The Hobbit

[Dio Brando]

So I recently just got back from seeing the Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies and now that I've seen the whole trilogy, I want to give my thoughts on it and see yours.

Overall....it was okay. That's it. The last film was just okay. The entire trilogy just came off as "okay" to me. I never hated it, but I never was amazed nor impressed as I was with the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. Unlike the original trilogy, I actually read the Hobbit, so I guess I did act a bit "Nitpicky McDouchebag" during some scenes, but overall it was faithful.

If you want a more in-depth, spoiler-full analysis, here it is:

Spoiler: Spoiler Time!

Not even 10 minutes into the movie, they already made a stupid decision: Killing of Smaug so early. In my opinion, Smaug was the absolute best part of the trilogy. He was a fantastic character in the book and he was translated very well onto the big screen with an amazing performance by Benedict Cumberbatch. Now, Smaug was killed off in a relatively early chapter, but it still annoying that he was killed off before the main characters even have time to notice. They barely even talk about him after that

That leads to another problem of mine, although this one is more for the entire trilogy: How forgettable the dwarves were. Besides Thorin, Kili, and to some extent Balin, they never play a big role besides being "Heroic Dwarves". The only one with an actual goal is Thorin and Kili has this akward love interest with an elf named Tauriel.

One change I like was the bigger focus on the Battle of the Five Armies. In the book, the battle was kind of glossed over and more focused on the aftermath. Peter Jackson being Peter Jackson, decided to dedicate an entire third of the movie to the fight.

The battle is your typical LotR stuff. They're fighting, it's kinda equal, then they start losing, some back up appears that boosts morale, hijinks ensue. At least it was a cool battle, although the battle of Helms Deep is still the best in the series.

In the end, The Hobbit never reached the levels of LotR for me, and I was never surprised by that. The trilogy never got better with each film nor worse, it remained in the same enjoyable, but forgettable experience from beginning to end

 

[Judge Holden]

Honestly, i aint seen the last film yet, but I think i can sum up my main complaints of the series so far with these bulletpoints

- annoying attempted comedy: for the love of god the FUCKING STAR WARS PREQUELS were less juvenile and asinine than the abortions passing as jokes in this series. whomever decided on filling the movies with this did more damage to the tolkein mythos than john boorman's infamous plans for the LOTR ever could have done
- forced attempts at drama: be it that cringeworthy last fight in the first movie or thranduil's volturi style posturing or....well everything to do with bard and laketown that doesnt fall into the above bulletpoint (fcking alfrid.....i sincerely think he is a worse character than jar jar binks), the films' attempts to make mountains out of narrative molehills just serves to either annoy or amuse me, and even when amused i am just laughing at the shit im seeing. also from the extended edition...MAKING THRAIN DIE WITH A GODDAMN WILHELM SCREAM!? WHAT THE FUCK PJ??!
- all the bullshit changes to the canon (both film and book) and attempts to pander to fanboys of LOTR: exhibit a. tauriel and the goddamn romance plot. exhibit b. bard and the goddamn revolution plot. exhibit c. legolas and the goddamn pandering plot

Honestly, the films are still...ok due to the quality of the main character actors, the general plot, and the visuals (mostly...) but the above three things make movies which could have been a pretty damn good trilogy into rather mediocre messes

EDIT: also I concur with the claim that smaug was the best part of the trilogy. makes me goddamn heartbroken we will probably never see an adaptation of children of hurin where we could see Glaurung portrayed in a similar manner

 

[XYZpdq]

I didn't know I wanted Radagast the Brown to be the Doctor as a walking pot joke with bird shit running down his head until the movie.

 

[Overcast]

I enjoyed the movies myself.

Granted, I never read the book, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. :/

Initially, I was kinda skeptical over the movie adaptation of one book being split into three movies, but for what it was, I liked it. Bilbo was somewhat endearing, I enjoyed the cinematography and landscapes, and I enjoyed the story for the most part. Plus, as shallow as it sounds, I was pretty amazed by the framerate of the movies. I haven't seen any other movie done that so far.

I'm sure the book is better though. That's usually how these things go. If the movies did anything, it's sparking my interest in reading it. Perhaps one of these days I'll get around to it.

 

[Judge Holden]

And sadly, i think the only time the movies will give me any true enjoyment is when they are eventually covered by the Rifftrax crew, who being even bigger tolkein fans than I, will likely shred the movies worse than twilight

 

[XYZpdq]

I finally caught more than just the first one, wandering in and out from the rest through the day.

Yeah that was something else all right.

I get the impression that GdT made plans for some parts of a light cartoony take on it that ran two movies, then PJ came in to rework those plans and pad them out for three.

But really what the fuck actually happened?

Legolas being a tryhard show-off was funny when it was doing it to piss off his boyfriend, but it just gets boring and even more obviously computer animated as it goes on in Hobbits. And I want to like him doing a huricanrana.

 

[Bugaboo]

I thought the first hobbit was fine and the next two got progressively shittier. I actually talk about these movies a lot for some reason and I've come up with something I like to call "The Bilbo Theorem"

1. Most Bilbo: Best of the three
2. Less Bilbo: Medicore
3. Even less Bilbo: the worst

The amount of Bilbo is in proportion of how good the movie will be. The less Bilbo the worse the movie is.
Tbh the guy who played Bilbo did do a good job I just didn't give a shit about 99% of the characters

 

[XYZpdq]

I thought the first hobbit was fine and the next two got progressively shittier. I actually talk about these movies a lot for some reason and I've come up with something I like to call "The Bilbo Theorem"

1. Most Bilbo: Best of the three
2. Less Bilbo: Medicore
3. Even less Bilbo: the worst

The amount of Bilbo is in proportion of how good the movie will be. The less Bilbo the worse the movie is.
Tbh the guy who played Bilbo did do a good job I just didn't give a shit about 99% of the characters

They seemed to wander off from the book less for 1, also.

