|
AdmiralViscen posted:The third Hobbit isn't even a movie I saw it, it was a movie.
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 02:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 1, 2024 18:31 |
|
|
The Hobbit trilogy of films was pretty bad, but it can be interesting to interpret them as a satire of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 02:42
|
|
|
Bongo Bill posted:The Hobbit trilogy of films was pretty bad, but it can be interesting to interpret them as a satire of the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films. I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 03:03
|
|
|
sunday at work posted:Other than the massive changes in tone, characterization, hours of new material, bloated action scenes, and new or over developed characters that added nothing to the story. Apart from the "new or overdeveloped characters" these are all present in the Lord of the Rings films, too, and action-adventure Arwen at Helm's Deep was filmed but thankfully only made the cutting room floor. It's remarkable just how much they changed for the films that people don't notice now (or then). Apart from Bilbo's farewell speech and Smeagol's argument with Gollum little else appears on screen as it does in print. Frodo leaving The Shire is entirely different, Bree has very different tone, the flight to the ford is different (and misses out an important moment of defiance for Frodo, and so he spends 3 movies looking merely weak and sickly). The Council of Elrond is dramatically different. We have a young Frodo and an old Gimli. Faramir, Theoden, Denethor etc. It's a long, long list of changes. Ignoring whether those changes are "good" or "bad" The Hobbit films are overall more faithful (in tone, characterisation etc.) to the source material, even with a bunch of stuff added to fill them out.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 10:01
|
|
|
sassassin posted:Ignoring whether those changes are "good" or "bad" The Hobbit films are overall more faithful (in tone, characterisation etc.) to the source material, even with a bunch of stuff added to fill them out. Honestly, the cast has always been the best part of the LotR movies. Everyone goes 100% on their roles, and it really helps make up for the narrative bumps in the road.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 10:25
|
|
|
PMush Perfect posted:Please tell me about the personality of each dwarf in Thorin's company as-written. They don't really have them, which means it's harder to be unfaithful to the book when they get a tiny bit in the films. Bombur is a fatty. Fili and Kili are young and brave/stupid enough to die. They did change things up by making Thorin young and *the one who leads the Moria expedition decades later* old, but that's not as significant a change as what happened to Gimli the young and increasingly-wise warrior, who earns the respect and love of a strong, good-looking older man.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 10:54
|
|
|
PMush Perfect posted:Please tell me about the personality of each dwarf in Thorin's company as-written. I'm about to pass out and not replying to all of his observations but the one thing that you could argue Hobbit films did right and LoTR did wrong: Bombur is just a living fat joke, which cruel as it may be is exactly what he was in the book. In the LoTR films which I still greatly prefer: Gimli is depicted as somewhat of a joke despite being a very serious and important dwarf who maybe is described as running out of breath once in the books? But then you can easily negate all of that with the dozen dwarves they developed and changed for The Hobbit films solely so each one would represent a different appearance and personality so the audience could find one to relate to and buy all the action figures. From what I remember in The Hobbit book: You actually should forget the names of half the dwarves because they weren't supposed to really matter much anyway. TLDR: They actually got Bombur right and Gimli half wrong. This isn't enough to compensate for making all dwarves taller and half as stout just so women could view Thorin as sexy and men could take the leader of all dwarves seriously, which would be impossible if he was short and twice as strong?
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 11:09
|
|
|
 MOOOOOOM! John is playing with my jewelry again. John, return your sister's ring!
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 11:36
|
|
|
Are Tolkien's dwarves supposed to be the super-stocky d&d variety in the first place? They're small bearded folk, he never said they couldn't be sexy. PJ's LotR Elves are almost all stoic robots unfamiliar with human emotions (ala Vulcans, or Data) but his Thranduil is wonderful and angsty teenage rear end in a top hat Legolas is (if not true to the books) closer to Tolkien's versions of Elves whose egos and tantrums constantly hosed things up for everyone.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 11:36
|
|
|
Thorin was descended from Durin. It's possible he looked young even when over a hundred years old or whatever. It's an adaptation tho so whatever . Change things to make a better movie imho. You need to change a lot in the hobbit to make a good movie . As compared to Lotr which In many places is not far off from a screenplay .
