A Tolkien and Middle Earth Thread

Can we also discuses the Amazon series here or is that off limits.

Naturally, although I can’t understand why anyone would wish to do so.

575,

I’ll have to answer more fulsomely in a short while when on my computer, but the films were based on such a well loved and well known series of novels that for them to be a flop, the first picture would need to fail. That would need TFOTR to go from a worldwide box office of $898.2 million to under $300 million, or 3 times the production budget.

I don’t believe that some changes to the stylistic choices of Gandalf’s portrayal and the inclusion of Tom Bombadil would amount to that. For the first film, the audience were largely, though not entirely, existing Tolkien fans. They lined up in queues that wound up and down both sides of a megaplex cinema here in Adelaide to get in to sessions not just on opening day, but a week afterwards. People saw it multiple times (4 for me). It was seen as a masterwork not despite the book elements and language, but because of them. A tiny bit more that doesn’t fundamentally change the plot or characterisation would not have been a game breaker in my view.

Jackson was somewhere around 75-80% accurate to the books; more importantly, his changes in all three films worked, made sense and were done with a great respect for the source material.

Later, in the far too stretched Hobbit trilogy, some of his bad habits came to the fore.

My review of the 3rd Hobbit Film:


“Today, I saw the final installment of The Hobbit trilogy, 'The Battle of the Five Armies'. What follows will be a review with a fair few spoilers while the impression is still fresh with me.

It was quite possibly the worst film I have ever seen.

I've seen and studied a lot of films. I like to think I'm a reasonably fair critic who tries to find the good in most pictures, even if they don't quite hit the mark in my opinion. I'm struggling to find the good in this film apart from a couple of sequences.

Hobbit 3 or TBOTFA as I'll call it (the acronym provides some pretend separation so I don't have to think of it as a Middle Earth picture) has several major problems - it has a poor story and tells it badly; it has a number of technical failures; and it misses its intended tone.

TBOTFA has an extremely disjointed narrative, with awful storyline choices and battle sequences that fall flat. Technically, there is poor characterization, ineffective lighting, mediocre music and several major failures in cinematography. Tonally, it never makes up its mind whether it is trying to be LOTR-lite or the lighter-hearted Hobbit.

In the spirit of Peter Jackson, I'm going to split this review into three parts to artificially inflate the size and...profit?

Part 1: Narrative
The original story of The Hobbit is straightforward enough, with an introduction to the eponymous main character and the two major supporting characters of Gandalf and Thorin; the other dwarves don't matter and are never fleshed out. The journey commences and after two major obstacles (the goblins of the Misty Mountains and the spiders/elf captivity of Mirkwood), the dwarves reach their destination. There is a nice confrontation between Bilbo and Smaug the Dragon, followed by Smaug's death over Laketown. Various demihuman and human armies then descend upon the mountain before being joined together by the deus ex machina of the attack of a massive Goblin army. Thorin redeems himself as a hero and king, dying valiantly after reconciling nicely with Bilbo.
The everyman hero then returns home, stops the sale of his possessions after he is presumed dead, and lives happily ever after. There was some business later on about a ring, a Dark Lord and the end of the world, but that is another tale.

Peter Jackson's major failure was the decision to stretch that plot out to 3 movies. There isn't really enough there for 3 x 2.5 hour blockbusters. As such, he went through some of the support material and apocrypha, of which Tolkien has thousands of pages. An interesting subplot about the fall of the Necromancer of Dol Guldor was a reasonable addition.

However, he didn't stop there. He inserted a subplot containing fan favourite Legolas from the LOTR (not in the original novel or support material) and an elf-dwarf love triangle featuring an entirely original female elf warrior maiden/Mary Sue. This showed a real lack of understanding of the nature of Tolkien's world and devalued a lot of what he accomplished with LOTR.

Legolas and Tauriel get almost as much screen time as Bilbo Baggins and fail to do anything with it. Martin Freeman as Bilbo gives a good all round performance that injects warmth and humanity in the tale and really works well in every scene he is part of. This is his story, not that of elf-like video game characters who can do no wrong.

