The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies Trailer Released 156
An anonymous reader writes: The first teaser trailer for the final installment of the Middle Earth saga, The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies, debuted at Comic-Con, and now Warner Bros have made it available online. While the trailer contains some nice shots on a visual level, very much in keeping with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, about 80% of the trailer's awesomeness is provided by the background music. Pippin's mournful song from Return of the King plays intercut with the doomed mission that Faramir leads on his father Denethor's orders.
That has to be the most garbled summary.... (Score:2)
Why is he talking about Faramir? Faramir isn't even BORN yet!!!
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Well, the Hobbit was written for children, so nothing wrong with that and you can't blame the script.
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The movies were written for a Dora the Explorer level child, as opposed to children who new people dying in war, other children dying from diseases, etc.
I've always disagreed with it being called a children's book. The fact that he wrote it for his children does not make it a children book. There was no age 8-13 category of books in 1937.
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It wasn't the "uber geeks" that ruined this trilogy. Jackson built up an incredible amount of "cred" with LOTR. The speed and decisiveness with which he obliterated his cred with The Hobbit is rivaled only by George Lucas and the disaster of Episodes 1 & 2.
I'll concede that The Hobbit movies have been boring-as-fuck. But, then again, I found the LOTR movies to be boring-as-fuck too. I pretty much concur completely with the Randall Graves interpretation [youtube.com] of LOTR: Just a bunch of boring movies about walking. And at least the Hobbit has a dragon. He's a boring-as-fuck dragon, mind you, but at least he can fly instead of walk.
Re:That has to be the most garbled summary.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Such a Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
After the travesty of the first two films, I'm not looking forward to the third movie.
While far from perfect, I felt that Peter Jackson at least made an attempt to stay true to the original story in Lord of the Rings. For the Hobbit he didn't hold anything back as sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers. Both he and the Tolkien family should be ashamed they agreed to this abortion screenplay.
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What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
LOTR all had battle scenes that took up half the movies that were too long. Songs were not included and plot from the book cut to make room for action and Hollywood.
The Hobbit has songs in it and has more of a personal story and A LOT MORE of what is in the books and material from The Silimarian. The 1st hobbit was a little long, but I liked the 2nd a lot and I loved Misty Mountains which had a nice theme to it that I found lacking in LOTR.
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And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.
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Yawn like the Spiderman movies.
Midway through the final chapter of the Trilogy, when Theoden's rallying the troops on the hill and the sun is rising... man, I'm All In. I'll give this the benefit of the doubt.
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And by the time the last film is released, will be about 4.5 hours too long.
Wait for the 'Directors cut'. We'll be looking at about 5 hours per movie.
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It had more then one director.
http://goo.gl/SmqcDs [goo.gl]
Re:Such a Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
The book? Nothing. It's a decent story. I like it.
But if you're talking about the movie trilogy then there's a problem. It isn't "The Hobbit". It's a movie that wants to be "tolkienesque" and uses names and scenes that Tolkien had used in his stories. The same as the "I, Robot" movie was with Asimov's stories.
Look at the page count in The Lord of the Rings. Then compare it to the page count in The Hobbit.
Now compare the run time of the movies. Either LoTR got butchered or The Hobbit was puffed up with standard Hollywood hero crap.
I'm skipping it because I do not want ANOTHER generic Hollywood cliche driven green-screen-spectacle-fest.
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Re:Such a Waste (Score:5, Informative)
No, the Lord of the Rings dwarves do not exist and you won't find a human world replacement for them. These are not the same as dwarves in Game of Thrones or Willow. Lord of the Rings dwarves are a separate species from humans. If you used an actor with dwarfism then it would not fit the part.
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I also noticed that dwarves were no longer dwarves, but "normal height" humans shot at weird camera angles.
Exactly the same as in LotR, then - that is, if you count 6'1" John Rhys-Davies as "normal height."
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Run time isn't a fair comparison.
A good version could do 90 minutes JUST on Mirkwood. It could be an Alien like suspense thriller.
So I would have likes to see:
1) outsider / buddy film - up to Mirkwood.
