I still can’t stop but think how stretched out the Hobbit films were, for an otherwise short book. That’s a sin that stains forever with me. The Lord of the Rings films, do have their own flaws, but they’re fairly contained and can be debated as to whether they were good or not. I have so much trouble excusing anything with the Hobbit though.
And I hope we never, ever see anyone tackle The Silmarillion. Simply because, there will be so much improvised fluff in that would-be film, that it’d make the Hobbit films blush.
I love how long the hobbit movies were, all movies that are adaptations of books (not short stories) should be that long so they don’t have to leave out anything that the books contained, otherwise they all feel rushed
The Hobbit movies jammed a ton of things not from the books in to pad the run time on top of completely changing the tone of the story from a light hearted adventure where violence is glossed over into a lesser version of LotR.
They jammed in a freaking elf and dwarf love interest angle somewhere in the movies.
In the entire Middle-Earth Legendarium, Elves and Dwarves were bitter rivals to eachother to the point where the idea of A elf and A dwarf would never work together in a conceivable fashion that constitutes a relationship to that extent. Legolas and Gimli I was okay with because they developed as functioning partners for the sake of the Fellowship when the call was heeded.
But what happened in the Hobbit, was once again a shining example as to how stupidly obsessed Hollywood is, with cramming romance into everything.
One egregious example of this is the battle near the end of the book. My memory is a bit fuzzy, so please forgive if I slightly botch the details.
Bilbo has no reason to care about the fight. The audience has no reason to care. So Tolkien doesn’t write the fight, and just knocks Bilbo unconscious at the start. One of the movies devotes a significant amount of runtime to the battle, despite the fact that audiences still have no reason to care. But you gotta have the big setpiece, right?
The battle of the five armies is like Gandalf fighting the balrog, a huge and epic battle that was important to the story but not something that needed a lengthy description so both happen off screen. Bilbo, who was in way over his head in the Hobbit, gerting knocked out was the perfect way to handle it!
Yeah, they kept it in for audiences expecting a big battle like in LotR. It was such a boring slog, although we did get Beorn doing an arial assault off an eagle which was hilarious!
Agreed. For the life of me I can’t figure out why Amazon bought rights to the Lord of The Rings for their 5-season epic instead of something like Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, which offers a much richer text and history.
I don’t remember the timeline, but perhaps they jumped on the bandwagon while LotR was still fresh in everyone’s mind, thinking they’d get rights to touch other Tolkien sources, and then were told “hell no” so had to use a few scraps and make it up as they went.
Nope. They paid a shitton of money for the appendices of Lord of the Rings, but nothing from the Simarilion. As far as canon goes, it’s fan fiction.
Some words from Tolkien about adaptations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIqc8FDndRY