The main storyline is about Bilbo and the dwarves. In order to make the 12 supporting dwarves appealing and less than cartoonish charicatures, some personality clashes and subplots necessarily have to be introduced. More time could have been spent on these characters and their interaction with Bilbo to make the viewers become more attached to them and identify with them as individuals.

Spoiler: The dragon dies in a 10 minute sequence before the opening credits. He is shot by Bard the Bowman (all well and good) with a black arrow (with you so far) using a broken bow and his son's shoulder to balance the arrow in a mind numbingly silly homage to William Tell (you've got to be fricken kidding me). This is after a long song and dance in the second film where a great deal is made of how Smaug is only vulnerable to a black arrow shot by a dwarven windlass (some type of bow, rather than a female midget who reads the weather on Channel 86)...which then comes to absolutely nothing. This isn't advanced film making here - it is Chekhov's freaking gun! You do not introduce an object or plot element unless you are going to use it.

Extending Smaug's presence into the third film fails. He is the centrepiece (and masterpiece) of the second film. The ridiculous (and wholly Jackson authored) sequence where the dwarves are hunted by Smaug and successfully fight him in the mountain devalues the dragon as a threat and a powerful figure. Substituting that 20 minute sequence (during which I fell asleep in boredom) for an extended attack on Laketown and Smaug's death would have provided a satisfactory narrative arc for the third film and not created an anti-climactic beginning.

Too long is spent on the subsequent travails of the people of Laketown, when it could be establishing the situation of the dwarves in the mountain. An interesting plot point in the novel is that the dwarves and hobbit do not know about the death of Smaug and have to be told by a raven. Nothing on that here - they see it happen in the distance.

Jackson compounds his narrative sins by splitting the party in the second film and then reuniting them to no real effect in the third. The party should only be split if there is some payoff to the audience in character development or plot progression. None of that here - we has 48fps instead!

The Necromancer subplot is resolved in 5 minutes in the third film, where Galadriel, Saruman and Elrond show up and banish Sauron/the Necromancer by Cate Blanchett getting bad CGI make up and a voice synthesizer and 92 year old Christopher Lee engaging in some sort of kung fu with ghostly Nazgul apparitions.

This brings me to a couple of my major gripes with Jackson's forays into Middle Earth:

1.) He doesn't get magic.
2.) He doesn't get elves.
3.) He doesn't get dwarves.

Throughout all 6 films, the only magic that any of the Wizards/Istari (essentially angels in human form sent from Heaven to Earth 3000 years previously to counter Sauron/demonic minion of the Dark One) perform is getting their staves to glow, besides a comic relief Radagast the Brown raising a hedgehog from the dead.

Jackson was on record as not liking the fireball/lightning bolt type of effects that are seen in sword and sorcery films, which is all well and good. However, he goes too far the other way by reducing them to elderly swordsmen/martial artists with Maglites.

Jackson's elves don't give off a quality of being non-human, apart from one nice sequence in Fellowship of the Ring, where Legolas walks along the top of powdery snow that goes up to the waist of humans. They have no real abilities, no inner light or power of goodness and are basically just immortal humans with pointy ears and 'mad fighting skillz' straight from the realms of video games. This is compounded by the elf-dwarf love affair, which is literally impossible for elves to even contemplate.

Jackson's dwarves are comic relief, best typified by a pointless cameo by Billy Connolly riding a boar and inviting the arrayed armies of elves and men to 'sod off' in a broad Scottish accent. Their serious moments are few and far between, with even the fighting prowess that Gimli showed in LOTR absent from The Hobbit. Far from being tough, doughty axemen capable of defeating armies of goblins and orcs, they eschew armour and generally act completely like humans.

Indeed, we could see the dwarves as part of how Jackson's humour usually fails to fire. In TBOTFA, we have an awful original character named Alfrid, a slimy servant of the late Master of Laketown. This monobrowed cardboard cut-out has two switches - cowardice and greed. He displays both at times as directed, but falls utterly flat when he is used as a poor punchline for jokes. He exits the film in the midst of the raging battle, dressed as a woman with his bust stuffed full of coins and having to be reminded by Bard the Bowman/replacement Aragorn that his slip in showing. That misses the point and tone as much as toilet humour in Schindler's List, but more on that later.

