Now that I’ve finished the movie twice, I like Radagast more, even though the birdshit is distracting. But since there are so many people hating on Radagast, someone please explain why the whole storm giant scene scene was necessary to the film?* It was nothing but CGI for ten minutes.
Radagast was helpful to the plot. CGI metal transforming robots giants chucking themselves at each other without Megan Fox/Rosie Huntington-Whiteley bent over a motorcycle, not really.
So what say you?
* – (for those of you my age, that would be G2- Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, from modules G1-3, Gygax RIP)
*** Update ***
Did you all know that there is an Ultimate Dodgeball League? And that they have a televised championship? And it is in HD?
*** Update #2 ***
AND THE CHAMPIONSHIP PURSE WAS 2h THOUSAND DOLLARS??????
what
extendz
for movies
kindness
I haven’t seen it yet. Thanks a lot John! Now you’ve gone and told me too much about it.
Just Some Fuckhead
Oh goodness, look at the time.
Craig
I understand the “Special Edition” DVD is actually going to be 30 minutes shorter than the theatrical release this time around…
SatanicPanic
It’s in the book- basically it happens so that they’ll seek shelter in a cave where they can then be caught by goblins. And it’s giants throwing rocks, isn’t that cool?
Left Coast Tom
I thought the storm giant scene was ridiculous, I had read that metaphorically in the book and couldn’t believe it was turned into some sort of mountaineering Indiana Jones scene (same view of the way the dwarves’ and Gandalf’s escape from the orcs was filmed). Radagast’s inclusion seems perfectly fine to me. In fact, the first time you mentioned liking the idea that wizards were different…one of the things I liked in the LOTR films is the way Ian MacKellan (sp?) captured the difference (which was also present in the books) between Gandalf as The Gray and Gandalf as The White.
Soonergrunt
One of my favorite stores on the Intertubes:
D&D Classics
Wizzards of The Coast owns the D&D IP now. You can find the current stuff here.
At my second duty station, Fort Ord in the early 90s, we used to go up to Battalion HQ on Staff Duty and use the big photo copier up there to copy and shrink pages from D&D manuals and sourcebooks and then take the smaller packages to the field with us and we’d run a campaign while we were in the Defense. Since you’re digging for like 20 hours straight and it’s boring as hell, we’d do that to kill time. We couldn’t get too elaborate, however because we were Light Infantry, and had to carry everything.
Enceladus
I was amused by how much of the second half of the film consisted of Gandalf, Bilbo, and the dwarves falling, falling, falling, falling down a mountain or cave or hill in such a wide variety of different ways.
Cacti
I’ve given Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit a wide berth and nothing said about it thus far has made me change my mind about that.
If ever there was a book that didn’t need 9-hours worth of film to tell its story, it’s The Hobbit.
Punchy
Who gives a fuck, honestly? NCAA Tourney is on and Ron Mexico iz about to lose to Rich Nerds.
Redshirt
Balloon Juice – The Internet’s source for Radagast the Brown’s Bird Shit Beard chat!
dopealope
I’m still stuck on/fascinated with Radagast’s Rabbit sled. Who cares if they are a Peter Jackson invention?
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/01/03/67872-radagasts-racing-rhosgobel-rabbits-a-recreational-musher-looks-at-the-realities-of-bunny-sledding/
The stone giants were in the book, but I agree, they seemed a bit pointless in the movie.
erlking
I joined my first campaign on Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. Mostly a kill, loot, move dungeon but those fucking dragons. Jesus.
Comrade Dread
They were in the book. But I thought they were ordinary giants who were playing a game in the book, and not rock monsters.
slag
Your Favorite Wizard Sucks.
MoeLarryAndJesus
Betcha could brew beer with beard birdshit:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/brewery-puts-the-ew-brew-new-beard-yeast-beer
DaddyJ
Because Peter Jackson likes things that go boom, and because a $300 million dollar film requires a couple of roller-coaster rides per episode?
Jackson is sometimes a genius (the Orthanc to Gandalf to moth to orc forge tracking shot in the first LOTR movie) and sometimes a 12-year old boy with his finger up his nose to the second knuckle (Radagast’s beard; Denethor squirting tomato juice out of his mouth).
With Mr. Jackson, you gotta take the silly with the sublime.
Personally I liked the first installment. It appealed to my inner 12-year-old, which is about how old I was when I first read the book. I remember thinking at that age: Stone Giants?! Cool! and then being slightly disappointed that all you get is one glimpse of them.
