The Hobbit Trilogy 4K UHD Extended & Theatrical (2012-2014)

[JimDiGriz]

Originally Posted by Geoff D

The Hobbit films as they stand do have a lot of newly added characters and whatnot though, strip them out and even with the stuff from the Appendices added in then two films should've been ample. Hell, we don't even see the Battle of the Five Armies in the book because Frodo gets conked on the head and he misses it all.

But having them as a trilogy makes for a nice mirroring of LOTR and I do still love them anyway. Unexpected Journey is actually a fairly decent adaptation of the book, Smaug is where it really goes off the rails and shifts focus to the new characters and the Appendices, and Five Armies is more in that vein too.

So on the balance of it these films are more along the lines of LOTR 0.5 than The Hobbit and that's something that far too many people seem to be oblivious to whenever they complain about how badly it's been adapted. I'm not saying that they have to like it, and it's still got a lot of Jackson's special sauce in there too which is enough to set some people off, but there still seems to be a real misunderstanding over what the goal was here. I mean, even when it was just two films and GDT was going to direct the plan was always to have film 1 be the adaptation of The Hobbit and film 2 as more of a bridge to LOTR.

Or we could have had two films with no actual Battle of the Five Armies... . Maybe that's what some wanted but it was interesting to see Jackson take that paragraph and make a film out of it - I'm not complaining.

[Geoff D]

He did pretty much the same thing with Helm's Deep, that battle is literally 16 pages in the book (out of, like, a thousand pages) but he turned it into the major climax of Two Towers.

[ThorsScrewdriver]

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

With that said, The Hobbit is far too bloated as a movie. There is a great 4 hour movie somewhere in there.

[rexcrk]

Originally Posted by ThorsScrewdriver

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

With that said, The Hobbit is far too bloated as a movie. There is a great 4 hour movie somewhere in there.

Big disagree. Give the movies some time to breathe.

[Alister_M]

Originally Posted by ThorsScrewdriver

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

With that said, The Hobbit is far too bloated as a movie. There is a great 4 hour movie somewhere in there.

Plus in the wake of Tyrion getting knocked out and missing an entire battle in the first season of Game of Thrones, audiences who hadn't read the book would have perceived it as a ripoff of that

[krismate]

I quite like the first 2 movies (haven't seen their extended cuts, only theatrical) but really didn't dig the 3rd movie. I also recall the over-reliance on green/blue screen bugging me a fair bit for all 3 movies.

[Alister_M]

Originally Posted by krismate

I quite like the first 2 movies (haven't seen their extended cuts, only theatrical) but really didn't dig the 3rd movie. I also recall the over-reliance on green/blue screen bugging me a fair bit for all 3 movies.

The extended cut of the third one is much better. By their own admission, the theatrical cut was extremely rushed and they considered it an unfinished work in progress. The extended one has a more refined look to it, it's still a bloated CGI-fest but at least it makes more sense and doesn't look quite as overprocessed.

[Schwartzy]

^ jackson literally said he had no idea what to do with the third film thats why it has that 40min battle sequence

[Alister_M]

...and yet the ending still feels incredibly rushed compared to the languid conclusion of Return of the King.

[Kendog52361]

Originally Posted by XavierTheaterPotato

Aside from New Characters being added, they also had some liberty doing other stuff. We mostly Follow Bilbo and the Dwarves all the way through(Mostly Bilbo though) in the book, Gandalf is out of the picture pretty early on in the journey and if I recall he doesn't show back up till the end. So some bit of Liberty about what Gandalf and the others are doing outside from where and what Bilbo is up to, was up to the filmmaker. And I didn't take much issue with it.

As I understand it, Gandalf's "journey", including the White Council Meeting, the Expelling of the Necromancer, and so on, was covered in the Appendices, of the Lord of the Rings Books, I think. So, they weren't exactly "originally created action", it's similar to "cut scenes" from a TV Show/Movie, just simply from the book, The Hobbit.

[Farerb]

The insinuation of a sexual relationship between Gandalf and Galadriel wasn't in the appendix.

[SuperFlyHighGuy]

I haven't seen the Extended Edition of these but would probably watch them in 4K. I pretty much hated the second film though so I'm not sure how much my opinion could be swayed at this point.

