The Hobbit

Yes, the Dwarven Rings helped their bearers acquire gold, but also made them extremely covetous of it — above and beyond what is normal for a Dwarf, anyway. Thrain passed his ring to Thror, from whom it was taken when he was captured by Orcs; it does not appear in the stories afterwards. In The Hobbit, Tolkien had not set up the narrative of the Rings of Power, so there's no significant mention of the Dwarven rings.

edited 28th Dec '14 8:13:03 PM by Fighteer

I just realised Thorin fought a battle, scaled a cliff ledge, and then fought a mighty duel all after three days without sleep.

That's bad ass.

(I think it was three days... Balin said Thorin wasn't sleeping, so he didn't sleep the night Smaug left the mountain, he didn't sleep the night the human refugees spent in Dale, and he didn't sleep the following night Bilbo snuck out of and back into the mountain; the battle then started that following morning.)

Worthy of note is that three fully sleepless nights is the maximum amount of time the human mind can handle going on without sleep before breaking down in pieces, hallucinating and overall going downhill

It goes without saying though that Dorf brains are probably chemically different.

True. Maybe their creator made them of sterner stuff than Eru did with humans. I mean, maybe Eru thought "Meh, they can choose to die at will, everything else about them can be average."

To be more precise:

Yavanna went through channels and asked permission (with the Ents); Aulë just bulled right ahead and wound up having to beg forgiveness (which was granted, with conditions).

edited 29th Dec '14 8:24:07 PM by Maven

I always get confused trying to figure out when the Eagles were made.

edited 29th Dec '14 9:48:45 PM by Whowho

I have to say I didn't enjoy this one. Too many battle scenes that stretched on and on. There were flashes of magic though - Bilbo returning to his furniture being auctioned off was fantastic. But other moments I thought were hugely weak. Dain Ironfoot was cringeworthy from Connolly - reminded me of Shrek or Fat Bastard. The other thing I didn't like was that everything felt rather artificial - has Jackson overused CGI? Compared to the Battle of Helm's Deep it looked like a video game.

I think that seeing the trilogy fan-compressed a la the Phantom Edit will be great though. There's the bare bones of one or even two excellent films trying to escape the trilogy.

Two films would probably be the best—even if they lean toward the shorter side—since that was the original intent, after all. Trying to fit critical scenes like Bilbo's confrontations with Gollum and Smaug, not to mention the Battle of the Five Armies, into a single movie might make things a bit disjointed and rushed. Fiddling the pacing and trimming the padding could definitely cut the story down to four or five hours or so.

That's a generous estimate of course, if you generally liked the overall structure of the trilogy save pacing and padding to fill three films. If you really wanted to cut out Jackson's influence—like Azog and Tauriel—then you probably could cram it down into a three hour film, though that would mean gutting the films' original story and becoming a little more disjointed in exchange.

I don't mind Azog.

Though I would've cut most of Tauriel's and Alfrid's scenes.

I would have just cut Alfrid.

I didn't mind Azog until the end - his duel with Thorin made the podrace from TPM look like D-Day from Saving Private Ryan.

You didn't like the Azog duel? I'm genuinely surprised; what was your problem with it?

Far too long and far too cluttered given we kept cutting between about three or four different fights at that point. I also just thought the choreography was a bit too - I dunno, Star Wars? It didn't feel like a Middle Earth film. I kept thinking that when I watched the battle too - it seemed more like something from Warhammer than LOTR, with all the ridiculous CGI armor etc.

The battle itself reminded me of the Total War games.

Someone a while back mentioned that the fight really should've ended with Azog sinking into the lake under the weight of his own flail, and I agree. Have Kili be mortally wounded at that point, and realize you can't out-tough the opponent; so he out-thinks him. And then succumbs nobly to his wounds.

Perhaps while mouthing "I love you" to Tauriel as well. Personally, I think everyone should die that way. Even Smaug.

I would have preferred if they had just collapsed Azorg and Bolg into a single character. Make Bolg "the pale Orc" who killed Thorin's father a long time ago and is now standing in Thorin's path. You could then say Thorin killed Azog in the backstory, creating a nice Cycle of Revenge feel to the whole thing (Bolg kills Thorin's father, Thorin kills Bolg's father, Bolg decides to kill Thorin, e.t.c).

Yeah, I'm confused as to why they didn't just do that. If they wanted a recurring Orc villain to up the suspense during the trilogy, expanding the role of a character already present and active in the book seems like a much more obvious solution than resurrecting a Posthumous Character mentioned all of once in it. It would be more understandable if Azog had to do something that Bolg couldn't, but he not only doesn't, he ends up usurping some of what little role Bolg had in the book as the main Orc commander in the final battle.

Probably because having Azog being the one that killed Thorin's grandfather provided a lot of good motivation. Plus in the book we see nothing of Bolg until the actual battle itself.

Then why just not make Bolg be the one to slay Thorin's grandfather?

Because that's not what happened in the books :3

Yeah, damn those books for having Loads And Loads Of Characters, such that it becomes almost mandatory to compress them for a film adaptation.

Never mind that PJ added more and gave some of them expanded roles...

You know, I haven't read The Hobbit in years. Does the group spend any time in Laketown at all?

I think most of the noticeable issues with padding out the plot into three movies hits Smaug more than this movie - maybe because most of it is taken up with the battle and the lead-up to the battle in the first place, it doesn't feel as extended as the previous movie.