Film: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)

[stip]

Hey, I love his world, but I am convinced that anyone wishing this was more like the book hadn't read the book in a while


And damn it bada, I'm defending the films!

[dimejinky99]

The last few chapters from the death of the dragon, battle of five armies and homeward bound are all wonderful but really really feel like barely sketched out ideas. And the mode for telling most of it is bilbo being filled in after the fact. It's very rushed.

Jackson is gonna run riot with that cos it gives him almost a blank canvas.

[stip]

how can the chapters be wonderful and not filled in? That's my beef with Tolkien as a writer. They're cliff notes, at best. I do think Jackson and his team really do a wonderful job capturing the feel of the world, the values and conflicts within it, the cultures, the history, the temperaments of the races, the hierarchy, the language, and all the rest. Jackson is a bloated filmmaker at his worst, but he's yet to do anything that feels out of place. My only issue with the two films that I can think of right now is really just pacing. And interestingly enough, the special edition of the first film actually felt brisker and fresher despite the extra length. The film seemed fuller. The story more organic.

[bada]

Every night before my kids go to bed I show them a picture of Stip and call him the bad man. He must be stopped boys. He must be stopped.

[McParadigm]

At all costs

[stip]

I can't wait to enjoy the shit out of the winter soldier tomorrow

[E.H. Ruddock]

I can't wait to enjoy the shit out of the winter soldier tomorrow

Yeah this is going to put a big downer on that movie for me if it happens. If stip loves it is may question all in hold dear in life...

[McParadigm]

I can't wait to enjoy the shit out of the winter soldier tomorrow

don't you threaten me

[Mecca]

Every night before my kids go to bed I show them a picture of Stip and call him the bad man. He must be stopped boys. He must be stopped.

the desolation of smug

[dimejinky99]

Agreed about the extended editions feeling a lot better than the cinematic cut.
Can only hope that this is the case for DOS EE also but this films longer than it needs to be already.
He has managed to capture the Essence in some ways but his cutting to almost nothing of important threads and insertion of his own Made up stuff, (which gets inordinately more time than it should) is what rankles.
Beorn is hugely important.
So we go to beorns house, he tells us he hates dwarves and then sends them on their way with everything they need AND gives them escort. While it does happen in the book the pacing(again that word) is all wrong. They should have lingered there for a bit longer.

I can do this about each scene. Lets not.

[stip]

how is beorn hugely important Dime? What would you have liked to see added?

I suspect he makes the decision about what to extend or not to extend based on their connections to other points in the film. Rivendell gets extended because it is set up for both LOTR and the entire necromancer thread. The laketown stuff gets extended in part so we'll care when smaug attacks it and (I'm assuming) because of the role it'll play in the 5 armies battle. Boern is something of a stand alone moment.

[McParadigm]

how is beorn hugely important Dime? What would you have liked to see added?

Boern is something of a stand alone moment.

And, just in terms of pacing and storytelling, it's a brutally stupid one.

They rush to him because they need horses, I guess. And in the span of about 5 minutes he's come around to their side, handed over some horses, we've flashed to a quick wide shot of horsebackery, and....then they ditch the horses so they can go into the forest anyway. And this is pretty much the start of the movie.

It's pretty indicative of the terrible decision-making going on throughout these films. If they knew that they couldn't be bothered to invest more than 4 minutes screen time in this guy or this moment (because we sure don't want to sacrifice any of that "gripping" love triangle or watertown footage later on to make room now, do we), then couldn't the movie have just opened with them being chased by stock villains #7-34 (like it does), but had the chase lead directly to the forest instead of to Bjorns? And just left that whole thing out, or incorporated the character some other way?

The Rings trilogy would have had the orcs just turning away all of the sudden, giving up the chase. Someone small would ask "hey Gandalf wha happa?" And Gandalf, side-eyeing a bear-like creature on the horizon, would mutter something ominous about "There are things in this world that even orcs will not tangle with, motherfucker."

And it would have worked. The fanboys would have said "oh cool that was (x)!" And the rest of us, not in the know, would have just assumed it to be a scary Tolkeiny monsterbeast, allowing it to feed our sense of tension and suspense.

The point is, if you aren't going to linger on these moments enough for them to feel like they are significant, are an organic a part of the journey, and are impactful to the characters...then why include them at all? What was gained by including him in such a brief scene that, if he does reappear later, literally no one is going to be saying "oh dude THAT GUY?" In a scene that farted all over the pacing of the opening sequence of the film. Hell, if you DO bring him in later to save the day or something, you would have gotten more bang from it by having the silhouette scene with Gandalf's mystery words and leaving it at that...because then when he arrives we'd have a moment of "what's going to happen?!" suspense, at least.

[stip]

do you know how upset dime would be if that happened?

that's the problem with the films is that they're extremely faithful to the lore of the books at the expense of pacing. LOTR has the same problem but it's a better story, a more fully developed story, and a more dynamic story so it was easier to address some of those issues by interweaving between the various arcs. The extended edition of the hobbit actually helped the first film because a lot of things that felt a bit throwaway were further developed.

If you just wanted to tell the best possible story that adapts the source material you could make a much more streamlimed, and probably better, hobbit movie. But these are really recreations as much as they are retellings, and the world building and history clearly comes at the expense of the storytelling.

But in the end I do really love the world and am happy to linger in it and watch the history unfold, watch the themes play out, and just linger in those spaces. Plus I tend to really enjoy the way Jackson stages his fights. So these are easier sells for me

[dimejinky99]

My two RM man crushes duking it out over Tolkien. I'm going to a quiet room. Alone. I may be a while

But basically what McP said for the most part.

[stip]

I'm not disagreeing with McP. I think these would be better movies as movies.

[McParadigm]

I'm still very hopeful to one day see a single 3 1/2 hour fan edit, which chops off as much of Jackson's additions as possible and emphasizes only those moments that serve the story and make it engaging.

It might even end up being a movie about the oft-mentioned Hobbit, since the scenes involving him easily trend among the best so far.

A Hobbit movie about a Hobbit. I dunno, prolly won't work

[dimejinky99]

I agree.
In a perfect world, Pj would have made this film first. It's a bit bizarre it went the other way, the hobbit is an easier sell for movie audiences by far if you look at it.
But you touched in something that's at the heart of a lot of the hating (for want of a better word) for purists, and that is that Pj is more concerned about sewing up these movies and laying foundations for the LOTR films and some of the decisions made, than he is about making great films in their own right(canon be damned)

And I'm not trainspotter enough to detail but how but apparently he's already dropped/screwed up a few important pieces.


So in that,
I'm reading the one of the (numerous) history of middle earth volumes, compiled by Tolkiens son. It's INSANE how many rewrites Tolkien did for every single piece of these books. And a lot of time was spent writing LOTR to actually match it up to Hobbit, but mostly? He was writing LOTR on the fly. Completely making it up with no clear goal or ending at all! (Strider was called Trotter for a long long time!) these books are insanely academic and I mean that. But worth dipping into as well if your curious about watching a creative process and complete world, evolve out of endless rewrites.


Think there's about 12 volumes.

Intimidating

[Bammer]

I am way late to the game on this obviously, and I haven't seen this yet...but early in the thread there was bitching about the trailers.

Um, I am pretty sure that anyone who's seen all the other Hobbit/LOTR movies is going to go ahead and watch this one also, at some point, regardless of what was/wasn't in the trailer...or even if there was no trailer at all. Who cares. It's a sequel of a prequel. You're going to watch it and you know it so STFU about the trailers.

[dimejinky99]

Lol

[CopperTom]

I thought this was infinitely better than the first Hobbit movie.