The basic narrative looked very hard to mess up - big battle brings all the factions and characters together. Peter Jackson finds a way. The centrepiece of the Lord of the Rings was arguably two well filmed epic battle sequences at Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields. They featured a broad view of the battlefield, character development of major leaders, valiant deeds a-plenty, a genuine sense of menace and a clear flow of events.

For a film named after a battle, it should show the broad sweep of this battle. Instead, there are five sequences: The initial major engagement, a completely unnecessary and claustrophobic segue into street fighting in the ruins of Dale, a brief moment of the arrival of Thorin and Company onto the field, another pointless segue to an interconnected series of running personalized duels on Ravenhill that drags on far too long and a momentary glimpse of the arrival of the deus ex machine Eagles.

This misses the point. What makes a good battle is not a series of individual duels between the champions of each side, but a truly epic coverage that shows scale, what is at stake and the ebb and flow of combat. The individual fights between Thorin and Azog could have been included on the main field.

Jackson choses to split the elves and men away from the dwarves of the Iron Hills by sending them into urban combat (something he has loved since TTT) rather than having them fight on different spurs of the mountain. Having them on the same field would make the intervention of Thorin and Company all the more climactic and heroic, as it is what saves the day when all seems lost in the novel. When we separate the heroes away from the armies, we disconnect the former group from the main events and completely devalue the latter. No amount of CGI will make up for such basic errors in storytelling. The high moment of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields in ROTK was the arrival and Ride of the Rohirrim. This film missed its opportunity to have a corresponding crowning moment of awesome triumph.

Thorin's death occurs off the battlefield, robbing him of any sense of kingly sacrifice and redemption.

The arrival of the Eagles and Beorn is done in ~90 seconds, with Bilbo seeming almost embarrassed to come out with his famed line. We don't see them win the day.

The five armies in the original book are Men, Dwarves, Elves, Goblins + Wargs and the Eagles. Here, Jackson throws in the threat of a second Goblin army arriving from an unexpected direction (a la Blucher at Waterloo), but then crushes them with contemptuous ease and little resolution through the Eagles. A good 10-15 minutes of build up is spent on the threat of Gundabad, which is then wasted. Simply having one Goblin/Orc army with one leader would have simplified the story and allowed more time to tie together the already considerable loose ends.

Part 2: Technical Flaws

Jackson developed quite the deserved reputation as a decent director in the LOTR films. TBOTFA fails on a number of technical levels.

The lighting is quite dull, with little use made of light and shadow to highlight mood or characters. There were many opportunities to make use of expressive lighting, particularly to demonstrate the redemption arc of Thorin in battle. These were not taken.

The soundtrack failed to inspire, with no triumphant high moments, effective montages or dramatic set pieces. Instead of matching tracks to scenes, it began to feel like a disjointed video game soundtrack. This was one great feature of the LOTR films and the first Hobbit picture, but was noticeable by its absence here. On occasion, it toyed with striking the appropriate mood and crescendo, but then pulled back.

Cinematography is where the picture really fell down. The use of HFR and 3D was jarring and not really necessary, with the latter providing continual blurring of background characters and imagery. However, Jackson's issues went beyond this. He chose to film the majority of the action in tightly framed, claustrophobic scenes inside greenscreen backgrounds of urban ruins. There was very little panning and the use of angled shots was generally ineffective.

The landscape was not given a chance to shine and there were few wide angled shots showing the totality of the battlefield, the Lonely Mountain itself or the attractive natural background of Middle Earth. This combined with the problems outlined in the section on the battle sequences last time to break up the centrepiece of the film into a series of repetitive green screen faux-action sequences.

An overly long concentration on the documentary style refugee exodus from Laketown did not seem to fit in with the rest of the picture in light, camera work or the transition to the different background.

