The Hobbit films, previously to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and now to be directed by Peter Jackson again.

Is it weird that I watched the third film that way instead of actually watching it all the way through

Ha, couldn't blame you. The Killstein edit really did do a great job of turning the films back to as much of the actual source narrative as possible; I'm surprised at how effective the overall editing choices were. A couple of unavoidably clunky moments where you could feel it was an edit and not something plausibly 'as filmed/released' but on balance, nicely handled.

I missed out on the third movie. Saw the first two in the theater, in 3D, and just forgot about the third. Is it any good?

if you thought there wasn't enough screen time for Bard's children in the second movie, you'll like the third one

Also if you thought the master's henchman needed a lot more screen time.

And if you thought Ornaldo Bloomps bringing down the Elephant hardcore in ROTK was too gritty and realistic.

That's the best bit, though!

this week is school holiday week.
so, me and mk2 decided to watch this trilogy.
having never read the book(s), we really enjoyed the whole experience.

what was fascinating was just how much of the JRRT world has been ripped off for the 'Elder Scrolls' games.
i had no idea, but mk2 is massively into Skyrim, and Oblivion.
and there is a lot (seriously - a lot !) of crossover.
even in the small level detail of the game, eg, the use of a book called "black arrow" that increases your archery skills.
(one example of many that mk2 picked up as we watched the films)

so, question : did the creators of the Elder Scroll games get clearance from the JRRT estate to rip off a lot of the same language/ideas etc ?

i doubt there's anything of Tolkien in the Hobbit movies bar a few names.

inasmuch as all fantasy fiction rips off largely from Tolkien, not only is TES not exceptional but in many respects it's a good deal less egregious than most tbh

yours, a butthurt fanboy

Probably not; Tolkein has been getting ripped off heavily by everyone since he wrote. In particular Dungeons and Dragons was invented by a bunch of Tolkein fans and is basically a Tolkein pastiche in many ways. And D&D is the direct ancestor of video game fantasy RPGs like Elder Scrolls.

also

https://timcrairebooks.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/ba-cover.jpg

fair enough.
i am not that much of a fantasy fanboy, so was shocked as to how often mk2 was 'this is in skyrim' etc.
i guess you are right, its all a direct connection to the D&D world.

If anything, Peter Jackson ripped off Skyrim

movies are still terrible

So this guy has edited the three Hobbit films down to a single film. Or actually three films, there are 2 hour, 3 hour and 4 hour versions.

http://jobilt.tumblr.com/post/156704220060/jobilt-hobbit

I'd previously just seen the first film on a plane, hadn't bothered with the second or third ones. Watching this just confirmed for me that the problem with the films isn't just that they are too long, it's that they are a series of reasonably decent set pieces strung together into a directionless, meandering whole. And I still don't care about any of the dwarves / understand their motivation / feel myself in any way emotionally invested in their fates.

But anyway, might be worth checking out. The edit was good overall, only counted three jarring cuts.

many years later i finally saw THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES, and it's crazy how long this movie feels. this series was mostly terrible, and this was perhaps the worst one. it is *atrociously* paced and makes zero sense and every single moment when they felt they had to shoehorn in LOTR references and foreshadowing was *trash*, and while i actually know why they decided to create and include such garbage in terms of padding things out and turning this single novel into a trilogy (i'm still amazed this crime of an idea wasn't stopped early on), it came off storywise as if Jackson and co weren't confident that the story of the Hobbit was enough to build a compelling narrative around.

what the hell was going on with Gandalf in a cage and then him being rescued by Galadriel and Saruman and Elrond? The Nazgul were there? Sauron himself? please don't explain it to me.

my favorite recurring bit was how multiple characters would hand obviously duplicitous coward and thief ALFRID LICKSPITTLE important assignments such as: a) handle the night watch, b) "look after my children, make sure they're safe" and c) make sure Bilbo gets a good meal and keep an eye on him. I was convinced at some point Bilbo was going to d) hand him the Ring for safekeeping. the only thing worse than craven, greedy, stupid characters is when no one notices they are. the only thing worse than *that* is when everyone notices they are just that, but they don't exile them on the spot, and in fact continue to give them crucial gigs.

If you can take video reviews, Linsday Ellis has a good series going on YouTube right now about how the Hobbit movies screwed up. Two parts up, third is going to be about how the series affected New Zealand.

please don't explain it to me.

There is an in-text explanation but yes, it was handled in strange fashion here.

i may check that out, xp

the tone of this film was so wrong. the tone of the whole trilogy, really. when i think of the Hobbit, i don't think grim portentousness. i don't think it would have to be lighthearted per se but there was a way to make this into a film (one film!) that would be correct and true to the story and not be out of line with the properly serious LOTR adaptation.

considering how few errors Jackson made w/LOTR i'm astonished that this series was just one error after another.

the second film was the best, i think the Smaug business was actually well-done and it was led up to impressively.

There is an in-text explanation but yes, it was handled in strange fashion here.

