Never seen a LotR movie, never will.
LOTR aside, this thread is about The Hobbit.
I actually really liked that they included content from the appendices and the Silmarillion :c
I'm sure the dwarves looking like
cartoon characters instead of
actual dwarves was taken from The Silmarillion!
Peter Jackson did a great job in adding things that weren't in the original book and removing what wouldn't have been good for the movie.
no he didn't. having duplicate scenes from LOTR, making the dwarves a bunch of horrible clowns and loving up the pacing wasn't good for the movie. What did he remove that wouldn't have been good for the movie? Bilbo finding the ring? I can barely remember that scene. the ring was on the floor, and then it was in his pocket. What did I miss? I guess I missed the much more memorable scene from FOTR!
that movie was boring as stuff
absolutely nothing happened in it other than fighting
Ian Holm also said a couple lines. He forgot to act, though.
I enjoyed the movie. It was /really/ strung out, but other than that the CGI was fantastic and the acting was great. It was a really long and slow movie, though.
I wonder how a movie is slow and boring while the acting is great... I think you might be misrepresenting your feelings!
boop, beep. this was a bad one.
Do you like caviar meth? read this:
"The book is too thin to support a trilogy" - An Unexpected Journey covers the first 126 pages of the book. At the screenplay standard of one minute per page, that's already over two hours. Add to this the extended White Council scene, and the addition of Radagast, both of which connect The Hobbit with LotR, and the run-time naturally lengthens. And there is also Thrain's demise (the dwarf battle), which in the book is mentioned in conversation between Thorin and Gandalf, but not described in detail. Another reason for the expansion is...
"A lack of character amongst the dwarves" - Tolkien's dwarves are mostly characterised by their physical characteristics - e.g. age or weight. Jackson adds more character to Thorin, Balin and Bofur particularly. Jackson has also amended the purpose of the dwarves from a treasure-raid to a more noble plight. This takes interaction and this takes talking, hence the running time.
I'm picking this out because it is my main concern of the film.
One page of a novel does not translate into one page of a screenplay, so you can't compare them like that. The extra things that you mention tell more stories, but pacing becomes an issue. There's a rule of thumb that most filmmakers try to follow. If a scene does not directly affect the ending of the film, then it is an unnecessary scene. This is a job that editors and directors take very seriously, and it's often their favorite scenes that end up on the cutting room floor.
We don't need entire scenes devoted to things mentioned passingly in dialogue from the book. Books tend to go into more detail than films to begin with, so if it wasn't important enough for the book, then it wasn't important enough for the film either. Authors and editors leave appendices detached at the end of a book for a reason. It disrupts the flow of the story.
As for the dwarves, Tolkein never fleshed out most of them for a reason. Most of them are treated as bit parts, providing little more than flavor to a scene or comic relief. Having too many central characters is a common criticism of many stories, no matter what medium they're told through. We only need to know as much about the characters as is needed to fully understand the ending. Anything else is best left for outside lore, DVD extended/deleted scenes, literary tie-ins, etc. Remember that Jackson needs to make a film for the general movie-going audience, not just Tolkein fans. Every adaptation ever made would be a massive flop if the director sought only to please fans of the source material.
While The Hobbit is sure to please most devoted fans of the novel who will eat up any lore, it's still a good example of poor storytelling in a film medium. The Silmarillion would make a poor film because it's mostly just a book of lore, with minimal storytelling.
sås:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903624/board/nest/208609899?d=208611129&p=1#208611129