Mr Stagger Lee
HAVAAHD BEATS LOS LOBOS BITCHAZZZSSS!!!!!
Chris
Precisely.
As with Star Wars, gratuitous SFX is part and parcel of these movies.
Jay C
The stone giants were in the Hobbit book, but just, IIRC as a throwaway line or two: obviously, Peter Jackson seized on them as a way to get some extra CGI and film time into HAUJ, even if the result was just some meaningless danger/thrills. I found them extraneous, but unlike Radagast’s rabbit sled, they weren’t ridiculously comic (and thus more in keeping with the tone of the material. IMO, of course)
@John Cole:
My babelfish is on rest leave: can you provide a reasonable translation from Nerdish for us?
David Koch
so given today’s bullshit today about Jonathan Pollard it prompted me to read his wiki page and surprise, surprise–turns out even the liberal icons Barney Frank and Anthony Wiener support his release.
How perfect.
Not a single liberal figure supports Bradley Manning, yet a few dozen high profile icons support Pollard.
I will say, they do have one point: Pollard has spent 28 years in prison, but Christopher Boyce (Falcon and the Snowman) only spent 24. Hard to say Pollard was worse than Boyce.
it also raises an intriguing position for Manning supporters. By supporting Pollard’s release, you establish a precedent and ceiling on the amount of years Manning will serve. It will be hard to keep Manning in prison for life when Pollard and Boyce did far worse but were eventually release. But that would mean having to support, if not reward, the dreaded Israel. Can idealists swallow supporting an outlaw terrorist nation like Israel in order to limit Manning’s eventual sentence?
Chris
@Comrade Dread:
Me too! I wondered after that if I was just misremembering what I’d read, glad to see I’m not the only one.
Walker
@erlking:
That would be any standard Gygax dungeon. The puzzle heavy dungeons at the time (e.g. Ghost Tower of Inverness, Tomb of Horrors) where competition dungeons.
Gygax was never big on story or even dungeon ecology for that matter.
erlking
@Jay C: Dungeons & Dragons module, padawan.
Comrade Dread
I know this marks me as a nerd, but I miss playing D&D.
DPS
Radagast sucked. The stone giants sucked. Rivendell sucked. The goblins sucked. The Wargs sucked. The dwarves sucked, especially the ones they didn’t even bother to make look like dwarves. The trolls sucked. The treeing of the dwarves sucked. Lots of other things that I’m forgetting sucked. Martin Freeman was fine. The scene with Gollum was great.
I loved the LOTR movies. I liked the changes from the books made for those movies. This movie was shit, though. This was as bad as Star Wars Episode 1-3 compared to the originals.
erlking
@Walker: True enough. Still, Hall of the Fire Giants had its thrills, if you didn’t think too much about it.
Jay in Oregon
@Soonergrunt:
Wizards of the Coast has owned the D&D IP for almost 16 years now; they bought TSR in 1997.
They’ve held off reprinting the older stuff because they wanted to maximize the market for the 3rd Edition (and later 4th Edition) D&D.
They’ve put out deluxe reprints of the 1st edition AD&D core books and the 3.5 edition D&D books; they’re reprinting the 2nd edition core books later this year, doing some hardcover collections of classic D&D adventures as well, and the end of the year will see a deluxe reprint of the original “white box” D&D rules. And, as you say, they have dndclassics.com with PDFs spanning all of the different editions.
They haven’t really made any public statements about why they’ve chosen to reprint the older editions now, but there are two obvious reasons:
1) They’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of the original “white box” edition of D&D, and so they probably hope to cash in on nostalgia and people looking to replace long-out-of-print-books.
2) They are working on the next edition of D&D—nicknamed “D&D Next”—and have been conducting a public playtest for close to a year, releasing new mechanics and classes for people to test every few weeks. As a result, 4th edition product has virtually disappeared from their shipping schedule; the few new books that are coming out this year are supposedly “edition neutral”.
Also, one of the goals for the new edition is to make it easy to incorporate or convert material from other editions, so that bodes well for continued sales of their back-catalog product.
Michael
Didn’t see this mentioned: Obama gave a pretty awesome speech in Israel.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/21/politics/obama-mideast-visit/index.html
Jay in Oregon
@Comrade Dread:
Given that our bloghost and at least two front-pagers (Sooner and Zandar) make references to D&D from time to time, I think you’re in good company.