2) suspense thriller - Mirkwood
3) suspense/action - The dragon and 5 armies
Re:Such a Waste (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of the Hobbit film bits are supposedly from letters JRRT wrote Christopher about 20 years after LOTR came out, describing how he would like to rewrite the book to make it tie in better with LotR and the limited Silmarillion notes he had at the time. Tolkien was supposedly torn between finishing up the Silmarillion or going back and working on a 'better' hobbit first. I suspect there's some truth to this claim - LotR draws from a great many sources that are fundamental in studying early English literature, from Spencer's Faerie Queen to the "Jack the Giant Killer" stories, to the Song of Roland to Beowulf itself, and the Hobbit's literary roots are mostly in one story - the same one Wagner drew on for Das Rheingold. Some of the dwarf naming and such in the Hobbit seems to connect to Finnish mythological tales and maybe some other Scandinavian sources, but the references are mostly truncated there or limited to a few very short phrases to fit in a children's book.
I can certainly see JRRT deciding to work in some other bits from classics he couldn't really use in LotR. LotR took so long because Tolkien wanted it to have a certain gravitas as fantasy and so aimed for being really encyclopedic in referring to the roots of Fantasy literature, and at least touching broadly on English literature of the mundane and modern kinds. Tolkien even read some Lovecraft (and liked it), probably before writing the scene of the Watcher at the gate to Moria, possibly afterwards to see how it compared, and read or re-read some of the more esoteric works of T. S. Elliot, R L Stevenson and such, maybe just to have a better idea of where he wanted to steer modern English lit. or maybe to see if he needed to actually address these modern works in what he aimed to make his Magnum Opus. What he did afterwards, planning a next stage after becoming such a success, was doubtless quite technically ambitious.
I respect people saying they don't like this or that, but some of those people might want to do a little research before they label everything they don't like as not true to Tolkien. In particular, the scenes where the dwarves try to use all the gold to kill the dragon seems to have some real connection to Tolkien's plans for the story, and possibly the way there is more about human 'politics' in Laketown is too. Once people get some idea of what might have been the Hobbit, rewritten for an audience the same age as LotR's, they can rag on the Hobbit equivalents of Elven Shield Surfing twice as hard. (Please! I could have done without half the falls in the Goblin caverns and had the height of the other half quartered, and the extended commercial for the Elven Rafting Riveride at Universal Orlando). Still, not everything here needs to be line for line either.
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...and the extended commercial for the Elven Rafting Riveride at Universal Orlando
This. This is what has taken me out of the "suspension of disbelief" in each of the first two Hobbit segments - the feeling that I'm looking at the preview of a ride, designed for that purpose rather than designed to be a film.
Re:Such a Waste (Score:4, Insightful)
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WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief? If it's an Asimov or AC Clarke adaptation maybe we can start talking about believability, but a high fantasy like this one? Anything goes, except perhaps when it comes to absolute immortality. Apparently "immortal" characters or monsters tend to have some sort of weakness that allow them to get killed by a determined hero or villain.
Re: Such a Waste (Score:2, Insightful)
Thorin, the dwarves, Bilbo, all of them are absolutely immortal in the movies. They've been through dozens of incidents which would certainly have killed them all - fantasy story or not - yet they come through completely unscathed every time. Because Hollywood.
Suspension of disbelief doesn't mean "anything goes". It means the story must be internally consistent for the audience to accept it. Wizards, elves, and dragons doesn't mean that Thorin and Company being completely invulnerable is acceptable - unless
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That's exactly what it felt like when I read the book as a kid. It's not "because hollywood." That's the way the story is written in the book as well.
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This is a good point. The book certainly didn't feel that way. The problem is that for the Hobbit movies, Jackson started with the original material and then decided to overdo everything about 5x beyond how Tolkien wrote it. So they can't just ride in barrels down a river - an incredibly perilous thing to begin with.
Here's how I picture Jackson deciding to "improve on" the original. They can't just ride in barrels, they have to ride in inexplicably stable barrels that don't take in water, down a river with
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WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief?
