DDL on 6/1/2014 at 11:07

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Saw it this weekend. Liked it a lot, actually, though it was totally a "I was gonna wait for the next film to do X, but....that will have to wait for the next next film" type movie. So many plot threads culminated in "..."

Also, that was a shitload of gold, like...unless middle earth is particularly gold-rich, that there was probably about 60-80% of the total gold you'd find on an earthlike planet. And that big gold dwarf would've probably sunk through the floor. Gold is HEAVY. (And yes, molten gold is fucking hot, so the wheelbarrow boat was hilariously bad, but that's been done to death I think)

I kinda would've thought dwarves had a better storage system than that too (though their record on handrails does not bode well for their general health & safety consciousness), and I'm finding it hard to picture smaug manually picking through chest after chest and then dumping the contents into his growing sleeping pile. Did the previous king (Thrain?) get a wierd hoarding disorder that made him want to sit in giant piles of loosely collected gold? I vaguely recollect that from the first movie, but that could be the retrospectoscope playing up.


Also, is it me or does Evangeline Lilly actually look more natural as an elf than she does as a human? Their casting choices for elves are really, really good. Lee Pace as Thranduil manages to be both aloof and haughty while also being a massive cockbag, which is refreshing given Tolkien's usual spooging over all things elven. None of this "we shall join you on the battlefield" shit that Elrond pulls, it's madagascar-level SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING castle doctrine all the way for mirkwood.
Orlando Bloom suffers from being ten years older while trying to look er...well, exactly the same, I guess (elves don't age in middle earth, right?) but also seems to look largely made out of plastic, which looks wrong since you've got the LotR version of legolas (which was less CGI and lower framerate) as a comparator, but the rest looked great.

Dwarves continue to be rubbish, with their distractingly massive hands and tiny tiny heads, and their tendency to be captured by absolutely fucking everything (first movie was trolls, goblins then orcs, this movie adds spiders, elves and humans to that list, next movie will probably add nazis, zombies and moomins). All Thorin does is basically glower. And there was still too much James Nesbitt.
Their big 'secret door' scene was laughable: since it was all about "last light on durin's day" etc, I kept expecting SOMEONE to shout "get the fuck out of the light" but no, get more dwarves in there to cast big stupid shadows and ruin another set of weapons by smacking a cliff. And then just shrug and go "whelp, that's that. HOME TIME." I mean, jesus, you spent this much time getting here and you give up after less than 10 minutes?

And yes, the thrush smacking a snail AS PROPHECIZED was awful and unnecessary.


...and I loved the barrel scene. I know I shouldn't, but where the goblin chase in the first one looked ridiculous, in this one it was just the RIGHT amount of ridiculous. I kinda think of Jackson's middle earth as the place where all the ridiculous stunts and tricks you'd think of, but promptly write off as being unlikely to work (or attempt, fuck up, and die)... just work, so all the silliness with the dwarves throwing weapons back to each other so they could systematically take axe chops at the same branch and stuff? That just about worked for me.

Having said that, they were one barrel short at the start, and one got smashed to make LOL BARREL ARMOUR for the ginger dwarf, but by the end they had enough barrels to take one party member each?

Chimpy Chompy on 6/1/2014 at 12:14

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I hadn't noticed the hands thing, but I do think aesthetically dwarves have a problem since they were introduced as having enormous beards and lumpy features (Gimli). But now they have to be protagonists and pretty guys instead of just being comic relief. So we end up with just normal-looking humans with a bit of facial hair and no facial prosthetics, mixed in with a few more dwarvish dwarves.

re: glowering, I thought Thorin's greeting of gandalf in the first film was rather... steamy

Tony_Tarantula on 16/1/2014 at 04:16

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Or to put it better:

Changing up key plot points, and adding in contrived side plots, just for the sake of giving one of Peter Jackson's favorite characters (Legolas) scene more screen time or changing key events for the sake of creating another flashy action does NOT fall under the category of



For a good example of a fantasy film that does that right look at the Potter films. No key plot details are changed for the sake of the film writer's whims. The changes primarly differences in presentation (things being described explicitly in the book vs. being background scenery in the films), changes to the timing or order of plot points(Numerous in Prisoner of Azkaban, or cutting out side details that don't contribute significantly to the main plot.

They didn't, for example, shoehorn in an entire romance that never existed in the source material.

DDL on 16/1/2014 at 07:27

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Book: "Harry swoops in on broomstick, swipes egg from behind the dragon, flies away, wins prize."

Film: "Harry swoops in on broomstick, swipes egg, goes through a fucking fifteen minute aerial dogfight with a giant fire-breathing dragon (in the middle of a fucking school), smashing the dragon through various rooftops and viaducts before eventually apparently killing the damn thing (which was, after all, defending what it believed was one of its eggs), flies away, wins prize."


....I'll take barrel chases, I think.

Nicker on 16/1/2014 at 20:03

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I don't think it's fair to make the sins of Harry Potter redeem those of The Ballad Of The Barrel Riders.

I didn't mind that there was a bit of a battle there but FFS it just went on and on. And of course the old endless supply of bad guys and the inevitable yet convenient arrival of just another arrow in the nick of time.

Of course we expect some added spectacle when a book is adapted. Film is a visual medium. But there is a line between awesome and wretched excess and it's not a particularly fine one either.