Yeah, who cares if the book is too thin to warrant 3 films. If PJ can give us 3 films like The Hobbit, then I'll be a happy chappy.

Let's make it a dozen!

3 films = a dozen HBO episodes. Sounds about right to me.

Film and television are two distinct media - - what works in one doesn't necessarily apply to the other.

Why not!

I'm having difficulties putting my thoughts into words on this one. First off, it was great being back in Middle-Earth and I loved every moment of the film because of that. Yet, it still left me unsatisfied. Too many scenes felt drawn out for the sake of it or completely pointless. I would have easily gone 3 and a half hours here to get the full experience. It's the same way I felt about the last two Potter movies. The entire necromancer plot feels ... unneeded. As does everything else that desperately tries to connect it to the original trilogy.

Having said that, I really loved the last stand on the cliff scene, everything Martin Freeman, the design of the Goblins (though why does the King speak fluent English while none of the others can), the pale orc being pushed into the main antagonist, and they way they built Thorin into a tragic character. Overal an A- and I'm expecting the next one to be an A+.

Also, I'm guessing they kept most of GDTs creature designs. The troll scene also seemed more like GDT than LOTR where that moment would have been very tense. I wonder if the movie would have been much different if he had stayed. It really felt like watching a Peter Jackson movie that was intended for Del Toro.

Everything was completely redesigned by Jackson.

And yes, it would have been much different. Del Toro saw the film as much more of a 'story.' The script was rewritten a number of times after he left as well.



It happened pretty much exactly as how Bilbo described it in Fellowship of the Ring, and pretty much exactly how it happened in the book.

Except in the book, the Trolls break into a musical number.

I remember feeling a huge sense of dread when I read it, maybe that was because I was younger. To me, it was a parallel to Frodo's first encounter with the Nazgul, proof that the dangers in the real world are not imagined. Yet the trolls never seemed menacing to me, kind of adorable even, which seemed more like something out of Hellboy than the vicious cave trolls we saw in LOTR. It also helps that, in the book, we mostly see everything from Biblo's perspective. At this point in the movie we've already been introduced to Smaug, the Pale Orc's pack and the great evil in the forest.

Lol, for real? That would have been horrible in the movie.

I liked it because my interest in Middle-earth is mightier than my loathing of childishness.

In the book, the encounter with the trolls has absolutely nothing to do with the seriousness of LotR. It is light-hearted, childish and playful, just like in the movie.

I don't know what spell folks are under but this film just puts you right back into the lotr world and even works at laying connecting parts to fellowship itself. What is it missing that makes one think this is Not a lotr film. I just don't get it.

Me too. It's transported me back to 2002-3.

I dunno, I just found it way too long and drawn-out, and far more concerned with connecting the story to LOTR than capturing the magic and whimsy of the book. I'm not usually in favour of cinematic adaptations hewing too close to the source material, but here I would've welcomed it. The novel is a simple adventure story, not an epic tale, but by trying to make this into another LOTR (or at least something too similar), Jackson loses sight of that. This really should've been made first, and certainly not stretched out to three films.

At least it got Riddles in the Dark (my favourite part of the book) right.

The problem that Jackson faced was that making it after LOTR meant that he couldn't make just "a simple adventure story". Audiences expect more, and he delivered but with also keeping it low-key enough to slot in as a prequel to LOTR (which is the biggest good vs. evil story in the Tolkien universe).

That is not true.

While we may be more familiar with the third age story of The Lord of the Rings, it pales in comparison to the epic events which occurred in the first and second ages.

Bigger than The Hobbit, though, which is the point I was making.

Completely agree.

I just re-watched the LOTR trilogy after seeing The Hobbit and the references to Bilbo and his adventures are numerous. They even encounter the very same trolls (now stone) in Fellowship. The connection between The Hobbit and the LOTR films is so perfect, it transforms you back to that world. Once The Hobbit films are complete, I feel you can watch both series chronologically and not feel The Hobbit was made a decade after LOTR (which you can't say for most prequels).

But Tolkien himself added stuff in his appendices that affected the story of The Hobbit and connected it better to LotR.

Perhaps if Jackson had left the "added stuff" to the appendices of visual media: DVD extra features, and left The Hobbit alone, as Tolkien himself finally decided to - - I might have actually enjoyed this film adaptation.

I don't think pleasing a man who systematically dislikes what most people like and likes what most dislike was one of PJ's aims.

You're correct about Peter Jackson not trying to please me - - but what concerns me is the fact that he doesn't appear to care what J.R.R. Tolkien thought about LOTR or The Hobbit.


(BTW, you are incorrect in your assumption that my tastes are somehow systematic - - they are simply my tastes.)

Peter Jackson and Tolkien worked with different mediums. What works in literature may not necessarily work in film. Jackson knows his field, and he knows that he doesn't have to blindly follow Tolkien just because he is the source of this material. Peter Jackson is a film author, and one that I respect much more than Tolkien.