Having watched The Hobbit I wanted to gather my thoughts on the whole Lord of the Rings / The Hobbit hexalogy, something that has been with me since 2001 - thats 13 years of my life. Lord of the Rings was much better balanced trilogy, but still, both of these trilogies were born from the same mind and same ambition, but the approach to the source material was different. Where as LotR took cinematic liberties, The Hobbit re-wrote the story - a story that didnt need to be re-written. Lord of the Rings had to drop out a lot of relevant stuff, skin down the story to make it flow, but Hobbit felt that it had to bloat it up to match the missing page count. It didnt, and the second Hobbit - Desolation - is the proof. The first and the third Hobbit took their time to go through their specific part of the story. First one spent ages in the Shire, built up the Hobbit world, the smells, the textures, the Hobbit way of life, and the introduced the Dwarves, but still, didnt rush forward. The third part focused and gave all the time necessary to the huge battle, and did it well. But the second part failed because it wanted to rush through everything interesting, introduce as much new stuff as possible, and then cram in the love story, the old characters from earlier saga and well, it just rushed through a film that was actually either worth two films, or wouldve needed something to be dropped out. And I claim, the one thing that wouldve made a huge difference wouldve been to drop everything Tolkien hadnt introduced in the story. The lovestory and the Legolas storyline. Neither of these were original Tolkien material, and building them up weighted down the whole package in a way that it turned into exhausting bag of clichés. Its such a shame to hear a theatre full of fans laugh when Legolas says grim stuff about her mother. Even the fans - and Im speaking of 15-year-old-kids-with-no-kind-of-critcism - didnt get it. Fans of the movie, I mean. The fans of the books will never forgive it. Three films out of one book was a problem everyone was saying, but I claim the length was right - only, there was too many subplots, and the ones that the story couldnt handle were the ones introduced by Jacksons writing team. You need a love story - no, I dont. It wasnt in the original writing, it didnt need to be in the film, it brought absolutely nothing good to the table. But Hobbit did tackle well such issues as making a grim epic tale out of a childrens fairytale and bringing in elements from the Appendix material. Those alone are worth the movies. I just wish someone will re-edit the whole thing into three not-that-long parts without the lovestory and Legolas backstory. It will be a killer of a trilogy.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 17:38:31 +0000
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