Yes! It's a fantasy world with its own rules. Suspension of disbelief needs to apply to the rules of that fantasy world. Should be easy, when the world is all made up, right? I mean, they have all the fantasy stuff to play around for "unbelievable" stuff, which would still be perfectly believable and "realistic" (for the lack of a better word) in the context of the fantasy world.
In a fantasy film, there's no excuse to bend the basic physics too much, when you can apply magic to make it believable, as long a
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WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief? If it's an Asimov or AC Clarke adaptation maybe we can start talking about believability, but a high fantasy like this one? Anything goes, except perhaps when it comes to absolute immortality. Apparently "immortal" characters or monsters tend to have some sort of weakness that allow them to get killed by a determined hero or villain.
Suspension of disbelief is a challenge and probably more important to maintain in a fantasy than general fiction. A story must maintain internal consistency with it's own tone and rules. If you tell me that a dragon can fly and breath fire, well then I'll believe you, say Elves exist and can make pineapple smoothies by snapping their fingers, and as long as you don't have one of your Elves die of starvation because he didn't remember about the smoothie trick, it will work. The magic wasn't a problem in t
Suspension of disbelief (Score:2)
WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief?
Why not? Suspension of disbelief is probably the most important thing about sci-fi and fantasy movies. Far more than say a romantic comedy. You can do it well or you can do it poorly. You need a good script, good acting and good special effects to make a movie like that believable. If you are going to ask the audience to believe in magic or magic-science for 2-3 hours that is fine but you can't simply throw anything on the screen and excuse it just because the story says it is magic. The story has to
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"It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief?"
yes. Because it goes outside the contest of the film. THAT is what suspension of disbelief is. You set expectation and context. When you break that you break the suspension of disbelief.
It doesn't matter if its LotR, 2001, or Die Hard.
" Anything goes, "
No, it doesn't.
SPOILER!!!!!!
The evil in LotR is immortal. It's never killed. There's kind of a point there.
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"Nonsense. Imagine Bilbo kills one of the dwarfs for no reason and they all laugh and continue with their business. That wouldn't make sense and you'd be immediately pulled back from the scene and think WTF am I watching? Why the director do that? The suspension of disbelief would be broken."
I imagine you haven't watched one of those violent kiddie cartoons?
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The Hobbit didn't take the material seriously (Score:4, Interesting)
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows. They simply didn't have enough plot or action to fill the time and I got fairly bored at times. There are seemingly endless and mostly pointless action scenes that serve no purpose and frankly aren't all that well done either. The special effects were rushed. The dialog they added is insultingly bad. Etc... While I won't say they are horrible money grab movies on the level of say The Phantom Menace, they could have been a LOT better even if they had just spent more time in the editing room. Basically they knew they would be a commercial success so they really didn't try very hard.
LOTR all had battle scenes that took up half the movies that were too long. Songs were not included and plot from the book cut to make room for action and Hollywood.
The Hobbit is worse regarding the action scenes - the ones in LOTR didn't feel nearly as stretched out. And as for the "songs", there are lyrics but no actual music in the books so any music would be contrived. And frankly NOBODY wanted these movies to be a musical. (If you did then you are the only one) I sure as hell didn't go into them wanting to hear a bunch of "music" and I've read the Lord of the Rings probably close to 20 times. That is not what is the really interesting bit about the books - it's more of an intellectual curiosity than anything else that would have been terrible on the big screen.
The Hobbit didn't take the material seriously (Score:5, Funny)
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The movies are stretched and it shows.
Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread.
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http://giphy.com/gifs/37Ez5CZ8... [giphy.com]
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What's funny, is that I remember for DECADES, fans bemoaned the lack of a good LOTR/Hobbit adaptation, because the special effects weren't good enough. We had the Ralph Bakshi atrocity, then the Rankin-Bass embarrassment. (and for the hipsters, the little-known black-and-white Russian adaptation). Then. . . Nothing. No studio was going to invest their good money into such a farce. Then Peter Jackson came along, with some contacts who had a CGI technique that could maybe make human actors look like Hobbi
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Um, maybe Ralph Bakshi movie is an atrocity for you. For me it's the best Tolkien adaptation ever.
