[prewarning for lots of spoilers for both versions]
Wellllll... it was a good movie, and I liked it, but compared to the original... uhhh...
Have you ever read an AU fanfic that keeps lamely following the plot of the original story even though it doesn't really make sense anymore? It started to feel like that.
Peter Jackson decided to take out a lot of the things that made The Hobbit different to the Lord of the Rings, presumably to make it sell better - the Hobbit is, incidentally, a much more fun read than LOTR. It's a lot faster paced and less depressing.
[here's where the spoilers start]
Here's what I like about the movies:
- The extra stuff with Gandalf, Radagast the Brown, and the Necromancer/Sauron. This was apparently taken from one of Tolkien's unfinished works and (mostly) depicts what Gandalf was actually doing at the time, which is REALLY NEAT.
- The way Smaug was portrayed. My headcanons for the room he's in and his general appearance are a little different, but the peekaboo technique they used to unveil him was really, really effective.
- In an AU context, Tauriel. I still don't think that whole subplot was handled well though...
Here's what particularly bugged me:
- Beorn. I'm not even going to explain why I hated the movie version, beyond that the original scene is one of the cleverest and funniest parts of the book. It's supposed to be a slow part. All I can do at this point is put a lid on my boiling fury about how everything in these movies has been made 'tougher' and 'cooler' and 'more epic' because the writers can't any kind of narrative tension except fear.
- The timescale got compressed so much it's not even funny. They spent MONTHS in the elves' dungeons alone. It all seems... too easy.
- They messed with Bilbo's speech to Smaug! Hey! Also the part where he's visible for most of the sequence - the only reason Smaug doesn't kill him right away in the original is because he can't SEE him. By taking that out, Smaug comes across as prideful and stupid, rather than the utterly evil, manipulative mastermind that he is. Bilbo also wakes up Smaug while by stealing a cup and Smaug instantly snaps awake because he feels its absence or whatever and that is way cooler than just the mundane "Oh, someone pulled my covers down and now I'm getting light through my eyelid."
- Ok so, pretty much everything in Mirkwood is a little ??? First off, no white stag or river. They could have done that in the time it took to show them wandering around in the woods, lost. Then, they make the elves all proud warriors and stuff when nah, the real reason the dwarves got locked up is that they were hungry and wouldn't stop interrupting the elves' massive, magical parties. The elves are drunk, thinking about getting drunk, or in the process of finding alcohol pretty much all of the time. The original barrel scene happens in the middle of the night, and it's really great. No random stalling of the plot for an unnecessary battle scene. AND the elves don't take Orcrist (Thorin's sword.)
- Why does anyone say "Oh, Tauriel is a horribly contrived OC" and ignore the fact that the orc baddie with the plates stuck in his chest is too? After Beorn's place, the Orcs are gone until the very end of the book. But, as I said before, the writers apparently could only produce narrative tension through fear, soooo...
- Repeatedly using random enemies instead of the environment itself to produce fear, at that. Except for the Last Lonely House and Beorns' place, the places are almost always just as scary as whatever enemies were there.
It's one thing to massacre the plot of the books, but it's quite another to screw up the basic atmospherics. The Harry Potter movies lost the plot in places, sure, but they kept the themes firmly in place - and were resultingly still great portrayals of the stories. The Hobbit movies have lost both, and while they still might be decent movies, they're at best terrible adaptations of the book. |
