I was looking at my copy of “The Hobbit”, one moderately
sized paperback novel, one of my favorites.
The last movie adaptation took up the last couple of chapters. And it was hideous. The violence was gratuitous, overdone, and
well beyond the spirit of the novel.
Three movies were necessary for the treatment of the “Lord
of the Rings”, three books long, such incredible themes, such a world to
explore. And, despite the length, there
were parts of “The Hobbit” movies that I liked to. In “Desolation of Smaug”, the battle of the
barrels in the river and the battle inside the mountain between the dwarves and
Smaug were stunning. I could even get
into the presence of Legolas-but what’s up with the eyes?
I have seen much, I have written much, I have imagined much
that is overtly and excessively violent and brutal (two different things). I guess what bothered me about this last
installment of The Hobbit was knowing how the novel was written. It did not have the darkness of the “Lord of
the Rings”. I remember the billing on
the copy I read in school, “The Enchanting Prelude to the Lord of the Rings”.
This was not.
Peter Jackson does BIG better than any filmmaker today, in
my opinion. And “The Battle of Five
Armies” will not disappoint in that department.
But it is not the Lord of the Rings and it should not have been filmed
trying to match LOTR’s size and scale.
I wonder if the DVD will have a blooper reel.
3 comments:
Agree! Except that I thought the battle on the barrels was really rather silly and far-fetched. That and the collapsing goblin bridge in the first Hobbit installment just seemed over the top to me in silliness. I did like the adaption of dwarfish music to the interesting drone-type rhythm though.
I am used to movies having to strip down novels to something so thin as to be distasteful to the written word when I view it. The best work in this regard was probably Harry Potter, where the author had the control to keep the story flow intact, even as so much was stripped away.
The amount of stuff that Peter Jackson piled in turned my sensibilities upside down.
Yes, movies can go from following the book pretty closely (Harry Potter) to basically taking the character names only and a couple plot devices and then doing a completely different story (Bourne movies). But what Jackson did was take the basic, simple plot and proceed to weigh it down with a load of "improvements", wild special effects, "cool" battle scenes, and way too much "action" (aka cartoon violence). In doing so, he lost the simply underlying story. Sort of makes me think of one of Cadillac's big flops a couple decades back when they decided to take a bare-bones Chevy compact car and trick it out as a Cadillac. It just didn't work out very well.
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