Today there's too much money to milk out from Tolkien books for anything NOT completely-dumbed-down to happen. Including Jackson's LOTR movies that are 'great' only compared to poorly animated turd fest that is Hobbit, parts one to eleventy.
No perfect LOTR movie (Score:2)
Um, maybe Ralph Bakshi movie is an atrocity for you. For me it's the best Tolkien adaptation ever.
That rotoscoped steaming turd? I've rarely been more disappointed at a movie. It had reasonable fidelity to the books but that alone was hardly enough to make it good. I remember excitedly renting it from the video store sometime during the 1980s and thought that it was a really badly done movie. I thought the rotoscoping was bizarre and still do - uncanny valley reaction I guess. The voice acting was meh at best and the "action" was nothing to write home to mom about. Plus they released it as The Lor
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That move was so bad, I want to dig up JRR and apologies for it on Bakshi's behalf.
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Rotoscopy was part of the appeal of the movie, not a drawback. I've seen that movie as a kid and remembered it for unique atmosphere it had. It really was magical & mythical. It really did take you to another time and place.
A work of art trying to depict 'different' place/time needs to have a skewed perspective. It's not only about CGI and costumes. Think David Lynch. Or if you want to go further back / more experimental, think Maya Deren.
PJ movies did nothing like. And to make things worse, they could
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Rotoscopy was part of the appeal of the movie, not a drawback.
Glad you enjoyed it but I think it looks like a B-Movie that would go straight to DVD these days. It looks really amateurish. Ruins the entire experience for me. It's the same reason I can't really stand old Dr Who episodes. The FX is so pathetic that it ruins some pretty awesome stories and even some decent acting.
A work of art trying to depict 'different' place/time needs to have a skewed perspective.
That doesn't mean it needs to look like a high school art project.
Why is it awful? Because LOTR, in its core, is about loss. Loss of innocence, youth, friends, your whole world, in the face of events bigger than life. It's a tragic story. Those battles were supposed to be desperate and grim. The victories were supposed to come at a cost, not to be taken as granted.
That would be a pretty neat trick since probably the majority of the audience already knew the story having read the books.
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There were supposed to be an ending, it was never made.
Because the movie was not very good and thus didn't make much money. Sure it was faithful to the source material but the animation was pretty bad which matters a lot. It looks like a low budget B movie drawn like one that would go straight to DVD today. It needs to have a good story (check), good visuals/sound (miss) and be well acted (miss). Plus if the producers planned on making a second movie their naming choice for the movie was quite peculiar.
Jacksons were action movies, not adventure movies.
Calling something an "action movie" is shorthand for sa
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Why not? Imagine Smaug's first appearance being a little dance number set to the Ecstacy of Gold.
Just because you're making a stretched-out money-grab movie doesn't mean you can't make it entertaining.
Nobody wants a Tolkien musical (Score:2)
Actually, Tolkien collaborated on sheet music w/ Donald Swann:
Point remains that NOBODY wants to go see The Hobbit: A Musical Adventure. (well maybe the audience for Broadway musicals but nobody else) Just because some song lyrics were in the books doesn't mean it is a good idea to put them in a movie, especially one that intends to make any sort of profit.
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What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
The scene with Saruman in the first movie.
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That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.
I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot
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No, it isn't reasonable to include it.
If when wanted to to : "Middle Earth - An adventurers guide", that would have been fine. The inclusion of the work in The Hobbit breaks story.
Re:Such a Waste (Score:4, Informative)
What's so horrible about The Hobbit?
Gandalf knows that Sauron is back. This directly contradicts LotR. In fact, there's no reason Gandalf would let Bilbo keep the ring once he knew Sauron existed. And what's up with the Smaug fight scene? Instead of deducing Lake Town as the source of the intruder and exacting his revenge on the town (since he can't find the intruder), the movie version of Smaug runs around under the mountain for a while (so they can show off all the cool under the mountain visuals) then inexplicably decides to leave the dwarves without killing them. And the barrel riding was supposed to be a leisurely ride down the river; an escape plan showing the dwarves how clever their burglar really is, escaping with no danger or bloodshed. Also, Smaug didn't die in the second movie. That's the climax of the second portion. The cliffhanger should have been the first hints of the gathering of the five armies.