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 12:40
|
|
|
euphronius posted:Thorin was descended from Durin. It's possible he looked young even when over a hundred years old or whatever. Nothing in the film suggests that the angry man on a quest to avenge his father and grandfather and learn to become a real leader to his people is *actually* really old but just looks young. It's a deliberate change from the old dwarf of the book for whom the quest is sort of a last gasp/bucket list/legacy thing, and leads to some contrivances (like the "last light of Durin's day oh no the quest has failed let's all go home") falling flat.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:15
|
|
|
I agree, he is definitely not supposed to be old in the movies. The book harps on his age a bit so it's not like this was accidental either, it's a deliberate change like Frodo going from eldest to youngest of the hobbits. I don't think the movies capture the feel of The Hobbit at all, they are way too focused on spectacle and take their vision of the world more from cartoons than from fairy-stories. The less "realistic" feel is obviously intentional but it just winds up being bizarre and distracting from any similarity to the book that might exist (take a shot every time someone falls more than twenty feet without serious injury). Even disregarding that they have a consistent problem of backreading stuff in from LOTR that just isn't in The Hobbit, like Smeagol, the Ring being evil/corrupting influence, or the entire Dol Guldur plotline and everything to do with it. I guess another way to say it is that yeah, the LOTR movies have big problems as an adaptation of the books and yeah, they don't get half the flak for it that The Hobbit does, but that doesn't mean The Hobbit is a better adaptation, just that it was more obvious about it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:26
|
|
|
PMush Perfect posted:I will never give up opportunities to plug The Tolkien Edit. It still doesn't completely make up for everything wrong with the movie, but it turns the catastrophe into one single, solid movie a bit shorter than extended cut ROTK.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:40
|
|
|
I'm not really trying to argue that they're better adaptations, just more faithful. They keep more intact than LotR does. The Hobbit isn't a realistic and grounded book, taking "their vision of the world more from cartoons than from fairy-stories" is appropriate. The sequences where the dwarves slaughter all-comers are great (especially Bombur's barrel ride). Bilbo's just making stuff up because he wasn't there.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:46
|
|
|
I watched this yesterday, it sucks in its own special way. It opens with a "60 years earlier..." subtitle despite the fact that since the prologue was cut, the scene isn't sixty years earlier than anything. This probably should have let me know what I was in for. I don't want to fault the guys effort since it obviously took a lot of time and effort to chop and change this together, but I found the result boring and the name pretty odd since the result isn't all that much closer to Tolkien than the original movies. If I had to pick one thing wrong about it that sums up all its problems, it cuts the "out of the frying pan into the fire" scene, complete with eagles (making their later arrival at the battle into nonsense), but doesn't at all cut the lines where Gandalf and Thorin straight up say "out of the frying pan into the fire".
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:49
|
|
|
sassassin posted:I'm not really trying to argue that they're better adaptations, just more faithful. They keep more intact than LotR does. Yeah exactly Irrc Gandalf says "yo this all be made up" in the first movie.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:51
|
|
|
In the revised Hobbit that was Smeagol and it was the one ring. so they didn't really add that it. Regardless.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 13:54
|
|
|
euphronius posted:It's an adaptation tho so whatever . Change things to make a better movie imho. You need to change a lot in the hobbit to make a good movie . As compared to Lotr which In many places is not far off from a screenplay . I don't know about this. PJ LotR worked well as a movie as much because of the changes from the text as despite them. Case in point, Bakshi was a lot closer to being a "faithful reading" of the text—just putting dialogue straight up on screen with few to no changes, not mucking with the order of events, etc. And it was godawful. Frodo and Gandalf strolling around while they talk about Sauron and Gollum; Nazgul scenes that take for-loving-ever and make you feel bored rather than scared; lines of exposition dialogue tossed on screen without alteration out of "respect for the text" or whatever that only results in them having to be taken out of context and therefore incomprehensible. "Hiding and destroying"? When did we even talk about that. Hell, I'm surprised Bakshi skipped Bombadil. But PJ and crew did almost precisely zero that was a direct and unaltered "filming of the text", and I think it was all the better for it—moving so much of the Second Age backstory to the beginning so they wouldn't have to sit around for an hour hearing exposition at the Council of Elrond for example, or mashing up the Bilbo/Gandalf conversation where he hands over the Ring with various lines of dialogue and bits of imagery taken from elsewhere in the story, all to make the scene that much more ominous and suspenseful and ultimately effective as a scene in a film (which isn't to say the text version doesn't work well as a scene in a book). They're different media, and different approaches work better; especially when the filmmakers invent atmospheric flourishes that you can't really do in a book, like the intercut scenes of Pippin singing to a mind-rotted Denethor while the doomed forces of Gondor are overrun at