[Resettito]

Originally Posted by ThorsScrewdriver

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

With that said, The Hobbit is far too bloated as a movie. There is a great 4 hour movie somewhere in there.

Yeah, agreed about Bilbo and the BOFA itself.

[Resettito]

Originally Posted by Schwartzy

^ jackson literally said he had no idea what to do with the third film thats why it has that 40min battle sequence

Again with that misinformation? If your source for that is the cherry picked (I remember lots of blogs and trades using this to write clickbait articles way back) bit in the making of BOFA (which is several hours long) where Peter was talking about the Battle itself (not the film) and sort of "winging it", then this is nonsense.

Many people took this out of context and made it sound like he was saying that about the whole Hobbit trilogy, no, they were crunched for time, they didn't have enough time to choreograph the battle, so, it's a moment in the making of where Peter is exhausted, needs time to think about it and it's part of the reason why HE asked WB for a third film so they could have more time and do this properly.

[rexcrk]

Originally Posted by Resettito

Again with that misinformation? If your source for that is the cherry picked (I remember lots of blogs and trades using this to write clickbait articles way back) bit in the making of BOFA (which is several hours long) where Peter was talking about the Battle itself (not the film) and sort of "winging it", then this is nonsense.

Many people took this out of context and made it sound like he was saying that about the whole Hobbit trilogy, no, they were crunched for time, they didn't have enough time to choreograph the battle, so, it's a moment in the making of where Peter is exhausted, needs time to think about it and it's part of the reason why HE asked WB for a third film so they could have more time and do this properly.

That’s honestly what annoys me the most with those folks- the cherry picking. I had some clown on Facebook last night so the exact same thing to me. Of COURSE everything is going to look bad if you want it to look bad and will only focus on the bad. I guess it’s very telling that people have to use out-of-context quotes to try and prove themselves right.

[Lope de Aguirre]

Originally Posted by SuperFlyHighGuy

I haven't seen the Extended Edition of these but would probably watch them in 4K. I pretty much hated the second film though so I'm not sure how much my opinion could be swayed at this point.

I think you will enjoy them more.
Great that you give these another chance.

[phobicsquirrel]

Originally Posted by ThorsScrewdriver

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

With that said, The Hobbit is far too bloated as a movie. There is a great 4 hour movie somewhere in there.

If you don't care about the Lore and mythology of ME then I suppose but if you do then it's a good set of films. I think if Jackson had the time to tweak them it could have been better but he came on late and did the best he could.

[moreorless]

Personally though I think the choice was either to go for one extreme or the other in terms of length. Either you make a single film very closely focused on Bilbo with quite a light tone, maybe with old Bilbo reading Frodo the red book as a framing device to allow it to jump around more as the book does or you flesh out the story and bring the tone closer to LOTR.

I suspect audiences would not have reacted well to the lighter tone of the book myself plus indeed I feel rather too much of it is going over the same ground as LOTR. I actually felt what made doing it worthwhile at all was the extra focus on Thorin's character giving us something rather different from the LOTR films, especially covering for there not being time to give Denethor as much depth as the book.

You make Thorin a co lead and I think you really do need to show the battle at the end and that does make for a difficult situation in terms of what goes in which film. I think to get it down to two films Jackson would have needed to make some big changes to the book, either removed a lot of detail from the journey or mixed in Smaug and the battle much more.

Pushing to three films on the other hand does end up meaning there quite a bit of padding, especially a tendency for FX action sequences to go on rather too long. I did actually really like the invented Smaug fight at the end of the second film but things like the barrel escape didn't need to be that long IMHO.

[Vangeli]

Originally Posted by ThorsScrewdriver

Jackson was sort of forced to do the Battle of the Five Armies at the end of The Hobbit movies. From a cinematic standpoint, it would have been an utter failure if Bilbo got knocked out and the viewer just cuts to black and comes back when the action is over. It works in a book. It doesn't work on screen.

Didn’t that happen like two or three times in Game of Thrones?

[Falaskan]

The opening scene with Frodo and Bilbo has the actors looking noticeably older. I wish they had had enough foresight to have filmed these scenes along with FOTR. It seems like it would’ve added what, a few minutes of filming?