 

[Replicant Sasquatch]

I thought the first hobbit was fine and the next two got progressively shittier. I actually talk about these movies a lot for some reason and I've come up with something I like to call "The Bilbo Theorem"

1. Most Bilbo: Best of the three
2. Less Bilbo: Medicore
3. Even less Bilbo: the worst

The amount of Bilbo is in proportion of how good the movie will be. The less Bilbo the worse the movie is.
Tbh the guy who played Bilbo did do a good job I just didn't give a shit about 99% of the characters

Probably because the entirety of the book was from Bilbo's POV and The Hobbit is as tightly-wound a narrative as you can get. When you base two thirds of your movie on that giant index at the end of Return of the King your gonna get a disjointed mess.

I get the sense no one really wanted to make these movies. At least no one wanted to make them into the bloated trilogy we got. The whole thing has this really creepy mercenary vibe to it. Like New Line knew milking the success from the LOTR trilogy was the only thing which would save their company.

 

[Un Platano]

From a LOTR fanboy perspective I hated the movies for how much they deviated from the book. The first movie was ok and it followed the story pretty well, but by the third movie they were just thinking up whatever they could to justify padding out the movie into 3 parts. It's disappointing that they completely ruin the feel that the book had in favor of pointless subplots and changes in direction. Characterization was all over the place- some of the characters were characterized in ways they weren't in the book (similar to Mary and Pippin were in the LotR movies), and that's fine. The problem comes with characterization of people like Thorin that have a significant impact on the plot.

All that though is just me complaining about how they changed it, and not the quality of the changes. From a non-fanboy perspective I see it a bit better, but it's still not that good. The movie doesn't know whether it wants to be a lighthearted adventure of a silly little man with hairy feet or a romantic drama, so the pacing is fucked. I remember watching the second one in a theater and every time I thought it would end, it just kept going and going. Then Smaug dies 5 minutes into the next, and I could already see what was going to happen: way too much pointless shit packed into the last movie. The movies start out fine but it's a steep downward spiral from there.

Another thing disappointing about the movie is that it's not good to look at. I still am impressed by the scenery of all three LotR movies. It captures the setting perfectly, and it works greatly to the adventurous atmosphere of LotR. But with The Hobbit, there wasn't any scene that made me feel anything. All the scenery felt fake compared to how LotR handled it.

 

[BetterFuckChuck]

In retrospect do these movies come off as worse or better now that we have rings of power - which is infinitely shittier? I feel like the first movie was the one that was seen as the best or the worst because it does have the most faith to the books and doesn't do stupid tangents, but at the same time it just pads six chapters into a three-four hour movie. The second at least had smaug but then began the stupid action scene trend the next movie would make worse, and I've seen the extended so the third movie comes off a little better but it's the cinematic equivalent of noise to me. There's one or two movies in there that'd be really good. What's the best re-edit in this forum's opinion?

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

In retrospect do these movies come off as worse or better now that we have rings of power - which is infinitely shittier? I feel like the first movie was the one that was seen as the best or the worst because it does have the most faith to the books and doesn't do stupid tangents, but at the same time it just pads six chapters into a three-four hour movie. The second at least had smaug but then began the stupid action scene trend the next movie would make worse, and I've seen the extended so the third movie comes off a little better but it's the cinematic equivalent of noise to me. There's one or two movies in there that'd be really good. What's the best re-edit in this forum's opinion?

I at least had fun when I saw the first two in theaters.

Rings of Power just seems boring and cringe from the bits of it I've seen.

 

[Rome's rightful successor]

In retrospect do these movies come off as worse or better now that we have rings of power - which is infinitely shittier? I feel like the first movie was the one that was seen as the best or the worst because it does have the most faith to the books and doesn't do stupid tangents, but at the same time it just pads six chapters into a three-four hour movie. The second at least had smaug but then began the stupid action scene trend the next movie would make worse, and I've seen the extended so the third movie comes off a little better but it's the cinematic equivalent of noise to me. There's one or two movies in there that'd be really good. What's the best re-edit in this forum's opinion?

My views haven't changed of The Hobbit trilogy from the rings of power. They were fun films but were filled with excessive padding, filler, and dumb action scenes.
But what has change is that The Hobbit Trilogy is the last major set of films that I can think of that was not afraid to have an all white cast.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

In retrospect do these movies come off as worse or better now that we have rings of power - which is infinitely shittier? I feel like the first movie was the one that was seen as the best or the worst because it does have the most faith to the books and doesn't do stupid tangents, but at the same time it just pads six chapters into a three-four hour movie. The second at least had smaug but then began the stupid action scene trend the next movie would make worse, and I've seen the extended so the third movie comes off a little better but it's the cinematic equivalent of noise to me. There's one or two movies in there that'd be really good. What's the best re-edit in this forum's opinion?

Unlike the Star Wars prequels, nothing really makes the Hobbit films endearing in the long run. They didn't remain in public conscience, they didn't expand the lore of the setting in any meaningful way and no part of them can be taken with new context to see the things that do work.
The films just ended up as a petty derivative of the original films but worse in virtually every sense. In some ways The Hobbit is more akin to the Sequel trilogy - unfocused, over-produced, not even knowing the tone they are going for.

 

[Pork Packer]

I at least had fun when I saw the first two in theaters.

Rings of Power just seems boring and cringe from the bits of it I've seen.

Rings of power is like if you took all the shittest and most mediocre elements of The Hobbit trilogy and entirely removed the skeleton of Tolkien's story the hobbit had and replaced it with what is literally just garbage fanfiction....

.....holy fucking shit i just realised this makes it the 50 Shades of Grey to the Tolkien mythos