As I pointed out, a lot of the older stuff is being reprinted if you feel like getting your D&D geek on.
And there are plenty of other RPGs out there, some trying to replicate the feel of classic D&D-style games but with new mechanics. I bought a PDF copy of Dungeon World a while back based on some recommendations but have yet to try it.
qtip
If you are going to analyze things to this level, why not just suggest Gandalf call the giant birds at the beginning of the quest to fly them straight to the end?
James Gary
I’m not sure what the G2-storm giant connection is…I just pulled the module off a nearby shelf (BECAUSE I AM A BIGGER NERD THAN ANYONE ELSE ON THIS DAMN BLOG, BAR NONE) and the only storm giant mentioned is a female (HP:94) held in “durance vile” (and chained with “huge manacles at wrists and ankles” for a frisson of BDSM) in room #8 on the lower level. Please advise.
Edit: Reprints are for losers. Stone gangsta OD&Ders (such as myself) hung on to the original printings from their junior-high days. :P
erlking
I would so play a D&D campaign with Balloon Juicers, especially if we can get Cole to be DM.
Djur
@Jay in Oregon: They’re also presumably hoping to claw back a little bit of the retroclone market.
I just really wish they would release 4e under the OGL or similar. I feel like the super restrictive licensing was a huge part of why 4e struggled — pretty much nobody could make third-party material for it, so they all bailed to Pathfinder, the retroclones, or original systems*. Now, I think that was probably pretty good for the tabletop industry, but I genuinely do really like 4e and regret that WOTC is going to let it die from neglect.
I’m sure happy to be able to download the original Fiend Folio, though. I have fond memories of leafing through that and Deities and Demigods as a kid.
(*) Seriously: the articles I read said that Paizo’s main motivation in creating Pathfinder was the licensing issue, not complaints about 4e itself.
James Gary
@erlking: I would so play a D&D campaign with Balloon Juicers, especially if we can get Cole to be DM.
“You round the corner and encounter an enormous white cat. Roll for initiative.”
Bloodstar
And yet no one even mentions that Radagast was played by Sylvester McCoy, AKA the Seventh Doctor.
And the Tomb of Horrors was an evil dungeon, and introduced the Demi-Lich. One of those classics, Though I’ve always had a soft spot for Q1 Queen of the Demonweb pits.
Sadly not much of a collectible’s market for the First Edition AD&D stuff. :(
erlking
@James Gary: I have never had a character with the stats to handle Tunch.
And I played a psionic Bard.
Walker
@Djur:
Hasbro management is very OGL hostile. I had dinner with Elias Skaff and Richard Garfield last year and they told me about a lot of the bonhead issues that came about after the Hasbro assimilation. Decisions that caused them (and others) to leave the company.
With that said, 4ed had too much going against it that I am not sure OGL would have saved it.
mouse tolliver
@Chris:
Co-signed.
You might as well be asking “What’s the point of the Lollipop Guild?” and that whole big song and dance number? Did the munchkins really need to go to all that trouble? And is it even plausible that they could come up with a big production number like that on the spot? Why couldn’t they just say thank you and then send Dorothy off to the next plot point as quickly as possible?
SatanicPanic
@James Gary: That would happen when John decides he’s sick of us and wants us to go home so he throws out an unbeatable opponent
SatanicPanic
@mouse tolliver: I lol’d for real. They must have known Dorothy was coming.
David Koch
@Michael:
Meh. Just words. He didn’t really mean it. He only said it cuz we forced him.
Higgs Boson's Mate
One or another of Tolkein’s books was always in my seabag during my time in the Navy. Loved ’em, then, and I’ll always be grateful for the escape they gave me.
The first three movies struck me as trying too hard. I’m not much of a movie fan, though, so my opinions reflect that. I’ll wait ’till “The Hobbit,” “The Hobbit,” and “The Hobbit,” show up on Netflix or Amazon Prime.
Roger Moore
@Soonergrunt:
Jeez that makes me feel old. I still have my old first edition rulebooks.
Alex
Gotta do something to stretch a moderate sized novel into a 9 hour movie.
MikeJ
I used to work for the guy who wrote White Plume Mountain.
seattlewriter
Storm giants were ridiculous, Radagast was silly, but the G modules were pretty great.