― Ned Raggett, Thursday, April 12, 2018 5:11 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is there a general explanation you can give on what occurred in the source material? read the Hobbit recently w/our kid but can't remember a single thing about this, so I assume maybe it's from The Silmarillion?

I'm enjoying that Ellis series too (although the 'lost innocence' framing seems a bit unnecessary), and should probably actually watch the second and third films. I just feel like I know exactly what they're going to be like. By her account, some of the things that went wrong were: Jackson having hardly any preproduction time after del Toro left; too many parties being owed a share of the profits from the first film, which motivated them to stretch it into three films; and Warner Bros insisting on reshoots for things like the Tauriel love triangle. The actor who plays Óin also talks about the scheduling being a mess.

xpost -- The very, very brief explanation: as Tolkien was writing up The Hobbit he threw in 'the Necromancer' as a Macguffin to have Gandalf leave the rest right before Mirkwood. It's handled much more lightly in the book than in the movie, of course, and while he was drawing on what he'd already written of general Middle-earth backstory for hints and details that emerged throughout the story -- 'Sauron' as a character had existed in one form or another since 1917 -- this wasn't anything systematic. He's just this 'horror' that never directly features: Gandalf tells everyone at Bag-end that he'd found Thorin's father in the Necromancer's dungeons and gotten the key (and map I think) from him, he mentions he'll have to leave the party at some point, he does so at Mirkwood, and later back at Rivendell Bilbo hears him talking to Elrond about how the Necromancer had been defeated. This is all very much in the original edition of the book pretty much without change.

Tolkien later of course had to deal with the inadvertant tone shift problem -- to the point where he attempted a full Hobbit rewrite in the early 60s much more in an LOTR vein, but he never got farther than three chapters in, after a friend read it and rightly said it was good but at the same time it just wasn't The Hobbit, which really should have been the greater lesson there. The only thing major he did had happened some years earlier when he rewrote the Gollum scene, making him much more sinister and murderous instead of comically threatening, and turning the Ring's loss into a personal breaking point for him.

the second film was the best, i think the Smaug business was actually well-done and it was led up to impressively.

Yeah, and as I said from the get-go, I think, that's really all I wanted out of the films, a great Smaug. Not entirely thrilled with the invented action setpiece at the film's end but it does have some striking moments as it goes, and I would have much more enjoyed a full confrontation between Smaug and Bilbo where he never took off the Ring but hey. A bit unsurprising that and the Gollum sequence were the best moments overall over the three films.

In the book as well, those two scenes seem like a pair - Bilbo riddling with Gollum and then spinning riddles to buy time with Smaug.

thanks Ned, I think I forgot the Necromancer connection there.

the best part of BOTFA was the opening sequence w/Smaug's attack, though the Master and Alfrid are terrible characters who feature in too large a portion of it (and characters of that exact type almost always are terrible.)

i think one reason this film felt longer than even the extended cut of Return of the King was just the pacing, and how little actually occurred in the story. you could really sense the story being stretched out here. i mean Legolas was basically the main character in the third act, or so it felt. He was involved w/every character.

The various fan edits floating around help to a great degree -- there's one especially good one that reduces all three films to a three hour effort and follows the plotline of the original as closely as they can possibly manage it. You can sense the joins here and there but it really helps.

Sooooo, as I've mentioned in other threads, in two weeks' time our podcast on Tolkien will finally get around to talking about these films in front of an audience:

https://www.megaphonic.fm/live-2023

Rewatched them all this week for the first time since 2015. That was a slog.

Lindsey Ellis's video series was mentioned a little earlier in the thread but let's link them all, shall we:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7t_g5QObs

And our podcast is live! We had thoughts, we did.

https://www.megaphonic.fm/bythebywater/50

Congrats on making it to the big 5-0! (Enjoyed the last one on the animated RoTK, btw.)

Hahah thanks. I'm glad that we're kinda through a lot of the 'uhhh' adaptations woods after these last few months -- we need to get back to the actual work itself! Which we are, per Jared's choice of the next topic.

It's all part of the rich tapestry, imo!

I think these movies are worse than the Star Wars prequels. By a lot.

Oh yes

As far as characterization goes, Alfrid Lickspittle makes Jar Jar Binks look like Harry Lime.

They're better than Rings of Power by, like, a lot.

Rings Of Power has the big advantage of not being 48fps

Yeah, as bad as Rings was it was less ugly and tedious than the Hobbit films.

48fps is fabulous, it literally looked like you could walk in to the screen. It will be shame if it never catches on because the film designed to champion it was a steaming turd.

no it looked like a bad soap opera sped up

Like watching someone else play a video game all evening.

Like watching someone else play a video game all evening.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

Unwelcome flashback to the barrel sequence. Hard to believe I watched all three of these in the cinema.

Haha. I did the same.

I'd complety forgotten about the barrel scene. In fact, I think I must have totally blanked them all out as the only thing I vaguely remember is the fucking atrocious Radagast sleigh bit

That was the lulz and best thing in the films, I wouldn't go so far as to say befitting the original conception of this children's book but nothing like the travesty of the barrel sequence, or the rollercoaster in the golbin caves.