I think it looks completely wonderful, especially since I'm currently re-reading the book. The little touches here - like showing the dwarves clearing the table as only 13 skilled warriors can, and the song that first inspires Bilbo to want to run out the door and into the big wide world - make me really hopeful that they've got this story right.
Do we really have to wait a year? Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004
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It is almost cruel that we have been anticipating this film more than a year since the original word that this movie was going to be made, and now they show off how good it looks and we still have another year to wait.
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: What's really weird, is that somehow this felt like watching Lord of the Rings Fanfiction.
You're nuts. I thought it was fantastic!
Obviously trailers are going to make a movie seem more, what's the word, epic? action packed? than they actually are, but even from the trailer it looks like they've really captured the mood of the Hobbit - goofy and somber and subtle and clever all at once, more Fairy Tale than Fantasy. (and I mean that in a good way) I was afraid they would try and make it like The Lord of the Rings, which would be totally inappropriate for the tone of the book.
It looks like they're filming some of the scenes that happened off screen in the book - the White Council and the dungeon of the Necromancer, for example. It'll be interesting to see how they flesh those parts out.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Raymond Arnold: What's really weird, is that somehow this felt like watching Lord of the Rings Fanfiction.
You're nuts. I thought it was fantastic!
Obviously trailers are going to make a movie seem more, what's the word, epic? action packed? than they actually are, but even from the trailer it looks like they've really captured the mood of the Hobbit - goofy and somber and subtle and clever all at once, more Fairy Tale than Fantasy. (and I mean that in a good way) I was afraid they would try and make it like The Lord of the Rings, which would be totally inappropriate for the tone of the book.
It looks like they're filming some of the scenes that happened off screen in the book - the White Council and the dungeon of the Necromancer, for example. It'll be interesting to see how they flesh those parts out.
I said it was a weird feeling. I think the film, objectively, looks like a great adaptation of the hobbit. But because the Lord of the Rings films was made first, it sort of feels like "hey, let's find an excuse to go see our favorite characters again" rather than "hey, this is the legitimate beginning of a long story."
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The Galadriel cameo was totally fan-fiction:
"She leaned in, shining with ethereal beauty, and brushed away a stray lock of hair from Gandalf's troubled face...."
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Blayne Bradley
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They're old friends.
That and I'm pretty sure they DID meet up in one of the off panel scenes anyways.
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I'm pretty sure she was part of the White Council. The fact that Christopher Lee is also in the movie heavily implies that it will be filmed as part of the story, instead of just mentioned by Gandalf at the end. I do wonder why Elrond is missing from this trailer... he actually does play a fairly substantial role in the book.
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She was certainly part of the White Council, but did the council meet during the events covered in the movie?
Are they still planning a two movie set? I didn't see anything that really looked like Mirkwood or Lonely Mountain. I did see what looked like Gandalf in Dol Guldur (along with the scenes with Galadriel). This makes me think that rather than doing a complete Hobbit movie and then a movie based on the Appendices, they'll be mixing and matching. Personally I think that's a bad choice, but I'm glad to be proven wrong.
I wasn't really taken with the trailer, though. It struck me as being too beholden to the previous LOTR trilogy and too little it's own show. But, again, I'll hope to be proven wrong.
<edit>Wikipedia says that the Council did indeed meet during part of the company's journey to Lonely Mountain. This gets, in part, to my wish for two completely separate movies; the events involving Dol Guldur and the Council are largely separate from the small level concerns of the Company. The Hobbit is a very "local" story, unlike LOTR which is very "global" in its scope. It seems like mixing the two effectively would be quite difficult, and that the "global" picture would threaten to overwhelm the "local" drama. Smaug is a very different type of antagonist than Sauron.</edit>
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I agree there, I liked that Tolkien decided to keep the events at Dol Guldur in the background in the Hobbit, and instead has Gandalf describe them in a few pages at the end of the book. It gave the reader the impression that the world is much larger than the local struggles of a few brave Dwarves, a Hobbit, and a small town of human traders, but left it as an impression to keep the story focused. That's the magic of the Hobbit - it's a single, focused narrative, not a sprawling epic. I hope the White Council scenes are short and not distracting.