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It all could have been one movie it they followed the book. You could probably read the book in the time it takes to watch the first movie, if you were a fast reader.
When they first said it was two movies then it almost made sense, they could have brought in some extra detail from the LotR books. But when it was later expanded to 3 movies then it was clear they were going heavy handed and just wanted Yet-Another-Trilogy.
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that's what I'm looking forward to once the third film is out: the fan-edit that removes anything extraneous (i.e., not explicitly in the book). Take out all of that, cut each chase sequence roughly in half, and you will end up with ONE tightly paced movie about 2:45 in length that is an entertaining adaptation.
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I disagree. It could easily be three good 90 minute movies. As opposed to the nonsensical turds that actually are. well the first 2. Since I love the work, I continue to hold out hope that the last one will be good.
Re:Such a Waste (Score:5, Informative)
Gandalf knows that Sauron is back. This directly contradicts LotR. In fact, there's no reason Gandalf would let Bilbo keep the ring once he knew Sauron existed.
Actually this is exactly like in the books.
The Fellowship of the Ring, "The Council of Elrond", p. 261
'Some here will remember that many years ago I myself dared to pass the doors of the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, and secretly explored his ways, and found thus that our fears were true: he was none other than Sauron, our Enemy of old, at length taking shape and power again. Some, too, will remember also that Saruman dissuaded us from open deeds against him, and for long we watched him only. Yet at last, as his shadow grew, Saruman yielded, and the Council put forth its strength and drove the evil out of Mirkwood and that was in the very year of the finding of this Ring: a strange chance, if chance it was.
As for the ring, Gandalf did not know it was the One Ring.
Then for the last time the Council met; for now we learned that he was seeking ever more eagerly for the One. We feared then that he had some news of it that we knew nothing of. But Saruman said nay, and repeated what he had said to us before: that the One would never again be found in Middle-earth. (...) [Gandalf] sighed. `There I was at fault,' he said. `I was lulled by the words of Saruman the Wise; but I should have sought for the truth sooner, and our peril would now be less.'
He finally found an ancient scroll to test if it is the One Ring, because on the surface it looks like any other minor magical ring.
And then in my despair I thought again of a test that might make the finding of Gollum unneeded. The ring itself might tell if it were the One. The memory of words at the Council came back to me: words of Saruman, half-heeded at the time. I heard them now clearly in my heart.
` "The Nine, the Seven, and the Three," he said, "had each their proper gem. Not so the One. It was round and unadorned, as it were one of the lesser rings; but its maker set marks upon it that the skilled, maybe, could still see and read."
This is where it all starts in Fellowship of the Ring.
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And the barrel riding was supposed to be a leisurely ride down the river
Yeeeeah, we'll get right on that. Everyone from the studio execs to the Oscar committee will positively leap with glee when we release our new $200,000,000 holiday-season spectacular, THE HOBBIT, PART II: A LEISURELY RIDE DOWN THE RIVER.
Pro tip: Don't quit your day job to move to Hollywood.
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Yeeeeah, we'll get right on that. Everyone from the studio execs to the Oscar committee will positively leap with glee when we release our new $200,000,000 holiday-season spectacular, THE HOBBIT, PART II: A LEISURELY RIDE DOWN THE RIVER.
So instead we got a drawn out, absurd even by fantasy movie standards, pointless action scene that added nothing to the story. That entire scene could have been cut out and the movie would have been better for it. At most it should have been 1-2 minutes long if they absolutely had to have some action.
Pro tip: Don't quit your day job to move to Hollywood.
Sounds like you already did and worked on The Hobbit.
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Oh madn, noiw therrre's a missdt off cofFfee al ovcer m dissplaAy nd I haVe tooo sduimp ourt mny keqyboprd..
tThaznksd vwery mch fr thazt.
