Briareos H on 18/12/2013 at 10:48
I love Martin Freeman so much.
Anyway, I just saw the first Hobbit film yesterday and it wasn't very good at all. The CGI is in some places so jarring that I had to shout "did you see that?!" in disbelief to my flatmate three or four times. In general, a huge step back visually from the Lord of the Rings films.
As for the story and directing, I'm hugely impressed by the feat of making a film which is both mostly filler and yet too dense for its own good. It really is a mess of disjointed stories with some stupid slapstick sprinkled on top with no cohesive narration.
That's not to say there weren't any good bits. The long exchange between Bilbo and Gollum had me on the edge of my seat all the way through with excellent performances from Freeman and Serkis. Generally, the early exposition bits were funny and enjoyable, with good performances all around too. The huge problem in there lies with the stupid and poor-looking adventure and extended combat sequences.
After seeing its trailer, I'm willing to bet the second film is mostly the same. The part with the escape from the wood-elves looks so dumb.
To those who have seen the film, is there at least a Smaug vs. Bilbo scene as good as the Gollum vs. Bilbo scene in the first film? How dumb is Smaug in general? Do we see a lot of it?
SubJeff on 18/12/2013 at 11:53
Yeah, I agree with you totally on the first part.
Yes, Smaug is great and the scene with him and Bilbo is the equivalent of the Bilbo-Gollum scene. You see loads of Smaug and he really is brilliant. It's a shame as he should really be in a better Hobbit adaptation.
You're right about the rest of the film though.
Renault on 21/12/2013 at 06:11
These movies are so disappointing - just saw the new one last night. Over CGI'd, and whereas the LOTR trilogy was believable and authentic in appearance, these are just so overdone and fake looking. It's fairly pathetic and such an obvious money grab - dragging this shit out into 3 full movies and wedging in all the original characters wherever they might fit. It's like Peter Jackson sold his soul.
The scenes with Smaug were going so well, and then they had to wreck it with all that crap about the underground forges and molten gold and whatnot, just dumb... And I'm still picturing Legolas jumping from dwarf head to dwarf head. It's like the Star Wars prequels all over again.
Nicker on 22/12/2013 at 03:52
Just saw it in gut-wrenching IMAX 3D.
I know it's magical fantasy and all that but it still has to be believable. And it has to be digestible. The action sequences just keep stuffing it down your gullet relentlessly.
It's been a while since I read the Hobbit but I don't recall any Elf on Dwarf sex. Perhaps I got the expurgated version.
faetal on 22/12/2013 at 04:14
Don't forget that to justify the padding out, Jackson is including parts of The Silmarillion that suitably cross-ref with The Hobbit.
Stitch on 31/12/2013 at 21:15
So, I saw this.
Remember when Peter Jackson's version of The Fellowship of the Ring suddenly had an exciting Mines of Moria chase sequence about halfway through, complete with leaps from collapsing columns and exchanges of arrow fire? Pretty stirring stuff, despite absolutely none of it being even so much as hinted at in the book.
Well I hope you all dearly loved that instance of Peter Jackson fanfic, as the new Hobbit films are being utterly consumed by this sort of thing.
And honestly, as a fan of The Hobbit I'm really not sure what to make of it all. Those added sequences were pretty cool when grafted onto an otherwise reasonably faithful adaptation of Tolkien's work, but I'm not sure the center can hold against the sheer invention of new material seen in The Hobbit.
Some of which undoubtedly works, overall--pretty much anytime Jackson works from the source material, the results make sense from a cinematic standpoint. The compression of Mirkwood into a surprisingly abbreviated spider fight works, although it sacrifices the tone of mounting dread and hopelessness that Tolkien so effectively conveyed (and Bilbo's reduced role in the spider fight was a bit disappointing, even if it made sense due to his personal breakthrough being bumped up to the previous film).
I wasn't crazy about the presentation of Beorn--I found the wild hearted, dangerous Beorn from the books a lot more interesting than the muted were-giant of the film--but the scene made sense within the context of the film (and his introduction was cute). That being said, Beorn was on and off screen so quickly that it's almost questionable as to why Jackson even chose to include him.
Smaug certainly managed some visual splendor, even if he didn't quite look cooler than my imagined Smaug (i.e. Jackson wasn't able to conjure another Balrog). I also understand that Jackson is allergic to 75% of the screen not shifting every fifteen seconds, and so of course he decides to have Bilbo and Smaug's dramatic face-off occur amidst a punched up level of draconic movement, but by making the game of cat and mouse physical, Jackson saps the scene of the tension it had when the game was mostly verbal. I can't help but wonder if Del Toro would have approached this scene differently, with the escalating battle of wit and words being front and center as small, brutal details occur around the periphery to accentuate the rising danger that Bilbo happens to be in.
