I finally got to see it. I really enjoyed it overall - their choice of Bilbo was absolutely perfect. Absolutely. Bombur is also exactly as I imagined. Thorin isn't as cranky as I imagined, but the way they are choosing to do him makes for a better movie and is going to make the ending better than if his mannerisms were as my younger self imagined. Nitpicks in the spoiler below - aside from these, I loved pretty much everything in the movie. Specific great things will also be noted.
The biggest problem to me was the way they did the Elves. They're far too somber and subdued, very much equivalent to LotR tone. The tone of the story would work better with some jolly Elves, and doing it that way would be a great way of showcasing what Sauron's rise by the time of LotR has done to Middle Earth's people. The contrast, I think would've been a great thing. On that note, the scene with Gandalf's political maneuvering wasn't a bad thing to include, but it should've been shorter and I think Saruman ought to have been the lone dissenter, overruled. There's no reason to have Gandalf have to catch up with the party later, I think.
Some of the action scenes were a little cheesy. I know what they're trying to do. The cinematography makes very clear, from the difference when Bilbo is the center of attention and when Thorin is, that they're playing up the contrast between the Dwarven perspective of themselves as Great Adventuring Action Heroes, and Bilbo's perspective of himself as just a normal person caught up in something big. That's fine, and it works really well with Thorin's pride in particular. In fact, I really like how they spend the entire movie setting up the Dwarves as action heroes, right up until Thorin gets curbstomped and suddenly you realize that the movie's been setting the audience up to buy into the Dwarves' own overconfidence. They haven't fought anyone competent so far. They got a lot of really easy victories, overlooked the situations they barely got out of by the skin of their teeth, and got caught up in their own apparent awesomeness. The last time they fought a real battle was decades ago, portrayed in a flashback that emotion has probably exaggerated.
But god damn it, that dramatic slow motion and music is too over the top. It's just too much, like making a video game with bad mechanics as a parody of such a game. There's being artistic, and then there's sabotaging yourself, and they strayed just a little too far toward the latter.
Speaking of cheese, the scene at Dol Guldur was also a little bit much. Radagast in general was okay, and I get the feeling that they were trying to insert a bit of Tom Bombadil thanks to all the complaints about his absence in LotR (he certainly suits the tone of the film and novel overall), but the Necromancer's dramatic reveal was a little too dramatic. Mirkwood's corruption should really have been a slow, subtle rot, not a sudden invasion of giant spiders and ghosts, and I don't see a good narrative reason for the change. Apparently the natives changed the name over the course of a week or two?
Finally, on the cheese front, we could've done without the Weathertop scene. It was a kind of random callback to LotR, and didn't add anything. We already knew Azog was going to continue being relevant (I mean, really, even without spoilers), so all we got there was a cliche scene of a villain killing an underling for failure, or possibly for failure to do anything but grovel when no groveling was asked for (it really felt like they were talking past each other, which didn't help). The whole scene could've been cut, and the movie would have lost nothing.
The giants were a bit of a random thing, and introduce some verisimilitude wtf. One wonders why nobody attempted to harness them during the War of the Ring. I would've just had some unusually large trolls tossing boulders at each other.
Just about everything in the Shire and Goblintown was perfect. Erebor was also great. I know the DF jokes are done to death, but I couldn't help but think about Erebor "This is what a Dwarf Fortress is supposed to look like," and of Goblintown "This is what a Dwarf Fortress often looks like. Welcome to fucking Boatmurdered! I wonder where they butcher the mermaids." The Gollum scene was well-done, even if they did mess up wording one of the riddles somehow (it's "this thing all things devours", not "it devours all things", you need it the first way to get the meter right).
The only thing that stuck out about the Shire was the framing device. Frodo didn't really need a cameo, and we don't really need it to be explicitly called out as Bilbo's memoirs. LotR callbacks are kind of unnecessary, really.
I liked the original resolution to the trolls better, but they needed to give Bilbo more to do since they're breaking up the book into multiple films, so I understand why they did it. I just kind of wish they could've kept the original trick of getting the trolls to bicker.
A minor thing is that Glamdring and Orcrist don't glow. I know Glamdring didn't in the LotR movies, so they were kind of stuck there, but Orcrist's glow condition changing is kind of a spiffy part of the ending that I would have liked to see included.
Building the camaraderie between Bilbo and Thorin is working really well. So far we've had the traditional acceptance buildup that you'd see in any movie, trilogy or no. When Thorin's pride tears all that down at the end, it's going to be excellent, provided they actually let that happen and don't turn his friendship with Bilbo into a way of redemption. This is my biggest fear for the future of the movies, but other than that I really have high hopes for where it's going.
Great movie, would watch again, will buy.
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Topic: The Hobbit (Read 55733 times)