Osgiliath. At the same time though, the PJ Hobbit movies I think fail less because of the filmmakers' deliberate changes than because there's simply not that much story. It's a classic "one disaster after another" tale, and wasn't written to be much more, despite all the ensconcement in Tolkien's preexisting legendarium. Plus it was pretty lighthearted, full of songs and poetry and jokes and meant to be read to/by kids. The contention here isn't that the PJ Hobbit is "better" than LotR or whatever, so I'm not gonna argue that; it's that it's "truer to the books", and I guess what I'm saying is that the changes to the story are kind of secondary to what the movie feels like, tonally—like is this supposed to be a kids' story with fat jokes and funny spiders and a wiseass dragon, or is it supposed to be another LotR installment full of apocalyptic imagery and existential dread? Stretching it to another three-movie epic inevitably made it feel like the latter, and while sure some of the elements in it were pretty cool, I think any argument that it sticks closely at all to the feel of the text—to say nothing of sticking more closely than LotR does—is on pretty shaky ground. preview edit: I'm probably getting sniped as I type this by posts making clear that this is all tongue in cheek and I'm being a dork so
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:00
|
|
|
I think we can all agree that the Tolkien estate is right to keep The Silmarillion etc. out of the hands of Hollywood.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:01
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:preview edit: I'm probably getting sniped as I type this by posts making clear that this is all tongue in cheek and I'm being a dork so I thought better of you before you said this. Stand by your walls of text.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:03
|
|
|
[quote=] —like is this supposed to be a kids' story with fat jokes and funny spiders and a wiseass dragon, or is it supposed to be another LotR installment full of apocalyptic imagery and existential dread? [/quote] This tension exists in the source material imho as well
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:03
|
|
|
sassassin posted:I thought better of you before you said this. Stand by your walls of text. Stand, Men of the Text
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:05
|
|
|
They do change some of the lines and characterizations in lotr but the imagery and set pieces are straight from the book and more what I was referring to. It's paint by numbers basically from moria on.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:07
|
|
|
Data Graham posted:But PJ and crew did almost precisely zero that was a direct and unaltered "filming of the text", and I think it was all the better for it The problem with RotK especially is they changed a lot of big visual moments that would have been amazing on screen into... nothing much. Like when the corsair ships appear on the river and instead of unfurling the banner Halbarad has been carrying for the whole movie, Aragorn just pops up, says hi, and a green blob washes over everything. It's bad cinema. Some of the changes are good, some are very good, but a lot feels like change for changes sake that accomplish not a whole lot.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:12
|
|
|
euphronius posted:They do change some of the lines and characterizations in lotr but the imagery and set pieces are straight from the book and more what I was referring to. It's paint by numbers basically from moria on. How long ago did you last read the books? Helm's Deep is very different, Gondor is completely different. Maybe my paint by numbers edition of the book was different from yours but they don't look the same at all to me. Off the top of my head there's only one scene in TTT & RotK that's lifted directly from the page (Gollum vs. Smeagol argument). It's surprising just how much was changed looking back.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:17
|
|
|
Totally disagree almost 100%. But whatever. This is the biggest book forum.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:18
|
|
|
sassassin posted:The problem with RotK especially is they changed a lot of big visual moments that would have been amazing on screen into... nothing much. Like when the corsair ships appear on the river and instead of unfurling the banner Halbarad has been carrying for the whole movie, Aragorn just pops up, says hi, and a green blob washes over everything. Yeah that bit sucked, no argument. Especially with the green ghost wave just cleaning house while Aragorn stands there looking useless, of all the scenes to decide to play for a laugh that one was one of the worst. There were plenty more specific things that were changed in LotR that I didn't like, from Faramir to dwarf-tossing to Gandalf clinging to the edge long enough to whisper "fly you fools" before apparently letting go (?!!), but even with those missteps they all (with some exceptions, as noted) still felt exactly right to me somehow. The echoing shell-shocked silence as they flee from the Bridge in Moria, I mean the specifics of what they're shocked by are different but it's exactly the audio-visual gut-punch I hoped they'd be able to pull off.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:31
|
|
|