And, of course, the invented battle between Smaug and the dwarves is a little ridiculous, and changes both the dwarves and Smaug (as the dwarves of the book don't turn out to be very brave, and the Smaug of the book was far too clever to be easily tricked). That said, the scene does solve the whole issue of the book sending the dwarves on a quest to kill a dragon and then never having them actually interact with the dragon in any meaningful way, which never would have played out very well on screen.
While cataloging "big changes," one scene that works incredibly well was the barrel setpiece. While it ignores the book's satisfaction of an extended plot that has to play out over an extended and tense period of time, I can't imagine that ten minutes of Bilbo spinning around on top of enclosed barrels would have made for gripping cinema, and so it makes sense to have a massive action setpiece only tangentially related to anything in the book (Jackson: "what do you want from me?! They're in barrels!"). Plus, it was one of the few sequences of the film that manages to rise up to the heights of compulsively entertaining popcorn cinema. It's everything Jackson can excel at: a little inventive, a little over the top, and a lot of fun.
What I'm not so sure worked well is everything else. The first Hobbit film was a bloated mess, but it felt like there was a good movie there somewhere buried under all the excess, and all it would take is an aggressive edit to set it free. The same doesn't really hold true for Desolation of Smaug, however--it's far too grim in tone to do justice to the source material, and Jackson's additions are getting ever more intertwined and inescapable. There's an evil rising, yes, but must absolutely every major character in the film make some reference to it? Not even Smaug can just be a bad ass motherfucker all by his lonesome, and instead is tapped to be the mouthpiece of yet another prophecy of Sauron-driven doom.
I'd be a little more charitable toward Jackson's need to graft a prequel trilogy onto the skeletal framework of The Hobbit if it didn't sacrifice that book's sense of adventure and playfulness in the process. Seeing as how many of the themes of The Hobbit are explored in serious form in The Lord of the Rings, making The Hobbit more closely resemble The Lord of the Rings is just resulting in a series of unnecessary films that we've seen before in better form. Of course, The Hobbit Part 3 might come out next year and tie it all together, or at least provide a compelling enough narrative that leads into The Lord of the Rings nicely.
But does the world of entertainment really need that? We already have Peter Jackson's epic Middle Earth trilogy, and it happens to be the definitive cinematic adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.
Do you know what would be cool? If someone made a definitive cinematic adaptation of The Hobbit.
Fafhrd on 1/1/2014 at 01:50
My problem with Desolation of Smaug can pretty much be summed up with the Black Arrow. In the book, it's almost a deus ex machina, but it's less the nature of the arrow than Bard's skill as a bowman that's so integral to taking down Smaug. In the film, suddenly the Black Arrow is a fucking harpoon that is going to be fired from a giant dwarven harpoon launcher, (in the most flagrant Chekhov's Gun set-up of all time) which will redeem Bard for the failure of his ancestor and blah fucking blah.
20 bucks says that there's going to be a ridiculous set-piece where the dwarves left in Laketown are going to bust Bard out of prison and run across town dodging Smaug and fighting corrupt guardsmen to get Bard to the tower with the harpoon launcher so he can make the shot that we all know he's going to make.
Quote:
Don't forget that to justify the padding out, Jackson is including parts of The Silmarillion that suitably cross-ref with The Hobbit.
Actually, he's not. They don't have rights for anything from The Silmarillion. All the additional material is coming from either the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or being made up wholesale by Jackson et al.
Pyrian on 1/1/2014 at 20:31
Quote Posted by Fafhrd
My problem with Desolation of Smaug can pretty much be summed up with the Black Arrow. In the book, it's almost a deus ex machine...
Um, yeah. Except maybe minus the "almost" part. This was one area where the book really sucked. Fixing that up was necessary, no matter what one might think of the other changes.
Nicker on 1/1/2014 at 21:36
The absolute determinism of fulfilled prophecies in stories is a bit of a cop out.
The fact that someone in Middle Earth predicted that a thrush would be breaking open a snail shell at the precise time and place necessary to reveal the *keyhole* for the *key* to the *place* to get the *thing* that resolves the conflict... makes the whole getting there thing seem redundant.
Scots Taffer on 2/1/2014 at 00:44
I didn't see The Hobbit in the cinema because I thought it looked terrible. I watched it at home and was glad I didn't waste my money at the movies, but it gave my kids the taste for the movies so I get arm-twisted into seeing Desolation of Smaug in 3D at the weekend. Good God was it terrible. 2 hours of nonsense to get to a climax with a terrifying genius dragon that can't catch a hobbit or kill dwarves running along giant corridors that are perfectly conducive to dragon fire? And that giant molten gold dwarf...???? Fuck off.