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Yes, becasue that would ahve been the whole movie~
It's suppose to be a tie ti breath after a lot of action and tension in morder.
So, film wise they should have been sealed in the barrels, plopped into the river, a couple of shouting elves, and then off a small water fall into the river.
10 seconds off the dwarf's complaining.
Next seen, getting picked up.
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In the book the Barrel scene is very important. It's the moment all the Dwarves go from not really trusting him yet, to completely trusting them.
He seals them in the barrels so they are water tight.
Water tight = air tight (Score:2)
He seals them in the barrels so they are water tight.
Of course if they are water tight then they are air tight too... That bit never made sense to me even when I was reading it as a kid for the first time. Unless there was a hole in the barrel the dwarves should have suffocated. If there was a hole in barrel they should have drowned.
Hard to believe same director made both trilogies (Score:3, Interesting)
LOTR: Excellent pacing, lots of suspense, amazing sets, good cinematography, decent casting.
Hobbit: Terrible pacing leading to little suspense, cheap sets, awful cinematography with very awkward angles, mediocre casting.
In The Hobbit, Jackson makes the particularly noob-director mistake of trying to feature far too many characters. Nor does he give us much reason to care about them. Compare the OK Dwarven song in Hobbit 1 with the first encounter of the hobbits with the Nazgul.
https://www.youtube.com/wat [youtube.com]
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Thanks, glad someone appreciated it.
Might be interesting to look at how much of the rest of the great aspects of LotR were dependent on things not controlled by Peter Jackson eg Gandalf's rescue of Theoden, Aragorn et al at Helm's Deep, done largely through a CGI dawn and CGI armies.
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pointlessly long action scenes. just count in hobbit 1 how many times they jump from a tipping over column to another.
so much added crap which explains nothing.
I mean fuck, you could do it in a 2 hour movie! and it's been done before too!
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Well, it's put together poorly. We're in a field, we're in a forest, now a field, back to the forest!
Lets run around in circles while the Orcs run around us in circles for no apparent reason.
Radgast? Bird poop?
It's LESS of a person story then the book.
There should be no material from the Silimarian.
Dwarves were made as comic relief.
It was about Thorin more then Bilbo.
And I could go on about the nonsense story changes that added nothing. Remember, when you add cow poop to chocolate, you do not get better ch
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sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers
That's not going to turn out well for them. After the first steaming pile, the subsequent two aren't even on my list. Even if the next two were great, what were we going to do, show our kids only the last half of the story (well, with other random crap thrown in)? It's not like they were going to go back and fix the first one.
Once the copyright fully expires, somebody will make a great TV miniseries of The Hobbit. The folks doing Pratchet's stories would do a goo
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Infinity - 1 day will never arrive.
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What are we going to do now? the same thing you should have been doing, reading the book to your kids.
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While far from perfect, I felt that Peter Jackson at least made an attempt to stay true to the original story in Lord of the Rings. For the Hobbit he didn't hold anything back as sold out to the suits at Warner Brothers. Both he and the Tolkien family should be ashamed they agreed to this abortion screenplay.
LotR is a story worth telling, it's a grand epic. The Hobbit is... well, a children's tale about a dragon's treasure. In LotR it's obvious why Frodo must be the reluctant ringbearer, while in the Hobbit you have Bilbo making this insane leap to join a crazy bunch of dwarfs and a wizard to go steal treasure from a dragon. Totally credible. And being caught by big dumb trolls who want to eat them is totally cliche. All the characters are either good guys or bad guys, there's no conflicted characters like Goll
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Maybe Peter Jackson will release a limited abbreviated edition on Blu Ray to make up for this. Anyway the middle instalment was pretty good (thanks to Smaug) though both it and the first movie are guilty of some utterly pointless detours and WTF moments particularly any time Radaghast appeared on screen.
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Well, I think the first two films are a mixed bag. I rather liked getting meet Radagast, and to see what Gandalf was up to in Dol Guldur.