As far as the trailer - of course they're going to try and hype up the connection to the LoTR as much as possible, as well as try and make it seem more fast paced and "exciting" and dangerous as possible. Even with all that, I still thought it looked really good, and definitely has a different "feel" than the LoTR.
Edit: It occurs to me that the scene of Gandalf in Dol Guldur are probably from a flashback - the scene in early in the book where Gandalf tells Thorin about going there and finding his grandfather deep in in the dungeons. I certainly hope so, anyway.
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: She was certainly part of the White Council, but did the council meet during the events covered in the movie?
Are they still planning a two movie set?
Yes, it's two movies.
There's been a lot of conjecture on new content -- with Jackson seeming to want more than Del Toro. Now that it's Jackson's show, I'm inclined to think we'll see a few things not in the book.
"From Wikipedia: Jackson wanted to show "a lot of sections in which a character like Gandalf disappears for a while, (like) going off to meet with the White Council, (showing) characters like Galadriel and Saruman and people who we see in Lord of the Rings. (Gandalf) mysteriously vanishes for a while and then comes back, but we don't really know what goes on. Jackson was also interested in showing Gollum's journey to Mordor and Aragorn setting a watch on the Shire."
Posts: 1204 | Registered: Mar 2003
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I'm okay with it. I remember being incredibly angry with Gandalf for a while for disappearing (partly for leaving the group, partly for leaving me) when I was six years old and first read the book. I was full on Princess Bride kid 'But he can't do that!'.
So the remains of that six year old will be cheering to see him doing something useful.
Posts: 1528 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Gandalf goes to Dol Guldur three or four times. The second trip was when he took the key and map from Thrain, and I think the third trip was when he traveled with the White Council to drive Sauron from Dol Guldur. That happened right at the point where the Dwarves and Bilbo were arriving at the edge of Mirkwood Forest, and ended by the time Gandalf surprised them all at the beginning of the Battle of Five Armies.
These two movies will be chronological, from what I understand. Originally the plan was to do two movies, one of just The Hobbit, and the second a bridge movie that would discuss the White Council as well as other events and the search for Gollum in a way that would connect The Hobbit to LOTR, but that idea was scrapped.
As such, I think we can expect the White Council scenes to take place away from the main Bilbo/Dwarves adventure. I wouldn't worry about distractions. Remember at one point in LOTR, the storyline is split in three, almost four, with Sam/Frodo, Gandalf/Pippin, Merry/Theoden, and Aragorn/Gimli/Legolas, or when it was Sam/Frodo, Merry/Pippin/Treebeard and the other three. Jackson knows how to split up the stories, and the White Council stuff will likely be a more minor point anyway, unless he decides to expand upon it.
The part win the trailer with Galadriel and Gandalf might be fanfiction only in the sense that we don't know, minute by minute, how the White Council meetings went, but we know what happened and when they took place, so while the dialogue will have to be invented, just as a lot of things were invented or spliced into the originals, they probably won't take huge liberties with the plot. Much like weaving Arwen into the LOTR, I don't mind weaving this in either.
Tolkien put the information into the appendices that he did, like Arwen and the White Council, because he didn't think he could find a way to make it work in the narrative. I think Jackson has been largely successful in the past of bringing those elements back in through dreams or flashbacks or whatever, that work in movies that would be trickier for Tolkien to do in a story. But it was never meant to be extra, or less canon.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I'm sure that Jackson will take artistic license and change key points, as well. That said, he's earned my trust. I (and many people agree) feel that the changes in LOTR are mostly for the better.
Then again, The Hobbit was a much tighter narrative to begin with.
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I was fine with all his changes in the first two movies. I think he came close to ruining Return of the King with a lot of completely unnecessarily changes that added nothing to the film. I also think he ruined Eowyn.
