The Hobbit

True. I think it would have been better to finish the second movie with Smaug's death, maybe a shot of Azog's army marching out of Mirkwood. When Smaug dies before the title card, it definitely was nothing but padding.

I think a Unexpected Journey did fairly well with the Adaptation Expansion thing. It managed to use the extended bits to great effect, like fleshing out a lot more Thorin, his company, the dwarven culture and background, Bilbo's character arc, Gandalf's business with the Necromancer and the White Council, so forth. It also still felt like the same story to me, just more fleshed out, which I enjoyed.

The Desolation of Smaug however, felt like just endless padding, because (to me) it uses its time to focus more on the elves's Spotlight-Stealing Squad and Creator's Pet tendencies (the fuck are Legolas and Tauriel doing here) than anything else. Gandalf's plot is reduced to twos scenes (granted one of them is the best scene in the movie, but still), none of the dwarves are as well-characterized as the first movie (with the schizophrenic exception of Fili for some godforsaken reason gets a annoying romance subplot) and it just goes nowhere.

The movie does get stronger from the moment they reach Laketown onwards but it's still all rather weak to me. I only truly enjoy the scenes with Smaug (where the Adaptation Expansion of his plot works fine), which amount to maybe half-an hour of the entire film.

I just hope Five Armies goes back to the feel of the first movie.

It wasn't Filí, it was Kilí.

I really dislike the fillery action scene in the foundry, but everything else inside the citadel was amazing.

I also think that Smaug suffers a bit from trying to make the tone of the plot more in line with Lord of the Rings' more serious themes, whereas part of the reason Unexpected Journey was so endearing because it understood that The Hobbit is a very different kind of story. So there was a lot of folding the plot into Sauron, emphasizing the war against darkness elements, etc. It comes out a lot in how they treat the elves and the dwarves in general, too. The end result felt fairly muddled.

Yeah, The Hobbit just made it seem like "Isolated incident" rather than the actual LOTR series making it "This was Sauron preparing and trying to gain a good strategic position."

The problem with not making The Hobbit first was that they had to make all of these little Call-Forward movements in order to tie the movies together. I bet that if they hadn't put anything related to Sauron in people would have complained about "Where's Sauron? How can he not have a hand in this? Why's there no Sauron? What was Gandalf doing! You're not telling us enough!"

Basically getting complaints no matter what.

edited 30th Dec '14 9:11:19 PM by theLibrarian

I actually liked the parts that were about Gandalf investigating Sauron, but the attempt to make as many diverging main story elements as possible actually elements of just the one specific plotline, with tone to match, even though at its core the plot is very individual (and that the main characters are personally removed from those plots no matter how they slice it) weakened things.

Arguably, you can even attribute some of the filler and even most of the story decisions to that, though it isn't as strong in Journey than in Smaug. A lot of the superfluous action scenes struck me as attempts to insert scenes more comparable to LOTR into the plot, and decisions like making Beorn darker also feel along the same lines (though imo the only meaningful thing we lost with Beorn was his utterly hilarious introduction, which obviously would've had to be cut for time either way).

edited 30th Dec '14 9:36:01 PM by KnownUnknown

Finally saw it last night. Yep thats what the Warcraft movie is going to look like.

Also in 3d the wraiths look like ghosts from the Disney Haunted Mansion.

I liked Tauriel though.

I didn't like the romance between Tauriel and Kili, but man, could she sell those heartfelt moments.

They didn't look terribly much better without the 3D, to be honest.

I saw it in 48fps. The wraiths looked awful. It looked like the projector was borked and had started projecting something from an entirely different movie on top of the Hobbit.

Really they should have just reused the cloaked figures look.

Eh, I liked seeing what the Nazgul looked like before the cloaks, in their mortal forms.

I was impressed by the wraiths, actually, I thought the whole "broken projector" look suited them.

Regarding this feeling fillery - I thought this film actually felt the most forced of the three, because battle scenes are not interesting just by being battle scenes. Spectacle for its own sake doesn't work. The person who said it was like Total War was spot on.

I also suspect that people unfamiliar with the lore might have been very very lost.

So, I watched TBOFA recently. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I do have one major complaint. And when I say "major complaint," I don't mean that I have a complaint about a major point in the movie, oh no; I mean I have a complaint that is much larger than the actual part of the movie it's about. Basically, I'm nitpicking.

What happened to the Wereworms?

Here the orcs have a bunch of gigantic monsters that eat earth, and they're trying to get into a mountain, and...they disappear as soon as Gandalf says their name. They're even foreshadowed earlier in the movie, like they're going to be this important thing, and then nothing! It's like the filmmakers just saw the article for Wereworms on the LOTR wiki and were like, "Hey, there's no good picture for this article. Let's fix that!"

I'm going with the classic guess of "It's probably explained in the extended edition."

Well, until the extended edition comes out I'm just going to assume that what happened off-screen was that Smaug woke up, got hungry, ate the Wereworms, saw what was happening to his mountain, got sick of these dwarves and their shenanigans, did a surprisingly sophisticated double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling "The Star-Spangled Banner" which actually translates to "So long and thanks for all the worms," and flew back to his home planet.

It was an odd way to work them in, indeed, since there is the logical question of why they did not simply use them to burrow into the mountain proper.

Maybe Erebor is built on a subsurface granite plateau.

& In other words, you want the orcs to capture the mountain by destroying the mountain from the inside instead...?

edited 1st Jan '15 6:43:38 PM by entropy13

I mean, I don't want them to, but I'd like to know why they didn't.

...Actually, now that I think about it, from a Doylist perspective I kinda do want them to. That might've been a really cool scene, Thorin's company inside Erebor, fighting the Wereworms as they burst through and then having to defend against the orcs moving through the ensuing tunnels.

If they defeat the "Free Peoples" AND destroy Erebor, that means the nearest fortress they'll have to be able to exert their control over northwest Middle-Earth will still be too far to the north in Angmar.

edited 2nd Jan '15 1:36:19 AM by entropy13

Angband's destroyed. It sunk under the sea with the rest of Beleriand.

One thing that bugged me about the movie is that Angmar is nowhere near Erebor; it's on the western side of the Lonely Mountains. There's no way that holding Erebor would assist with re-establishing that kingdom, and there's no way that Tauriel and Legolas could ride all the way to Gundabad (at the north end of the Lonely Mountains) and back to Erebor within a couple of days. Not even Shadowfax could have done it.

edited 1st Jan '15 7:37:19 PM by WarriorEowyn

I mean, they don't have to completely wreck Erebor. They could just tunnel in, stab some dorfs, and take the mountain as their own right in the middle of this massive battle going on outside. Then the orcs are forcing their enemies to fight on three fronts instead of just two, and one of those fronts is a massively-fortified mountain city full of dwarven weaponry.

edited 1st Jan '15 7:38:58 PM by Zarek

I don't think it was that Erebor would help re-establish Angmar, more that it was a strategic location on the Anduin that Sauron might use to cut off trade or supplies by river.

Erebor is nowhere near the Anduin. The Anduin runs south through the wilderness between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood until it reaches Gondor and turns west to the sea. Gundabad is far nearer to the sources of Anduin than Erebor is.

Long Lake is on the River Running, well to the east of the Anduin.

edited 1st Jan '15 9:21:07 PM by WarriorEowyn