? Martin
@Alex: Well, a moderate size novel with any kind of depth in location and characters would clock in at a solid 6 hours. Turning it down to 100 minutes usually involves some pretty serious carving up of the story. There are some novels that lend themselves to a good adaptation, usually because they’re already thin and light in dialogue, but the Hobbit isn’t such a book, nor does the audience really want it to be. The point of doing these is to relay all of the depth of the location and relationships between the races and characters in a way that wasn’t previously possible. They may be a bit long, but there were lots of complaints that the Lord of the Rings cut out too much. I don’t recall any complaints that the movies were really too long.
MikeJ
@? Martin:
I got to the part where they stopped at the motel 6 and there was a creepy guy in a cape on a horse outside.
TriassicSands
Rumor has it that Peter Jackson is going to make a nine-hour trilogy based on the menu of his favorite restaurant. In 3D.
YellowJournalism
@mouse tolliver: Really, though, what else is there to do in Munchkinland but practice big musical numbers to prepare for your liberator’s arrival? (No midget pron jokes, please.) Think how much better that would have been 10 years ago if the Iraqis had done the same thing!
Yutsano
@YellowJournalism:
You never let me have any fun!
Narcissus
We should start a professional hide and go seek league. Ooh, Pro Spotlight Tag. We could be rich.
p.a.
I think The Hobbit and The Fellowship do by far the best to capture of the mood of the books. The recreation of The Shire and Moria I think outstanding. Gollum, Elrond, The Mirror of Galadriel and the fall of Boromir are super. Rivendell and Lorien, meh. The other movies, only Wormtongue/Theoden/Gandalf and the reproduction of Minas Tirith stand out to me. Jackson really fucked up Faramir. I really hated the ‘corpora ex machina’ of the Army of the Dead.
NotMax
That’s not birdpoop.
That’s enchanced conditioner.
Anne Laurie
@Roger Moore:
So does the Spousal Unit. Who was an excellent Dungeonmaster, according to his fellows, in case y’all need an evilminded DM who’s even
oldermore inventive than our blogmaster, or just one who can be totally impartial cuz he doesn’t care about blogging.(When we first started dating, 35 years ago, I tried rolling a character along with a couple of our other housemates. That character died almost immediately, as newbies will, so I reacted, in character, by tipping the table over & storming off. After which we mutually agreed that he would play D&D and I would do fanzines — both paper-based technologies, in those days — and that’s why the relationship has lasted.)
Comrade Mary
A couple of years ago, a bunch of Torontonians played dodgeball for 36 hours straight (which should have been a Guinness record, although I can’t find it). No purse, just $6200 going to charity. One of the participants blogged it (there are some really cool pictures included) and CNN even picked up the story.
Origuy
I got the D&D white box ruleset when I was a kid and never got anyone to play it with me. I still have it, fifth printing, in mint condition except for a tear in the box corner. Someday I’ll put it on eBay and get a couple hundred bucks from a collector. I wonder if the price will go up when WotC reprints the white box?
The prophet Nostradumbass
I have some original D&D books somewhere, but damned if I know where they are. I got them when I was about 8 or 9 years old, I think. Looking on the Google, I also recognized the first AD&D “Monster Manual”.
For those of you who like D&D and others like it, there’s a really fun game from Steve Jackson Games called Munchkin, which is a parody of D&D-style games, and is an absolute blast.
Johannes
@Bloodstar: I have to admit that despite a few dodgy serials, I’m very fond of McCoy’s Doctor. I particularly enjoy his ability to go from silly bugger to dark manipulator and back. Not to mention, he killed when he spot-read Matt Smith’s Pandorica speech at a convention.
http://youtu.be/nG9Z5djon7w
Yeah, I’m a geek.
Lavocat
The rock giants and the extended “Indiana Jones-ization” down in Goblin Town were the worst parts of the movie.
Radagast worked well as a plot-driver, but then sabotaged this mechanism due to his character flaws.
Jackson opted for fantasy-cum-reality over metaphor on the rock giants. More’s the pity.
As for the dodgeball league: John, you left out the most descriptive part: are they well-endowed, scantily-clad women with attitude? And in HD, no less? Damn.
Cermet
@p.a.: Exactly!
I agree with Cole that the storm giant scene was pointless and badly damaged the flow of the story.
The scene of them falling in the orc cave was such a blatant rip-off of Pirates that he should be sued (and really says a lot of Jackson’s need to steal others works to add silly action to a book/movie that already had far more interesting scenes. Jackson has to destroy his flow just to prove he can, I guess.)
