The Hobbit: movies VS. the book

[slumcat]

Originally Posted by spider-neil

To me, LotR are movies to be enjoyed and savoured. The Hobbit movies are movies to be endured. I often fast forward to Gollum and the Dragon, the only moments in an entire trilogy that I enjoy.

I really hope one day the Hobbit movies are remade as one movie.

I agree with this. I think the tone is fundamentally wrong.

LOTR movies have a portentous tone.

He carried that over to the Hobbit for some reason.

I think again and again it needs to be stressed that the Hobbit is a very different beast from the LOTR. It has a different tone, a different pace, and a different focus. PJ essentially used the LOTR playbook wholesale and did not do anything new with the Hobbit movies.

Say what you will about the prequel movies in Star Wars, they are undeniably an entirely separate beast from the OT. Lucas created a new look, new grammar, no method storytelling, new focus, everything.

PJ did not show a lot of imagination and did the same thing again as he did in LOTR.

[spider-neil]

Originally Posted by slumcat

I agree with this. I think the tone is fundamentally wrong.

LOTR movies have a portentous tone.

He carried that over to the Hobbit for some reason.

I think again and again it needs to be stressed that the Hobbit is a very different beast from the LOTR. It has a different tone, a different pace, and a different focus. PJ essentially used the LOTR playbook wholesale and did not do anything new with the Hobbit movies.

Say what you will about the prequel movies in Star Wars, they are undeniably an entirely separate beast from the OT. Lucas created a new look, new grammar, no method storytelling, new focus, everything.

PJ did not show a lot of imagination and did the same thing again as he did in LOTR.

Hobbit needed a different director. Any new director would have brought a freshness to the material. The people paying the cheques needed to be less greedy when greenlighting the movies. It should have been two movies at most.

I always imagined Hobbit would a better version of Legend (Ridley Scott) that is the tone it should have gone for.

[slumcat]

Originally Posted by spider-neil

Hobbit needed a different director. Any new director would have brought a freshness to the material. The people paying the cheques needed to be less greedy when greenlighting the movies. It should have been two movies at most.

I always imagined Hobbit would a better version of Legend (Ridley Scott) that is the tone it should have gone for.

This might seem like an unpopular answer but I'd even say - something like a tone of The Mummy. A broad adventure tone that most certainly does not take itself seriously. A sense of peril and menace. But also a sign of inexorable momentum, of things happening and events piling up driving the characters along. And only in hindsight is there any semblance of meaning or profundity.

But it needed to be a big boisterous eventful spectacular movie.

Or maybe even the tone of the Indy movies. A slightly droll tone to an action picture. Or characters striving against multiple forces but finding wit and inspiration throughout. I think Spielberg would have done a good job with them.

[spider-neil]

Originally Posted by slumcat

This might seem like an unpopular answer but I'd even say - something like a tone of The Mummy. A broad adventure tone that most certainly does not take itself seriously. A sense of peril and menace. But also a sign of inexorable momentum, of things happening and events piling up driving the characters along. And only in hindsight is there any semblance of meaning or profundity.

But it needed to be a big boisterous eventful spectacular movie.

Or maybe even the tone of the Indy movies. A slightly droll troll to an action picture. Or characters striving against multiple forces but finding wit and inspiration throughout. I think Spielberg would have done a good job with them.

Hobbit needed to be a fun movie with dark moments not a dark movie with fun moments. Tonally, Jackson got the movie all wrong. When I read a book I have an idea in my head how the movie will be. A '10' for me, is like a perfect translation' of the book and a '1' is the book in name only.

Harry Potter 2 is trashed by a lot of fans but for me, it is my favourite Harry Potter movie because that is the movie I had in my head when I was reading the book. Using that context, The Hobbit movies are a '3' on my scale. The movies are absolutely nothing like how I imagined when I was reading the book.

[joshsquash729]

I'll forever be bummed that Guillermo Del Toro didn't direct like what was planned. Don't get me wrong, I love Peter Jackson, and he does epic like nobody else, but I agree- the Hobbit is so tonally dissimilar from LOTR that it needed someone whose mind and soul wasn't so heavily invested in LOTR. Del Toro does mystical and magical, a fantastic blend of maturity and childlike wonder, quite well. The fantasy scenes in Pan's Labyrinth are some of my favorite ever, and to see an entire film in that style would have been a dream come true. I think Ian McKellan's notorious frustration with the rushed production and overuse of green screens says it all- it just should have been done differently and with a little more care.

