The Hobbit

Saw DOS yesterday. It was good, obviously, but there was a bit too much filler and padding for my taste.

Yep.

Smaug didn't really do all that much desolating did he?

The Desolation of Smaug is a location (specifically, the area around Erebor), not a particular action undertaken by the dragon himself during the story.

Well, in the book he "fouled all the area around the mountain with his wastes", basically tearing everything up on a whim so that nothing could live there. The film makes only passing reference to that, though.

Grass seems to be growing just fine in the desolation.

edited 16th Jan '14 7:35:28 PM by Canid117

IIRC, Mordor wasn't really as bad as the name implies either, was it?

edited 16th Jan '14 9:01:13 PM by Hodor

Oh, man, that bit at the end with Bombur was great.

I kind of wish that they had tried to use the eagles in that video only for them to die of heat exhaustion because the HISHE version of the LOTR people use them too much.

The idea there was that having giant eagles was so useful they should have flown the whole way.

Forgetting the fact that there's so much else going on in the world, that even if Sauron was killed early, there'd probably still be terrible shit going on.

Saruman was building up his own army, and the folks actually leading that attack on Helm's Deep weren't Sauron. He might have been the Big Bad, but he wasn't the solitary one.

Besides, the enemies had their own fliers, and only three people in the Fellowship were ranged fighters. The others would have had serious difficulties facing anything coming at them.

I recently described the situation in Lot Rs as because the Nazgul undoubtedly give Sauron air superiority; he is the Blitzkrieg of Middle Earth.

Really Peter foregoing having many intelligent races of Middle Earth talking shot himself in the foot in that he can't show that the Eagles are not beings you can order around.

Ha! So there IS an in-story reason they didn't just fly.

Also the Eagles have a hard time flying heavy people like dwarves any more than a short distance before they are too tired to fly.

On top of that they expressed a fear of being shot to pieces when flying over neutral ground. Because farmers feared that the eagles would eat their livestock, they'd shoot them down.

I'm actually wondering now if in There and Back Again we'll get a scene with Gandelf trying to convince the Eagle King to ride with him into The Battle-Of-Currently-Four-Armies. It would be a good opportunity to address an important character trait of Gandelf is that he leads people into almost certain doom more than a few times, and address the age old criticism that the Eagles don't fly people everywhere.

I could actually see Peter Jackson getting away with having an Eagle talk, don't have it's face relate to the words being spoken, just let the words be, because that would be mystical as fuck to see one Eagle, and one Eagle alone, talk and to do it all without lips to form the words with. Coupled with the fact that people are dying running an errand Gandelf put them on with no logistical help after they got to Mirkwood, it would be a pretty cool scene. (In my mind anywho)

It annoyed me in LOTR that it's never quite pointed out that Gandelf knows no one has the will to destroy the ring and that he's sent Frodo to his death. Sauruman talks about it to point out the fact the White Wizard can no longer comprehend the point is hope. I think the context of such an Eagle scene might enhance Gandelf in LOTR, for me at least.

edited 18th Jan '14 12:12:15 PM by Whowho

And the farmers would normally be correct.

Gandelf?

Bleh, now I feel dirty.

I tried searching "Gandelf" on Google hoping I'd find funny pictures of Gandalf with edited-in elf ears. Instead I found this. Ehhh... close enough?

edited 18th Jan '14 1:02:54 PM by Tuckerscreator

Sort of. There are a few reasons that can be extrapolated for a Watsonian explanation, but the official Word of God on why they didn't just use Eagles in LotR to fly to Mt. Doom can be roughly paraphrased as, "...huh. That is a very good question." The idea never really crossed his mind, likely because Lord of the Rings was written in a time when commercial air traffic was not an every-day occurrence, and if you wanted to get from Point A to Point B, you walked, trucked, or trained your ass over there.

And Tolkien hated airplanes (along with most other modern technology). His son Christopher was a pilot in the RAF during World War II. Tolkien's comments on it, in a letter to him:

''It would not be easy for me to express to you the measure of my loathing for the Third Service [the Royal Air Force] - which can be nonetheless, and is for me, combined with admiration, gratitude, and above all pity, for the young men caught in it. But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain....My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some hobbits learning to rise Nazgûl-birds 'for the liberation of the Shire'. "

I wonder if he often conversationally compared people/real life to LOTR like that.

edited 20th Jan '14 5:25:52 PM by KnownUnknown

Hippie.

No, just a medieval fantasy man who loved the past enough to write a saga or two based on old myths in a new world.

I don't think he likely did so conversationally; he read The Hobbit to Christopher when Christopher was a kid, and discussed The Lord of the Rings with him while writing it, so it wasn't like referring to Middle-earth in conversation with a random person who wasn't familiar with it.

edited 20th Jan '14 7:50:14 PM by WarriorEowyn