dimejinky99 wrote:It's about an hour longer than it needs to be. It's totally bloated and draaaaaags Painfully slowly
I don't know how you can claim to be a huge fan of this franchise and yet be surprised by this. The 4 previous movies are among the most unnecessarily long movies ever created.
To and from a fans point of view, the more time we get to spend in middle earth the better.
Trouble is it just doesn't work here. In thinking of the whole lake town sequence (debacle) among other things.
dimejinky99 wrote:It's about an hour longer than it needs to be. It's totally bloated and draaaaaags Painfully slowly
I don't know how you can claim to be a huge fan of this franchise and yet be surprised by this. The 4 previous movies are among the most unnecessarily long movies ever created.
None of the Rings movies sacrifices pacing or character for length, and none of them felt longer than was appropriate (or boring)
The dragging is offset with that trendy super fast editing during any kind of fight scene which prevents you from seein anything. I don't know which is worse.
dimejinky99 wrote:It's about an hour longer than it needs to be. It's totally bloated and draaaaaags Painfully slowly
I don't know how you can claim to be a huge fan of this franchise and yet be surprised by this. The 4 previous movies are among the most unnecessarily long movies ever created.
None of the Rings movies sacrifices pacing or character for length, and none of them felt longer than was appropriate (or boring)
I'm not a fair judge b/c I don't like the books, but I can count on one hand the number of movies that I thought needed to be over 2 hours.
Everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
I will honor Jackson by saying that I didn't think the last Lord of the Rings movie or the first Hobbit felt that long. Still, it's hard to argue that he couldn't have done that first Hobbit movie in 2 hours. All he had to do was not make stuff up.
Everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?
With you on that 100% B.
this could have easily been two really great movies and the whole story told.
His extrapolations and fabrications reall don't add anything to the whole in this one.
I'm having my head kicked in on Rings forums for not toeing the line. They all think its amazing, but they're hardly objective at all.
Perhaps worst of all, it didn't leave me excited or even bothered to see the conclusion in any way. And that's something I think we all left each of the first two LOTR films with.
It doesn't happen in this at all.
Well, I just don't see any getting around the fact that this is a substantially better movie than Unexpected Journey was. The Dragon scenes are fantastic (so long as he's interacting with Bilbo), the giant spider scene is genuinely great, and almost every one of the key hero characters is allowed to shine more than in the first. Bilbo is, at this point, the most engaging and likeable character in any of these movies (Rings included). If we didn't keep losing track of him for weirdly long stretches, that would really be a game changing factor.
This movie still has that weird thing from the last one where it will look spectacularly good for about 10 seconds, then look cheap as a Taco Bell shit for the next 10, and then go right back again. There are some scenes, like the barrel chase, that are at least as bad as the worst moments in Phantom Menace or Crystal Skull. Actually, with that particular scene, there is a little action piece where a barrel flips up on land and bounces around, and it's pretty much 100% a Jar Jar Binks moment. Like, an homage or something.
The soundstages still look painfully like soundstages, the CGI is much improved (though the best looking orcs are still dudes in make-up), Martin Freeman is astoundingly good, and the main villain is not hilariously cartoonish looking. But his newly introduced doppelgänger is.
The elves flat out suck. Holy hell. Why are they even here? The whole thing with them is totally unnecessary. Legolas looks like he's got a pill addiction, stares at women like a sex predator, and just generally looks like a stunt double. The other elves are no different than idiot orcs in the first trilogy. They get drunk and pass out while watching prisoners, they're obsessively militaristic (but not great at it). They don't ruin it. They just don't need to be there.
No, the one thing that really just kept this from being more than it was is the goddamn pacing in the second half. It literally splinters into FOUR different sub stories right as Smaug is finally showing up, so every time the stuff with Bilbo and the dragon is really starting to catch fire you suddenly get jerked into a side story that, frankly, you had forgotten was happening and couldn't care less about anyway. This is especially hard to deal with since the 30 minutes right before this all happens is also the slowest and most uninteresting section of the movie. It just loses all momentum and then, as you start to really feel the movie's length, it starts throwing some really cool stuff in with a whole lot of very tired material.
I really liked seeing Bilbo try the same manipulations with Smaug that had worked for him in the last film, and having them totally fail against this much smarter villain. That was a cool moment that I'm actually kind of surprised they were willing to invest the time to include. On the other hand, I didn't see any point to the opening scene in the bar, and I can't stress enough that the elves neither seemed like elves nor had any reason to show up for more than a couple minutes worth of this story. The new bad guy who is introduced is superfluous and unremarkable and only exists to give the elves something to do.
Basically, I thought it was a step up that was most successful when it wasn't trying to be a lord of the rings movie. The best action sequence with Orlando Bloom occurs in a small house, where the cameras couldn't pull away for CGI-heavy wide shots. And there are a surprising number of action scenes that are not quite as heavy on the digital effect as the last film. More of that kind of scope and less momentum killing pacing would have done wonders for this movie.
I did also appreciate that, unlike almost every big blockbuster movie I've seen recently, events seem to happen as a result of other events. Things don't just happen because the script writers wanted to go from A to B, and didn't care if the results made any sense. Characters here do things, and their actions have consequences that usually don't feel forced.
Everything involving Gandolf after he leaves the party should have been saved for the special editions. Maybe they'll do the opposite of the usual thing with these movies, and instead of an extended edition they'll put out a reduced one. Diet Hobbit. That's the one I will buy.
Last edited by McParadigm on Sat December 14, 2013 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Good review McP. I was beginning to hunk I was being a curmudgeon about it all but you've agreed with everything I have a problem with. They elves come across as complete cunts, I think that's a small device in order to make Tauriel's character likeable to the fanbois, the whole thing with Gandalf and that 'battle' looks ridiculous and its inclusion and conclusion are both unnecessary and also ridiculous. I found the Lake Town subplot to be completely unnecessary, poorly executed and way too long.
But I just remembered this last night and maybe you can answer it
the bit with the big golden statue, suddenly turning to liquid. Wtf was that??? Are we expected to believe that because they lit some furnaces minutes before, that they somehow melted the statue? If so, double wtf??
