We watched these back-to-back-to-back, so I'm going to lump them all together. I'm also not going to try to summarize the story but just make comments about things that stood out to me and places the films diverged from the book. (As I type this, I am sitting in Flint's deserted airport waiting for a flight to Chicago which will then take me to London. So what else am I going to do?) I remember going to see the first of these, it must have been back in 2012 when it was released, and it was at the height of the 3D boom, so we all had to wear those silly glasses. I say "we," because it was me, Thomas, Thomas's friend Sofi from Valley School (and this was well post Valley School, so this was probably a "let's try to stay in touch" thing in part organized by the other party, Sofi's mother Susan. My abiding memory is that Thomas refused to wear the glasses, so sat there for well over two hours staring at what must have been a horribly blurry screen. That was early-teen Thomas for you! I also remember not thinking much of the film: it seemed rather cheap and gaudy (a failure of the book is that there are too many dwarves (13!) and they are given hardly any distinguishing features, except that Bombur is The Fat One and Thorin is the boss. (Balin's chief claim to fame comes in Lord of the Rings, where he turns out to have made a failed go of re-claiming Moria, but I don't remember him distinguishing himself (same goes for Gloin, whose child is Gimli, I believe). Peter Jackson and co. made an effort to rectify this by giving them different outfits,
different British regional accents (some Scottish, some Yorkshire, etc.) and different hairstyles, some of which are truly ludicrous) but perhaps that was a side-effect of the 3D, because I didn't get that impression on this watch through. I also objected to the fact that (a) they'd padded the story out (how else could one book that's shorter than any of the three volumes of LotR become a trilogy of equal length?) but (b) they'd cut Beorn. Turns out they just shifted his location in the story and he shows up in the middle film, but still. I must be mellowing (and not as precious about The Word of Tolkien as some members of my family (not to mention my friend John from college, who actually shows up as a talking head on one of the DVDs of the LotR trilogy because he wrote a book about Tolkein) because I really didn't mind some of the alterations this time around, as they sort of made sense and in some cases shored up plot holes. And usually, when they did make alterations, they made sure to make them tie in with The Canon (so, for example, when giant worm-like things show up in the Battle of the Five Armies and are referred to as "were-worms" (at this point I literally said aloud "Oh, come on!" and funnily enough, Billy Connolly (playing Dain of the Iron Hills) said exactly that one second later) I googled it and apparently there is a one sentence reference to were-worms in the Hobbit (a throwaway line about Bilbo imagining going off to the desert and encountering them). Peter Jackson used that as an excuse to have them burrow tunnels so that an Orc army can appear on the battlefield in front of the Lonely Mountain without anyone seeing them coming. (Just saw two flashes of lightning outside. Hope this storm ends before my flight...)
So I can forgive some additions, including even adding a female forest-elf Tauriel
who falls for Killi (who gets to be an implausibly sexy young dwarf. He's still a good head shorter than her, so it's hard to take their love talks seriously as she has to crane her neck to look down at him), because, let's face it, there's a paucity of female roles in Tolkein. (Oh, Galadriel makes an appearance in this one as well, as they flesh out the part where Gandalf vanishes to fight "The Necromancer" in Mirkwood and have him do it with Eldrond, Galadriel and even Saruman (Christopher Lee must have died just after the film came out),
whose downfall is predicted as he goes off to confront Sauron in Mordor, where he vanishes off to after being zapped by Galadriel. Oh yes, they leave it no doubt that The Necromancer is Sauron. (Two more flashes of lightning. This is getting tiresome.) They also have Radagast the Brown play a fairly substantial role (even being the one leading the Eagles in the Battle of the Five Armies (aren't they one of the armies? They never actually count them, which is confusing for a film actually called that)), and while I'm fond of Sylvester McCoy who plays him, he rather plays up his comic aspect (he actually has a streak of birdshit in his hair, and rides a sled pulled by rabbits) which is a bit un-wizardly. But there are some changes they make that are a bit baffling. Several times they diminish Bilbo's role in the whole adventure. For example, as I remember it, Bilbo does not get captured by the Trolls, and keeps saying tricky things from the shadows as the dwarves struggle in bags that the Trolls put them in, until daylight comes. Here, Bilbo is captured and while he does help a little, Gandalf comes along and splits a big rock allowing sunlight to fall on the Trolls. Then later, in the lonely mountain, instead of Bilbo being the only one that goes in and encounters Smaug, they have all the dwarves go in after him and they have a massive pitched battle with Smaug that culminates in dousing him in gold. (And, another complaint, after this he just suddenly up and decides he's going to go off and set far to Lake Town leaving all the dwarves in his lair! Why would he do that? It makes much more sense in the book where (a) he doesn't know about the dwarves, and (b) because he thinks the thief must have come from there.) Of course this is part of the need to overegg the pudding to pad out the running time. It is true that there are a lot of little events in the book, so that while it's shorter than one volume of LotR, a lot more events are crammed in, there's still only really enough for two films. And that brings my main complaint. I remember going to see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the cinema, and there's a moment when Indy and co. are in a mining car hurtling down tracks in a mine, when they come to a part where the track has been ripped up. The mining car leaps in the air... sails about 50 feet... and lands exactly on the tracks on the other side. There was a collective groan of incredulity (the equivalent of shouting "come on!") in the whole theater. But we forgave the film because it didn't overdo it. We allowed the film one impossibility, much as you allow a friend to embellish a story a little bit so long as they don't go Full Baron Munchausen. Well, Jackson goes Full Baron Munchausen and then some. Every single set piece has about 4 or 5 moments that are at least as ludicrous as the leaping mine car. Dwarves fall about the height of the Empire State Building in a 3-story stack of wood and survive. Dwarves hop between rock giants as they battle in the mountains without a scratch (and certainly without falling to their doom). Dwarves run into hundreds of orcs or goblins and emerge without a scratch. (In fact, I remember the end body count of the book being pretty grim - at least half the company of 13 get killed, whereas here, it's just three (one, of course, being sexy Killi to teach Tauriel the pain of loving a mortal).) It undercuts the stakes.