As others have point out, to do any justice to the Hobbit does require 9 hours or more; strangely, no one has directly bitched about the numerous singing numbers in this movie but for me, that part of the book provides both a tone and atmosphere to the story that when used in the movie, would have made Tolkien really happy (unlike the LOTR which would appalled him terribly. Jackson (to be fair) used more modern approches to some characters in that movie but Tolkien would not have been pleased, at all.)
SLKRR
Still no complaints here about the scrotum beard?
Southern Beale
All I know is, I really miss Battlebots. That’s about as nerdy as I get.
lou
The storm giants thing reminded me of Jackson’s King Kong movie and the dinosaurs rolling down the hill scene that lasted interminably.
It was in the book, but just one sentence about Bilbo looking up and seeing storm giants throwing stones.
Same with the prologue. Yawn.
Schlemizel
Let me get this straight. I am forced to live in a world where a fucking dodgeball game is nationally televised but the NCAA womens hockey tournament is not.
More lite beer all around boys, that spinning is not from the drink its from us circling the sewer!
Attaturk
I played the “Giant” modules of AD&D leading to the voyage into the world of the Drow. All pretty awesome.
But when we got to the conclusion, “Queen of the Demonweb Pits” and had to deal with all that dimensional stuff, not to mention a Demigod Spider in Loth, our shit got all fucked up.
It’s tough to outfight a demigod on their native plane.*
*NERD!
Robert
Rock Giants were fan service. Jackson looks for the cool little quirks in source material that he can turn into spectacle and bring to life. He did it a lot in the original trilogy, as well. Shoot, he did it in Beautiful Creatures by putting so much emphasis on the fantasy novel the two troubled teens were writing together. It’s what he does.
Not all spectacle works for everyone and it never will. I liked the rock giant scene because I always linger on the brief mention of their game in the book.
Shalimar
@YellowJournalism:
What other kind of pron could an entire village of midgets make?
lol
@Bloodstar:
I mentioned it in the first Hobbit thread but no one apparently noticed.
Hunter
“. . . someone please explain why the whole storm giant scene scene was necessary to the film?* It was nothing but CGI for ten minutes.”
Because that’s what Peter Jackson does. He makes CGI movies with a couple of live actors thrown in here and there.
AnonPhenom
@? Martin:
In the early 80’s Stephen King, having had a few of his novels already made into movies at that point, decided to write a book consisting of 4 ‘novellas’ which he published under the title Different Seasons. Each novella was about 90 pages, a length King figured lent itself to being transposed into a screenplay without running into the editing issues which you outline.
As a result we ended up with the movies Apt Pupil, Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption (the fourth novella, The Breathing Method, was never made into a movie).
Jackson’s approach for LOR appeared to be a balance between a long movie runtime and judicial editing (Tom Bombadil gone, Arwen updated, dialogue transposed between characters, etc…). His approach to The Hobbit seems to be “Fuck it, get as much of it as you can in the screenplay”, something I would normally think is doomed to be a disaster. To whatever degree it winds up working I think will be attributable more to how well known and loved the book is rather than to Jackson’s considerable talents as a moviemaker.
quannlace
AdamK
Fkn 3D. We hates it. Every fkn movie now has to have people falling, a roller coaster, a water slide, creatures throwing shit, the same old crap. Boring. If you cut all of the 3D effects-inspired crap out of the movie, you’d have a movie. Now it’s a childish fkn theme park.
hartly
I read this site regularly but haven’t chimed in until now. Basically I’m a Dr Who obsessive, and Sylvester (Radagast) McCoy (mentioned in some of the above posts)is one of my pet peeves. He wasn’t funny when he tried to be, was funny when he wasn’t trying to be, and he always looked constipated when he tried to be scary. (Seriously, watch him say “Go! Go!” to Jean and Phyllis in the Curse of Fenric graveyard scene, and tell me you don’t think of a guy straining on a toilet.) He had his moments – his performance in the first 3 1/2 episodes of Greatest Show in the Galaxy are fantastic – but his dr is highly overrated, and his era opened up the way for the squishy, emotional garbage we’ve been force-fed by Russell Davies and Steven Moffatt like we’re geese on a patte farm. I hate to say it, but sometimes I wish Dr. Who had ended in 1985 with the hiatus. At least it would have gone out on a high (Revelation of the Daleks).
I haven’t seen The Hobbit and probably won’t. A friend has assured me that McCoy isn’t his usual annoying quirky self as Radagast, but if it’s anything like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, it’s too long and way over-directed.