A screenplay adapted from a book has to stand on its own as well as live up to the book. Where the movies have fallen down is living up to the book. The consensus of my writer friends is that the screenwriting team (Walsh, Boyes, Jackson and del Tormo) doesn't trust Bilbo to carry the story, which deeply undercuts the themes of THE HOBBIT. Lack of respect for THE HOBBIT n
Not looking good (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm usually against but-the-book rants in movies but I definitely agree on this. I gave up on the hobbit series being plausibly good as soon as I saw preview footage involving Radagast the Brown.
I mean damn he was A) just a brief mention in the hobbit and B) not some bird-shit coated foil for comic relief he was one of the friggan Istari, one of the 5 Maiar that took on the form of men.
Tolkein would have been flipping tables over it.
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I'm usually against but-the-book rants in movies but I definitely agree on this. I gave up on the hobbit series being plausibly good as soon as I saw preview footage involving Radagast the Brown.
Fucking rabbit sleigh ride. That was unconscionable.
I'll take the Battle of Five Armies, and I'll take the Extended Super Collector's Director's Edition WTF 95 Hour version too. It's all fine. Peter Jackson can knock himself out.
And then I will download the Kerr fanedit that takes all that footage and makes it reasonably match the book. No pathetic attempt at elf-dwarf romance, no whacky dragon chase scenes, no orc invasion of Lake Town, no running fight down the river, no motherfucking rabbit sleighs.
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I'd bet good money that it was Peter Jackson himself. In the LOTR his makeup guys knew he wanted that one 'John Wayne' Orc to be gruesome, and they actually tried to overshoot what Peter Jackson expected. Little did they know that Peter Jackson of "Dead Alive (Braindead)" fame was still alive inside Big Budget PJ. He approved it. Since then, you have seen the costumes for the grotesques go beyond the realms of good taste and into comically aweful. Just look at how the orc costumes changed from Fellows
Re:Not looking good (Score:5, Insightful)
Read LoTR's description of Tom Bombadil again, an equally powerful but rather loony figure in his own right, and tell me that Tolkien couldn't have imagined Radagast the way he was depicted (admittedly probably without the bird shit).
Frodo and Sam stood as if enchanted. The wind puffed out. The leaves hung silently again on stiff branches. There was another burst of song, and then suddenly, hopping and dancing along the path, there appeared above the reeds an old battered hat with a tall crown and a long blue feather stuck in the band. With another hop and a bound there came into view a man, or so it seemed. At any rate he was too large and heavy for a hobbit, if not quite tall enough for one of the Big People, though he made noise enough for one, stumping along with great yellow boots on his thick legs, and charging through grass and rushes like a cow going down to drink. He had a blue coat and a long brown beard; his eyes were blue and bright, and his face was red as a ripe apple, but creased into a hundred wrinkles of laughter. In his hands he carried on a large leaf as on a tray a small pile of white water-lilies.
A bit silly-looking for one of the most powerful entities in Middle-Earth, no? Somewhat frivolous-minded, too. The Council of the Ring considers Bombadil as a safekeeper:
‘No,’ said Gandalf, ‘not willingly. He might [take the ring], if all the free folk of the world begged him, but he would not understand the need. And if he were given the Ring, he would soon forget it, or most likely throw it away. Such things have no hold on his mind. He would be a most unsafe guardian; and that alone is answer enough.’ ‘But in any case,’ said Glorfindel, ‘to send the Ring to him would only postpone the day of evil. He is far away. We could not now take it back to him, unguessed, unmarked by any spy. And even if we could, soon or late the Lord of the Rings would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it. Could that power be defied by Bombadil alone? I think not. I think that in the end, if all else is conquered, Bombadil will fall, Last as he was First; and then Night will come.’
Why should Radagast have necessarily been a clone of Gandalf or Saruman? Tom comes across as halfway insane or a goofball, dressed like a clown and constantly breaking into song. Gandalf also speaks of him as ancient and powerful, but one who, if they gave him the ring, would literally forget about it. Jackson's take on Radagast was, I think, similar to Bombadil, one who concerned himself more with nature than the goings-on in the world of wizards, men, elves, and dwarves.
