helm, gives her "I am no man" line and face-stabs the Witch-King, at which point he dies and crumples up like a tin can. In the book, this is when Eowyn face-stabs him, and he dies and everybody gets the heebie-geebies as he goes off to the Void.

This is pretty clear in the film if you're paying attention. It's doubly clear if you've actually read the books. You can complain about changing the sequence of Eowyn revealing herself and using Shakespeare's cast-off "no man" loophole. But she's not just tea-bagging on a PvP corpse.

[Sir T]

How about the one that everyone else agreed that was the way it happened. Whether he had actually "died" at the point was irrelevant. He was a bloody corpse in every way that mattered. And yes I only saw it once and I was double facepalming at the time at the utter lameness of the line and the whole scene.

And no I'm not renting a copy just so I can win or lose an internet argument on a 2 second time frame. And by the way, whether the guy was alive or dead at the time makes no difference on the fact that the line was 20 times more lame than the book. Sorry to make your PJ nerd cry.

[Ironwood]

 

[Khaldun]

"Out of the wreck rose a Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill.

But suddenly he too stumbled foward with a cry of bitter pain, and his stroke went wide, driving into the ground. Merry's sword had stabbed him from behind, shearing through the black mantle, and passing up beneath the hauberk had pierced the sinew behind the mighty knee.

Eowyn! Eowyn! cried Merry. Then tottering, struggling up, with her last strength she drove her sword between crown and mantle, as great shoulders bowed before her. The sword broke sparkling into many shards. The crown rolled away with a clang. Eowyn fell forward upon her fallen foe. But lo! the mantle and hauberk were empty. Shapeless they lay now on the ground, torn and tumbled; and a cry went up into shuddering air, and faded to a shrill wailing, passing with the wind, a voice bodiless and thin that died, and was swallowed up, and was never heard again in that age of this world."

I never fail to be amused by people who hang out with nerds, get into nerd arguments, make a strong statement of fact about the content of a nerd-favored film or book, turn out to be unambiguously wrong, and then a: lack the grace to admit it and b: say, "You guys are a bunch of nerds, who cares anyway."

Just stick to saying, "I didn't like the scene" and you can't be wrong. At least factually.

Now if you want to get into the question of whether in fact Merry's the "no man" who is really responsible for nailing the bugger and Eowyn just took him to 0 hp from 2hp, you're deep into Tolkien geekery, because that's a debate that's been knocking around for years.

[Ingmar]

 

That passage incidentally does a good job of illustrating my utter "WTF?" reaction to people who say he wasn't a good writer.