Peter Jackson's 'The Hobbit' movie

I'm watching The Hobbit for the first time right now.... just passed the halfway mark (had to switch discs).

I liked the LOTR trilogy, but I'm not too impressed with this film so far.... pretty boring. Hopefully the second half picks up a bit.

 

This may have been mentioned earlier in this thread, but I know of fans who are waiting for the third Hobbit movie to come out so they can edit all three together, cut out a bunch of crap, and then get it down to about 2.5 hours for the entire thing. I suspect that will move a lot faster than the current 7.5-hour version.

I like Peter Jackson's work quite a bit, but this is kind of the same thing as his King Kong movie: you take a good 100-minute story, then drag it out to 3 hours, and it winds up getting boring.

 

My problem with the first 2 Hobbit films is a combo of the length and all of added sh!t that Jackson put in.
I understand the difference between books and films but the art is capturing the essence of the book and bringing it to life.
The Hobbit films so far, do neither for me and are over long and just plain wrong, in the wrong places
Totally disappointed.
For the record, I saw both version of LOTR in the theater and loved the extended versions especially FOTR.

 

The extended version of Desolation Of Smaug is due out November 4.
I loved the extended LOTR films, but this may just be too much. Does a film that already stretches out the book interminably need to be further extended?
That said, I'll probably buy it.

 

Bring on part III!

(and the DLC for Lego The Hobbit, too please and thank you)

 

I don't know if I can take a third one. I hope he doesn't set his sights on "The Silmarillion" next.

 

The Tolkien family has indicated that they really, really dislike Peter Jackson and has zero interest giving him any rights to any more of the books. It was only through a technicality that he managed to use the extra fictional material that occurred around the events of The Hobbit, and that's one way he was able to expand the movie. But frankly, I think what really happened is that Warner Bros. ran the numbers and said, "hey! We can make at least an extra $500M if there's three films instead of just two!"

It's alarming when you consider the shortest book has yielded the longest movie -- more than 8 hours, in this case, for a 300-page book. Apparently, Peter Jackson does his best work when his films are in a series of three:

http://gawker.com/5930277/the-hobbi...ckson-can-only-make-movies-in-groups-of-three

 

Can you expand on this, or provide a link please?

edit: nevermind, easily found with a search.

 

I found this out when Peter Jackson was interviewed I think for ComicCon and lamented that he was bummed-out that the Tolkien family didn't like the films and resented his changes in terms of story and character. I think they look upon the author's work as gospel and they don't want a single word changed, which unfortunately doesn't work well in the world of film. As it is, I think the Lord of the Rings films are about 90% close, far better than anything I could have predicted 20 or 30 years ago. For years and years, I cited Tolkien's books as good examples of movies that could never be made because it'd be impossible to create the visuals. Even Walt Disney had explored the idea of doing them as animated films but gave up because of the violence inherent in the stories.

 

thanks.

So the technicality is that the appendices were included in ROTK, correct?

 

Too late...it's coming in December...

...DRAGONNNN

Christopher Tolkien has said that. Tolkien's great-grandson, however, has been involved in at least one of the films and is not nearly so judgmental. As far as I know the film rights to anything but LOTR and the Hobbit were never up for grabs, though; especially considering the other works were still largely fragments when the Professor passed away.

Correct. The downside being they are literally plot points, so that's where a lot of the inventions from the Hobbit films have come from, is Fran, Phillipa and Peter filling in the blanks.


Interestingly, Viggo Mortensen, Aragorn himself, has been openly critical of the newer trilogy recently:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/05/14/89352-viggo-mortensen-interview-in-the-telegraph/

 

More material for the fan editors to get it right. I like it.

I love what you did with LOTR Jackson, but The Hobbit has been sacrificed to the almighty dollar.

 

Ditto. I will not be seeing the last installment of the Hobbit. At least not at the theater anyway. I saw the first installment there but watched the second by borrowing a friends BD and will do the same with the third installment. Paying them once to see the Hobbit is enough. My 7.2 sound system is better than most theaters anyway.

 

The problem with these lousy trilogies (like The Hobbit and the Star Wars prequels) is that I get stuck seeing all three movies because it goes down like this:

1st movie: Oh, that wasn't so good. Well, maybe the next one will be better, I'll give it a chance.

2nd movie: Nope, this kind of sucked, too.

3rd movie: Well, I know it's probably going to suck, but I watched the first two, so I'm already kind of invested in the story. Might as well see it through...

That's pretty much how I feel about the third Hobbit film. Not really looking forward to it, but I sat through the first two (and the LOTR trilogy), so I may as well see it through to the end.

 

My feelings exactly. I'm only seeing the third one because of a sense of duty to see it through to the end!

 

And I really believe a film on par with LOTR is hidden inside all of this footage. Maybe two, two hour films.

 

Y'all are no fun.

Granted I should probably get around to reading the books eventually...

 

In the case of the Hobbit, it is more than the one book. There are at least 5 other books and a gazillion appendices to read. Most of the other books weren't finished and were (with heroic effort IMHO) fashioned into pretty good works by his son and later grandson.

 

Speaking as someone who hasn't read the Hobbit and didn't read the LOTR books until after I saw the first movie, I'm really enjoying The Hobbit movies. I don't care a bit about what's different from the book, I'm just enjoying visiting that world again. I just watched the extended 3d version of The Hobbit and time flew by for me.

 

I read The Hobbit book long ago, and dislike the movies, but not because of changes or additions to material. I dislike them more for being needlessly stretched out and their over-use of CGI compared to the LOTR films. They feel like a chore to watch and have mostly inferior SFX.

 

I'm still seeing it as I said but for free.

 

Even longer if you consider the running time of the first film.

 

I wish I could same the same, but the crappy visuals, recycled music and atrociously contemporary dialog have me thinking otherwise.

 

And the latest news is that the three Hobbit films together cost a whopping $754 million to make (!!!):

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hobbit-trilogy-reportedly-cost-745m

But they're expected to gross over $3 billion, so I'd say they're all very profitable. Tolkien's son, Christopher, really despises the movies and did an interview not long ago explaining why:

http://www.worldcrunch.com/culture-...of-rings/c3s10299/#.VAhxHvldWSo#ixzz3CM7C57Zr