The Hobbit

[Mindful]

I still wanted more.

Yes. The books hold so much more than just the Quest. There is so much sweetness and nobility woven into the books; the hope unlooked for, the intricacy of the Elvish legends, the hobbits who kept us grounded in humanity, the beauty and the loss and the valor against all odds. It would have taken a dozen movies to add it all and I don't suppose it could be done. The movies teased out the action story line. When you are reading the books, the war scenes and battles don't take center stage the way they do in the films. That was only one part.

My favorite scene is when Aaragorn kneels to the ring bearers at the coronation. That was real LTR.

Yup .. great scene, I'd have quite a list of favorites including this one.. It just gets me every time, I love being a Dad and a husband, although they've all left the nest.


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Some of the scenes in the extended version were the best. For instance, the houses of healing/Arwen’s song.

 

[Mindful]

You serious? I thought it dragged on and on and on..
Little action, silly plot, retarded acting. I can't think of anything that I thought they did a good job on. To each his own I guess.

I have yet to see any of The Hobbit movies. I know I'll want to, eventually, but I expect that I will be disappointed.

I expect that they will suffer badly from a condition that I call “Pandorum”, after a movie which I consider to be the model organism for this defect.

The essence of Pandorum is a very good story, but not a very big one, stretched way too far to make a movie, with lots of burdensome, irrelevant crap put into it to pad it out, and a very slow pacing, to stretch it to what is a reasonable length for a movie. The Pandorum story would have made a good basis for a 15-20 minute segment on a The Twilight Zone type of anthology show, but there just was not nearly enough to the story to reasonably stretch it out to a full-length feature film.

What's all this have to do with The Hobbit?

The Lord of the Rings is a very big story. Made into a series of movies, it ended up being more than nine hours total for the theatrical releases, and more than eleven hours for the extended versions, and even to fit it into that longer length, some stuff had to be rather painfully cut out of Tolkien's original version of the story.

I guess the folks who did the Lord of the Rings movies, in following it with The Hobbit, felt that they needed to make the latter as big and grand as Lord of the Rings came out to be. But The Hobbit just is not that big a story.

Consider the box set of books pictured below, this set being published some time after The Lord of the Rings movies, but before The Hobbit movies. Four books total. Three of them comprise Lord of the Rings. Only one of them—the smallest out of the four—is The Hobbit.

The Hobbit is less than 1⁄3 as much story as Lord of the Rings. While eight hours isn't nearly enough time to properly tell the Lord of the Rings story, it's surely just way too much time to take telling The Hobbit.

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Too much CGI in The Hobbitt. LOTR got it just right.