Positives: there's at least one excellent set piece in each film. The first one has Gollum and the riddles in the dark, and it's effectively creepy. The second one has Bilbo creeping around Smaug. (Further complaint: Bilbo takes off the ring, so of course Smaug can see him!
Why would you do that? In the book Bilbo is wearing it constantly, whereas here he hardly uses it. The best rationalization I can give for this foolhardy behavior is that wearing it is painful, which is sort of a ret-con from Frodo's experience in LotR. They have the same "swirling shadows" effect that they used in that early trilogy for when the ring is being used, so there's that. And I do approve of one more change: it's only when he has the ring on that Bilbo can understand the spiders' speech. In The Hobbit (the book) just about every animal can either speak or understand speech, whereas that goes away in LotR (contrast the spiders of Mirkwood (a chatty bunch) with the silent, alien Shelob, much more effectively scary) and Jackson has more-or-less sided with LotR here. (One more animal-related complaint, again sidelining Bilbo: as I recall, Bard only knows about the missing scale on Smaug's belly because Bilbo sends a thrush (the same one from the instructions on the map) to tell him. Here Bard just sees it. And, annoyingly, he doesn't shoot Smaug as he's flying overhead (when you'd SEE his belly) - he shoots him as Smaug is more or less crawling towards him, having a conversation. Why not shoot him in the eye in that situation? But maybe the change is because you can't have talking birds? The eagles don't speak, either.
The last movie is pretty much just constant battle and it's just an inferior version of the battles from the second two films in the LotR trilogy. They also have Thorin have a rivalry that runs throughout all three films (sometimes unnecessarily - they're added to the barrel scene when the dwarves escape the wood elves) with a huge pale Orc called Splorg or something
(they've tangled before and Thorin cut his hand off - in fact, that's when Thorin acquired the name "Oakenshield" because he grabbed a chunk of oak on the battlefield to use as a shield - one of several occasions when Jackson gets a bit clever-clever filling in backstory that didn't need filling in) and the culminating battle between the two is pretty cool as it takes place on a frozen lake. But there's also a leaping mine cart moment there when Splorg seems dead and is floating under the ice only to stab Thorin through the foot and burst back out again. (Oh, talking of leaping minecart moments: they actually had them in the LotR trilogies, of course, only they were all given to Legolas. He was allowed one ridiculous laws-of-physics-denying moment in each film and it was okay because there were no others. Well he's back in these films (apparently he's the son of the king of the wood elves and pines for Tauriel - he also insults a picture Gloin has of his son, which is an in-joke given his relationship with Gimli in LotR) because evidently Jackson felt he had to cram as many familiar faces as possible in the Hobbit films to get LotR fans to love them. In this he failed: LotR fans all sneered at The Hobbit, but, as with the late 90s Star Wars trilogy which was reviled at the time by those who remember the originals, it is beloved by people who saw it first because they were kids at the time. Anyway, Legolas gets a leaping minecart moment where he literally runs on blocks of stones as they are falling, like Mario in a video game. And in general, in a lot of the busier scenes, like the dwarves' escape from the goblins in their mountain lair (ooh: side comment - it was lovely to hear Barry Humphries as the voice of the Goblin king, who had a very upsetting giant wattle), the film just looked like a video game, which took one out of the moment.
Still: Thorin's arc is tragic and Jackson didn't fuck that up. And there's enough familiar actors having fun (Humphries, Connolly, McCoy, McKellen and Stephen Fry as the gloriously oily Master of Lake Town (with a unibrowed Wormtongue of his own called Alfrid
who became comic relief, but the repeated trust that major characters still put in him when he was patently untrustworthy was frustrating) for example that the films are overall enjoyable, and certainly marvels of set design and special effects. Somebody should edit them down into two films, though.
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