XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: mr@sandman.net
In article ,
Steuard Jensen wrote:
Spoiler space removed!
> For me personally, the parts of the movie that best captured the feel
> of the original story were the Dwarves' song about the Mountain in Bag
> End and the riddle game. I thought that Martin Freeman played Bilbo
> very well, and that any changes to his character in the book were by
> and large for the better. Thorin seemed like a reasonably solid
> character, too, and at least a few of the Dwarves have recognizable
> personalities (more or less the same ones as in the book). Strangely,
> Gandalf didn't feel as spot-on here as he did in LotR; that may have
> been in part because Jackson left in quite a bit of his cutesy
> wordplay from /The Hobbit/ while at the same time trying to place him
> at the center of the more serious aspects of the story. Maybe.
The only thing I disliked about Gandalf was the bit in Bag End where
he for unknown reason had to use his Big Voice thing with Shadow Area
Spell, just to be heard at the dinner table when they argue about how
many dragons he has killed. I mean, in Fellowship, this is a really
good scene when he tries to get Bilbo out of a ring-induced rage, and
it works beautifully. Here it's just a nod to the fellowship movie to
mek us what - recognize him? I mean, it served no purpose what so
ever.
> I'm moderately confused by the changes to the backstory. Why make
> Thror corrupted by gold and Thrain a maddened coward?
Corrupted by gold... well, that was odd.. But in what way did you
percieve Thrain to be a maddened coward? I missed that.
> I'm at a loss to explain how Galadriel learned to teleport at the end
> of the movie
I never saw it as teleportation. She's an elf, and can move both
swiftly and silently. Gandalf may have been lost in thought, and when
a filmmaker cuts that way, I don't always necessarily see it as being
in real time.
> or how Bilbo learned to fight effectively with a sword between his
> flailing at Gollum and his slaying of a trained fighting Orc to
> save Thorin.
Well, Hobbits keep surprising everyone in the books and movies, so...
:-D
> I also have no idea why a company of wolf-riding Orcs seeking a
> troop of Dwarves in a wide open grassy area would be so determined
> to follow a lone weirdo on a high-speed sleigh (nor for that matter
> why the guy in the sleigh decided to drive around in circles rather
> than leading the Orcs *away* from the Dwarves).
Yeah, Thorin and company is constantly having to stop and hide because
that damn Radagast leads the orcs by them again and again. Wtf? :)
> More seriously, I'm not sure why exactly Saruman thinks that he can
> dictate what a random group of Dwarves can or cannot do, nor why
> the news that they had just left town (along a known, very
> specific, very narrow trail) suddenly convinced him that he was no
> longer able to do so.
Indeed. I would even go so far as to claim that Sarumans demeanor is
more in line with Lord of the Rings than what I would expect it to be
in The Hobbit.
When Gandalf learns that Saruman is there, he is almost disappointed,
which in line with our knowledge about Saruman. But Gandalf doesn't
know any of this at the time. At the time, Saruman is the head of the
Istari and deserves Gandalfs respect. In Fellowship, he specifically
goes to Saruman for advice, yet in Hobbit, he seems to rather want him
to not be there.
Also, Sarumans demeanor and arrogance seems to suggest that he has
already been corrupted by Sauron via the palantir, be we know that
won't happen for 59 years.
It also seems odd for Galadriel and Saruman travelling so long just
to meet up with Gandalf to talk about some insignificant dwarves, when
we know that they are all part of the White Council especially formed
to deal with the threat of Dol Goldur - about five hundred years ago!
I can deal with time being compressed and altered to fit the movie
storyline, but the movie makes it seem like the White Council doesn't
even exist, and is about to be formed due to the events in the movie.
> Finally, Radagast. Oh my, Radagast. There's not a lot to say about him
> that the movie didn't already say itself, really. So I'll just repeat
> my first exclamation after the movie:
>
> Every. single. argument. in favor of leaving Tom Bombadil out of the
> /Lord of the Rings/ movies has just gone up in smoke, given that
> Peter Jackson decided to include Tim Benzedrine in /The Hobbit/.
Agreed. And while I agree with others that have said that Radagast is
pretty much the only character that keeps the "tone" of the book, I
still think he is grossly misused. He lived near Dol Goldur, so it's
not illogical for him to be the first to note that something was amiss
there, even if that was, again, some 500 years ago. It is a bit
implausible for him to go there and fight the Witch King for a period
of... five seconds, just to get a morgul blade. I disliked the entire
bunnies and the sleigh (how *does* a sleigh run on grass and dirt,
anyway? Magic?).
But again, we needed someone to take note of the disturbance in
Mirkwood (which in the movie is named Greenwood, but recently people
have started to call it mirkwood - something that actually happened
some 3000 years before the events in the Hobbit :)
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