The main problem with Jackson's Hobbit adaptation isnt just that it's absurdly overlong and "scraped over too much bread", it's that it fundamentally rewrites the core of the story. In the text, Bilbo defeats the dragon. He's the one who figures out the weak spot, he tells it to the bird, the bird tells Bard. That's why it's all, ultimately, Bilbo's story, a story about a small person who did big things. In the film, Bard knows about the weak spot independently. That seems like a small change but it does violence to the core theme of the work. Everything else, ok, we can cut out Tauriel in a fan edit, no biggie. But that gets the story wrong. Somewhat ironically each successive.movie Jackson made got slightly worse. In the first one, the only real major change was replacing gildor with Arwen, which honestly was an improvement in terms of narrative unity. By the second movie though Aragorn is french kissing a horse and Frodo is trying to hand the ring over to the Nazgul and Faramir is bad, and by movie three there's a giant green wave and they just cut the whole Scouring ! By the time we get to the last hobbit movie I almost felt that he was drawing more inspiration from Games Workshop than from Tolkien. The battle elk would be a great miniature. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Jul 24, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 14:51
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:The main problem with Jackson's Hobbit adaptation isnt just that it's absurdly overlong and "scraped over too much bread", it's that it fundamentally rewrites the core of the story. Fellowship has much bigger changes than just Arwen replacing Glorfindel, almost all of the Shire scenes are cut. There's no sense of Frodo's character or why Merry and Pippin are coming along with him, they just run into them and decide to walk off to god knows where! No Gildor, no Maggot, no Crickhollow, no Old Forest nor Bombadil, no barrows, in fact virtually the only thing that isn't cut between Bag End and Bree (six chapters, almost half of Book I) is the encounter on the road with the black rider.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:13
|
|
|
It's an adaption . You can't have 15 hour movies tho I would watch one I guess.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:16
|
|
|
euphronius posted:It's an adaption . I'm not saying I can't see why the changes were made, but they were made. The perception that the first movie is the most faithful isn't strictly accurate. It isn't very faithful and neither are any of the other Jackson movies.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:17
|
|
|
Oh yeah. Fellowship is the least cinematic of the books by far, even including Moria, which is a gold mine cinema wise. There is no way to ever do a "faithful" adaption of Fellowship in modern film industry imho.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:20
|
|
|
Sometimes I think a series would be a decent way of adapting LOTR. It's not a super fast paced book and suffers for being crammed into 2 or even 3 hours, to say nothing of being interpreted as an action movie. Three seasons of ten hours each might be nicer.sassassin posted:I think we can all agree that the Tolkien estate is right to keep The Silmarillion etc. out of the hands of Hollywood. The truest truth.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:23
|
|
|
Series would definitely work, you are right. There would be time to breath a bit.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 15:25
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:The main problem with Jackson's Hobbit adaptation isnt just that it's absurdly overlong and "scraped over too much bread", it's that it fundamentally rewrites the core of the story. They made a Thranduil miniature and it's on a horse ffs. I refuse to believe that Arwen in Fellowship is an improvement on anything. It's nonsense that serves only to show how powerful a character is in a way that's never significant again in the films (doubling down on the problem with Glorfindel's character instead of fixing it). From the cringey opening line, to the magical costume change, to stealing one of the only powerful character moments Frodo gets (also in terms of practical power stealing those of Elrond, Gandalf and Asfaloth) with a line just as lame and designed purely for the trailer and then crying over Frodo... it's a really, really bad sequence. Look how cool she is that branch cut her and she didn't flinch! Good points about The Hobbits.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 16:17
|
|
|
Aragon marrying Glorfindel instead would have been cool but I can respect why they didn't go that way
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 16:51
|
|
|
The real way to fix that part is to replace Glorfindel with Boromir.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 17:11
|
|
|
Boromir marries Aragon??? That would have interesting gondorian political dynamics to say the least .
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 17:19
|
|
|
skasion posted:Fellowship has much bigger changes than just Arwen replacing Glorfindel, almost all of the Shire scenes are cut. There's no sense of Frodo's character or why Merry and Pippin are coming along with him, they just run into them and decide to walk off to god knows where! No Gildor, no Maggot, no Crickhollow, no Old Forest nor Bombadil, no barrows, in fact virtually the only thing that isn't cut between Bag End and Bree (six chapters, almost half of Book I) is the encounter on the road with the black rider. There is a difference, or at least I'll draw a difference, between a cut and a change. The farmer maggot scene and even the bombadil scene "could" have still occurred, offscreen, in the movie universe. If someone uncovered lost footage, it could be spliced in, without breaking continuity or the suspension of disbelief. There are a lot of small cuts and ellipses made in Fellowship but relatively few of them are actual contradictions or changes to the base story. Arwen for Glorfindel is a direct change, and a major one, but one that can be defended for a lot of reasons (the female love interest should probably appear before the appendix). The more film Jackson shot the freeer his hand got with rewriting and changing, rather than cutting and editing, the base text.
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 17:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 1, 2024 18:31 |
|
|
sassassin posted:They made a Thranduil miniature and it's on a horse ffs. What the gently caress that's just wrong
|
|
#
?
Jul 24, 2017 17:33
|
|