Persia
@dopealope: The bunny sled was delightful. The giants were stupid.
McJulie
I thought the stone giants scene went on too long, and I preferred my internal picture of “giants throwing rocks at each other.” But my husband who isn’t much of a Tolkien nerd liked that scene. He liked the way the company at first fears they’re being targeted, then realize the giants don’t even know they’re there.
It seemed less interminable on second viewing.
canuckistani
I came here to bitch about The Hobbit, but instead, I’ll bask in the good times of running a 2nd Ed. AD&D campaign that ran through two years of high school and four of university. I didn’t get into grad school, but did we ever have good times. Twenty five years on, I still remember some of the set pieces and the battles that went on until dawn.
And fuck Peter Jackson.
rm
Ther looked and moved a lot like Rock-‘Em-Sock-‘Em Robots, for those who remember that toy.
There must be a heuristic for judging the good and bad parts of an adaptation. I think excessive literalism and spectacle-withou-subtext make it bad. Robot boxing giants, goblin roller coaster — BAD. Singing, extra adventure with the bickering trolls (way more than in the book, but used to advance the dwarves’ acceptance of Bilbo), Radagast — GOOD. Riddles with Gollum — EXCELLENT. It was a bad movie, but the Gollum chapter made it woorthwhile.
JustRuss
Still haven’t seen the Hobbit. Played the Frost Giant Jarl module 30+ years ago, remember it well. Good times.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“But when we got to the conclusion, “Queen of the Demonweb Pits” and had to deal with all that dimensional stuff, not to mention a Demigod Spider in Loth, our shit got all fucked up.”
I DM’d Q1 once and they got as far as one room in the web and then got creamed by wandering monster arthropods. Magic not working in the Demonweb screwed the spellcaster-heavy party.
Yeah, I should have scaled back the number in the wandering monsters given the party was struggling. But I was still a rookie DM.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“As a result, 4th edition product has virtually disappeared from their shipping schedule; the few new books that are coming out this year are supposedly “edition neutral”.”
4th edition sucked. It’s not really D&D if your 1st level mage isn’t a walking torch bracket hiding behind the meat shields after they’ve cast their only spell.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
“Sadly not much of a collectible’s market for the First Edition AD&D stuff.”
Are you meaning there’s not a lot available to buy, or that the prices for what you have are low?
I flogged about $500 worth of RPG material a few months ago, and that was mostly 1st ed stuff. Even shifted crappy Judge’s Guild stuff I thought I’d never get rid of.
The sad thing? I could barely notice the dent in my collection. Paid for my kid’s birthday party though.
spacewalrus
Great fantasy film. Terrible adaptation of the book.
Who’s the protagonist in the film btw? Bilbo or Thorin? Love the part of the movie were Bilbo becomes an observer to everything that’s happening. But that’s what happens when you shoehorn another story arc on top of BILBO’s adventure. Did we really need a backstory for the warg attack when the eagles save them? Did we need ANOTHER antagonist in Azog?
As for Radagast, love McCoy’s performance–but why not just stay true to the source material and have Gandalf trot off to Dol Guldur one of the times he leaves the party (because that’s what’s implied by the LOTR appendices)? I actually thought the Radagast business would have worked better as a prologue than the needless prologue with old Bilbo and Frodo.
But there was no reason to turn The Hobbit into Lord of the Bilbo. And the characterization of Thorin is so far removed from the greedy old dwarf in the book that he’s more like something that stepped off the cover of a Harlequin Romance.
Still liked the movie. But it’s not really an adaptation of The Hobbit. It’s a version of Tolkien’s Third Age legendarium that we’ve never seen in a linear progression before, with some pretty unnecessary additions (like a 3rd film just to bridge to LOTR, which there’s utterly no reason to do; the connections are already there without it).
joel hanes
@Walker:
Hasbro management is very OGL hostile.
In the late ’90s I worked at a videogaming company. We tried to partner with Hasbro to fork off a toy-market gaming platform, in competition with Nintendo. We could never arrive at a deal, because Hasbro’s management insisted on terms and conditions that would screw over the customers at every turn.
Ann Marie
I played AD&D for a while in my 20s. Later, when I wasn’t playing, I still bought all the 3.0 and 3.5 ed. books, which were great. My memories of actual playing, however, consist mainly of the times my characters were killed, or nearly killed — almost killed by giant rats, killed by being stepped on by a giant, killed by our party’s idiot wizard setting off a big fireball in a small room . . . . Not an impressive record!