Part 3: Tone
The picture really didn't hit a consistent tonal note. At one moment, it would wax towards the grandiosity of the LOTR and then wane towards the childlike nature of The Hobbit. In trying to be both, it failed to be either.

The sequence at Dol Guldor abjectly failed to live up to the build-up and thus did not contribute to the seriousness or action necessary to making a LOTR style picture.

The degeneration of Thorin needed more screentime and would have worked, if given an appropriate redemption arc to match it. Instead, he is robbed of truly heroic deeds in combat, removed from the field of battle and killed away from anywhere of importance without purpose. This was the central thematic focus of the picture, but wasn't given enough time to fully play out.

Instead, there were cringeworthy attempts at humour, slapstick, utterly silly action sequences and a refusal to make use of the more serious moments, effective Tolkien dialogue or noble characters. The motivation of the Elvenking is reduced to a mixture of greed and an unexplained lost love, Gandalf continues to be reduced to a doddering charicature and the pointless Billy Connolly cameo came off as incredibly forced.

There was one sequences of the film that hit the mark tonally and technically - the conclusion showing Bilbo taking his leave of Gandalf, arriving back at Bag End and then transitioning to the older character at the beginning of FOTR. Visually gorgeous, restrained emotionally, well acted, effectively edited and timed properly. The single bit of introduced content - discussion of the Ring - fitted in well and added to the overall impact of the scene. This was Jackson at his best.

It was the epitome of what was missing from the rest of the picture.”

575,

As promised, a more detailed reply. 

Firstly, I don't think that a more 'book accurate' Gandalf would be markedly different or so unsympathetic as to lose the (very receptive) audience. The audience weren't just Americans from 2001, but the broader world, even as they were then the most important cinema market without doubt. Furthermore, a Gandalf more accurate to the books wouldn't be a 'stiff upper lip' Englishman, but an altogether more wizardly wizard/Istari; I don't think that Gandalf has a stiff upper lip, but definitely comes across as Someone or Something Very Different to the rest of the Fellowship, in age, experience and nature. Jackson had to make compromises, but went too far in this case for my tastes, making Gandalf seem in the majority of his scenes to be an old human swordsman with a shiny staff and some charmingly doddering mannerisms. Tonally, McKellen's portrayal of how Jackson and Boyens wrote the character is closer to how he is written in The Hobbit.

I agree that leaving the hobbits at the borders of the shire to go and commune with Bombadil wouldn't work in a film, but there were other options beyond completely cutting the whole section in this particular sense; these include, but are not limited to him being summoned by the Wise, staying to counsel Elessar or going off to see Bilbo. The Scouring of the Shire was an important sequence in the books as it reinforced how the War of the Ring and the changing of the Age changed everything, even in the Shire. If it had been sacrificed for a tonally effective ending, then that would be one thing; instead, we got the long sequence of fake out endings.

Similarly, there is more that Gandalf could do at the Morannon than simply charge forward waving a sword and shouting a battlecry. Tonally, that did not make sense. Audiences liked the overall picture though, and at that stage of the film, would not have got up and walked out if Gandalf had remained in the centre of the army, directing and commanding it, whilst using his magic strategically; as said in my review of TBOTFA, Jackson was seemingly physically allergic to any real use of magic in a, nay, the high fantasy story.

I understand the point that the nice Jess lady on the video was saying, but I disagree with it.

I utterly, utterly disagree that going that last bit down the line of being faithful to the source material would have made the films a flop; they were too popular because of Tolkien, not despite him. A bit of a different portrayal of Gandalf, some different choices for Faramir and other minor changes weren't going to be enough to drive off Joanne and Cletus Average from seeing at the time either; there were plenty of non-Tolkien fans who flocked to the pictures and then became veritable fanatics, joining quite new Internet forums to expound on that very fact. The margin of victory wasn't close.

Simon

There's one thing about the Hobbit trilogy I have to correct: I didn't like the scene where Bilbo returns either. In more than one way, not only because it's different from the book.

But being a geek and not watching it at least once somehow doesn't feel right...