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Next Jackson Project (Score:2)
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Roverandom with wargs?
A video game (Score:4, Insightful)
In search of a story.
Trailer not HFR? (Score:2)
It's too bad the trailer is not being released in 48fps HFR just in ordinary 1080p. My local theater is on the HFR list, and showed Journey in HFR but got so much negative feedback that they didn't do a single screening of Smaug in HFR. The next closest HFR-capable theater to me is 3 hours away.
Since the online trailer is just about the only chance most folks will have to see any of the films in HFR, it's a shame that it's not been made available.
Re:Trailer not HFR? (Score:4, Insightful)
Believe me, 48FPS is not the future. Or if it is, then there is a long way to go in setting it up and filming it properly.
It probably is, but I'm guessing our generation will have a really hard time accepting it. Our minds have been conditioned to think of 24 FPS displays as "cinematic" and higher FPS (30 or higher) at "cheaper", because for years the TV images we've seen *have* looked much "cheaper". It's an association that I don't think we can easily rationalize our way out of. Why do you think videogames have gone so far as to artificially render fake film grain or lens flare artifacts? That's a completely illogical thing to do except for the pleasant association people have with the look of traditional movie media.
Simply put, I think the high frame rate and high fidelity end up causing a negative association in our minds. It's not that it really looks worse - we're just not used to it looking quite so sharp and fluid, and it just doesn't feel "cinematic" to us. At least, that's the conclusion I've come to. Honestly, nothing else makes much sense to me, because otherwise, we're always pushing to make the picture better, more realistic, etc. After all, you can't really blame increased frame rate for making a movie set look more "fake", right? Film has always been a "high resolution" experience, after all.
Or, put another way, I think film technology just fell into the uncanny valley [wikipedia.org] for some people, where it looks so close to reality that their brains are rebelling a bit and causing distractions, which leads to a poor viewing experience.
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I believe you are spot on regarding perception and and possibly an uncanny valley effect.
In my opinion, when our heads move we experience motion blur, our eyes cannot be focused perfectly when in motion (when the head moves slowly focus can track, but if the objects in the field of vision vary significantly in distance from the subject then a lot of refocus is going on). Only when we stop do we get full clarity in our primary field of vision and improved peripheral vision (I'm just spit balling here, outsi
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So, 24 FPS is the vacuum tube amplifier of the film world - the distortion we're familiar with and like?
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I was actually going to make the comparison between "warm" vinyl sounds vs CDs (I'm not sure what SCAD is though), as well as tube amplifiers versus digital, but I thought it would distract from the point I was trying to make. Plus, the post was already getting long. But yeah, I think both of those are somewhat appropriate comparisons.
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finally over (Score:5, Funny)
good lord (Score:2)
A general plea for sanity (Score:2, Insightful)
Just a quick word before (too late) everyone starts debating the relative merits of The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson's beard, etc.
Other people are allowed to have opinions that differ from yours and that's fine.
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wrong.
Other people are allowed to have informed opinions that differ from yours and that's fine.
Looks mediocre (Score:2)
Am I the only one to think that it looks mediocre?
It's clearly not nearly as good as The Lord of the Rings was.
The story isn't the problem, it's the direction.
One (perhaps only) Good Thing (Score:2)
Cate is back as Galadriel. :)
this should honestly be called literary necroporn (Score:2)
I mean, what else do you call it when a director and studio execs repeatedly ass-hump JRR Tolkien's corpse until it's a tattered, torn remnant, not even recognizable as related to it's original form?
I'm not kidding.
This isn't The Hobbit...this is "fantasy action movie ver#3, including characters from The Hobbit".
And everyone knew it was coming. Do you know of a single person, anywhere who (when told The Hobbit would be 3 movies) didn't do a double take and say WTF?
I really loved the LOTR movies. I largely
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Worse, it was fucking boring. The Hobbit would have made a fine two hour movie, maybe two 1.5 hour movies. But there is not enough plot for seven and a half hours.
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A dwarf and an elf in love? In Tolkien's universe? Oh come on