Epicurus
“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball!” Fun little movie, if you haven’t seen it yet.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364725/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Paul in KY
@Left Coast Tom: It isn’t metaphorical in the book. I guess they decided they had to show it how Prof. Tolkien wrote it.
It did look cheesy, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Enceladus: Only think I can think of there is that it shows how tough dwarves are.
Paul in KY
@David Koch: I think Falcon & Snowman did show repentence. IMO, Pollard has not shown one ounce.
Paul in KY
@p.a.: Fellowship of the Ring is the best one, IMO. Even if he did mess up the balrog scene.
Paul in KY
@spacewalrus: Thorin is a protagonist, as he is also consumed by lust for the ring (one of the seven) that his grandfather posessed. He wants the arkenstone & his old home, but what he really, really wants is that ring.
Anna in PDX
@qtip: Ha ha ha! My partner was asking me that. “Why don’t the birds get used where they are really needed? Basically it’s like having but not using an air force.”
Anna in PDX
Also as the world’s biggest LOTR nerd I am still unable to sit through the movies, but I actually enjoyed the Hobbit. I just thought it was goofy and funny, and if you have to mutilate a Tolkien story, it’s better to do so with the silly toss-off children’s book than the serious world-building epic. I love and adore the Hobbit, and have it practically memorized, but for some reason didn’t feel outraged at all with all of Jackson’s innovations. But everything he does in LOTR that differs from the book makes me rant like he is making a movie of the Bible and I am a literalist fundamentalist. This is kind of weird now that I think about it. I am inconsistent.
Morzer
Not in any meaningful way and certainly not in any way that justified 20 minutes of mawkish sentimentality and utter irrelevance. Tolkien would have despised the idiotic butchery of a good, straightforward plot in order to drag in an entirely unnecessary character or scene.
How do I know this?
Read the man’s letter to Forrest J. Ackerman (June 1958) and see what he thought of a proposed treatment of the LOTR by one of Peter Jackson’s spiritual ancestors named Morton Grady Zimmermann:
The rest of the letter is well worth reading – as indeed are Tolkien’s letters overall.
Donald
The Fellowship of the Ring was good–the changes were mostly necessary (except for the bizarre depiction of Galadriel in her temptation scene–she was supposed to look like a goddess, not some blue green refugee from a bad opera with a voice that was almost unintelligible.)
The Two Towers was good in some ways and bad in others. Treebeard was portrayed as an idiot and Faramir’s character ruined.
The Return of the King was horrible in spots. Denethor is a tragic figure in the book–in the movie he’s a glutton and a moron and the audience cheered when he died. Jackson played it so they would. I think Tolkien would have hated that scene.
Turning the Army of the Dead into beings who could actually wipe out Sauron’s hordes in about five minutes was like introducing tactical nuclear weapons into medieval warfare. More Jackson stupidity. In the books they were only capable of scaring people and they only played a role in a battle to the South. But Jackson had to “improve” things.
Donald
Forgot to add that Jackson totally butchered the whole meaning of Frodo’s compassion towards Gollum–you were supposed to think in the movie that Sam was right, and that much of it was actually the influence of the Ring, when in Tolkien’s view it was Frodo’s compassion for Gollum that saved Frodo from being damned as Gollum was. And Gollum’s final chance at redemption in the book was ruined (unintentionally) by Sam’s mistrust. Of course that was too subtle for Jackson. So he turned it into a stupid story about how one drug addict was too addled to see how evil the other addict was, and only Sam got it right.
Jackson is a genius in some ways, but an idiot when it comes to understanding much of anything that is even remotely subtle regarding a character’s psychology. And fantasies aren’t even supposed to be that hard to follow.
PanurgeATL
@Donald:
Maybe he got the memo from Conventional Wisdom Central about how the LOTR characters Aren’t Very Deep or something and proceeded from that assumption.
Tehanu
@Donald:
Not to mention the stupidest cliche of all time in the Cracks of Doom scene, having Frodo literally hanging by one hand over boiling lava. Some parts of the Jackson movies (including Hobbit) are wonderful because they look and feel exactly like you imagine. Other parts — and more of ’em — are dreadful (Faramir and Denethor both come forcibly to mind). I’ve reached the point where I just fast-forward through everything I dislike.