[slumcat]

You have to doubly respect what Lucas did on Prequels now. Choose to completely ignore his greatest success and go in a completely different direction. The Prequels are many things to many people. One thing they are - are completely different to the original films.

Maybe the passage of time allowed Lucas to be different. No such luck with PJ. Went straight back to what he knew, did not reinvent anything.

[SymbioticFunction]

Originally Posted by Xtempo

It has been awhile since I saw or read the books and still haven't watched the EE that I have. I may never watch them.

They're definitely worth watching. The second and third films are very much improved. Also, it certainly doesn't hurt that the extended versions look a lot better than theatrical (on the 1080p discs).

[imsounoriginal]

Screen Rant: Hobbit Actor Says Warner Bros Got In The Way Of Peter Jackson's Vision

[Jed] Brophy, a New Zealand actor who also had roles in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, appeared on Kiwi Talkz to discuss a whole slew of topics. At one point, Brophy touched upon the behind the scenes issues with The Hobbit when talking about the freedom that comes from not working with a major studio. "They [studios] get in the way," Brophy began. He then turned towards The Hobbit by saying, "I may be speaking out of turn here, and probably if those people ever find me I'll get slammed, but I think that Warner Brothers kind of got in the way of Peter and The Hobbit." He went on to say:

"None of them are people that can actually look at a script and in their head imagine how you can actually get the best drama out of that. And if you get in the way of that process you're actually stopping someone from actually getting a flow on, and that's what I think happened, that's what I could see happening is that there was not that same flow. Now, Peter would see stuff on Lord of the Rings and get this amazing idea about how he could shoot the next scene from stuff that was already happening on set, but if you've got people dictating what your day is going to be then that stops it."

[trainreck]

I'm not much of a reader so I haven't read any of the books yet. As a movie fan I think the Hobbit trilogy is overly long and it just doesn't hold my attention on rewatching. Watching them recently I just don't think they needed to stretch it out to 3 movies. I actually just watched King Kong last night for the first time and I was also distracted watching that, definitely didn't need to be 3+ hours..


On the other hand I do find the LotR trilogy to be a masterpiece that I can watch over and over again. Peter Jackson is obviously a talented director but I think he needs to be restrained a bit.

[Xtempo]

Originally Posted by SymbioticFunction

They're definitely worth watching. The second and third films are very much improved. Also, it certainly doesn't hurt that the extended versions look a lot better than theatrical (on the 1080p discs).

I suppose I might give them a chance once I get them and the rest of my movies out of storage next year.

[sanjuro78]

Originally Posted by imsounoriginal

Screen Rant: Hobbit Actor Says Warner Bros Got In The Way Of Peter Jackson's Vision

Lindsay Ellis did an excellent series of videos about the mess made of The Hobbit movies. One of the main dwarves speaks in it a lot (he wasn't even invited to the premiere of the movie at first) and he makes it clear that WB is mainly to blame for this debacle. He claims it was WB that insisted in making it more like LOTR and to make it three instead of two. It even addresses how WB took advantage of a New Zealand labor dispute and got the New Zealand media (and townsfolk) to turn against the production when all the actors and crew wanted was stable healthcare for the multiple years they would be on the shoot.

[Xtempo]

I wonder if MGM could have pulled it off with WB since there was so much problems with it on WB's side.

[imsounoriginal]

Originally Posted by sanjuro78

Lindsay Ellis did an excellent series of videos about the mess made of The Hobbit movies. One of the main dwarves speaks in it a lot (he wasn't even invited to the premiere of the movie at first) and he makes it clear that WB is mainly to blame for this debacle. He claims it was WB that insisted in making it more like LOTR and to make it three instead of two. It even addresses how WB took advantage of a New Zealand labor dispute and got the New Zealand media (and townsfolk) to turn against the production when all the actors and crew wanted was stable healthcare for the multiple years they would be on the shoot.

Not surprised, though I wouldn't call it a "debacle." In spite of everything, I think the movies turned out mostly fine, which is a testament to Jackson more than anything.

[Mr. Chaverria]

Excess. So much goddamn excess. Jackson at his worst.

[levcore]

I think it's like Michael Bay though, one of the reasons I love PJ so much is because he goes to the excesses he does.