Many of the changes he had to make were to make it fit as a film. He shouldn't have to make as many of those changes with as tight a narrative as The Hobbit. With two movies to stretch it out, he won't have to choose at all what to leave out.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Many of the changes he had to make were to make it fit as a film. He shouldn't have to make as many of those changes with as tight a narrative as The Hobbit. With two movies to stretch it out, he won't have to choose at all what to leave out.
That is a pretty unique situation, I think. Taking such a comparatively slim novel and turning it into 2 films, the difficult decisions should essentially boil down to "How much do we want to add in this spot?"
I don't think that's ever been the case for another novel->film adaptation.
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There's plenty of Tolkien-related material that they can choose to weave in, so thankfully they won't have to make anything up, per se. That's nice.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I was fine with all his changes in the first two movies. I think he came close to ruining Return of the King with a lot of completely unnecessarily changes that added nothing to the film. I also think he ruined Eowyn.
Jackson definitely botched up Eowyn, but how do you feel he nearly ruined ROTK?
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Fortunately Weaving will make for a good Colonel Graff.
(What are we playing, by the way, some sort of movie casting Mad Libs among all the various movie threads?)
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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I'm just a little confused why they thought Abigail Breslin was right for Smaug. But I trust that it's all part of Jackson's master plan.
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: I was fine with all his changes in the first two movies. I think he came close to ruining Return of the King with a lot of completely unnecessarily changes that added nothing to the film. I also think he ruined Eowyn.
Jackson definitely botched up Eowyn, but how do you feel he nearly ruined ROTK?
Most of the changes that were made were for seemingly no reason at all. For example, why the hell did he screw up Faramir so badly? And why did he have the Army of the Dead so lamely end the Battle of the Pellennor? They should have left us almost entirely in the dark about Aragorn, just as we were in the book, and then perhaps cover it in a flashback. But the tension in the books of having the Black Ships arrive and thinking then were bad until the flag was unfurled was a big moment in the books that was totally ruined, just as the battle unceremoniously and somewhat foolishly just sort of ended. I also think they should have found the time, for how long it was, to do SOMETHING with the scouring of the shire, because the "you can't go home again" message of the books was a powerful theme that was dropped by allowing Frodo to return to an unfettered home, and then sail off to paradise. Took a lot of the oomph out of it by having Hobbiton frozen in time, untouched by events. But I could live without that if I had to (and I do).
So much of ROTK should have followed the books more closely and taken less dramatic license. Almost every scene with Eowyn should have been taken word for word from the books, rather than the lame dialogue and lame acting we got from Jackson and Miranda Otto, who made her look like she stumbled into the battle with the Witch King and then got mercifully lucky when Merry stabbed him with the barrow wight's blade, rather than in the books, where she was a total badass from start to finish. Both her and Faramir were ruined.
Meh. It just didn't have the right feel.
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Blayne Bradley
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The Silimililirion has excellent potential for a mini series adaption with a lot of stuff that could be added in.
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I've thought that for a long time too. Maybe something HBO could pick up and do a job with, since it would be pretty expensive. It could go on for years and years too with all the material in there.
But they'd also have to make a lot of it up to really make it into a watchable show. The only way it works as a show is if they do something much smaller, like, a mini-series in Turin Turambar, which is one of the more complete stories that actually exist in the series. Or Tuor. Or Berin and Luthian. Those are the three big Lays of the series, other than that it's all pretty vague narrative that would have to be re-written to add in a lot of day to day material with a Tolkien-created overarching plot.
I'd like to see Jackson do a duology movie of Turin.
I think a lot of people would have a problem with how almost every story in the Sil ends though. There are very, very few happy endings. Though, while Turin, for example, does not having a happy ending, it does somehow feel satisfying, or complete, given all his sins.
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Yeah but the Silimilililirilion is also unbearably convoluted and dense, and to draw any sort of cogent individual story out of it you'd need to write a lot of material from scratch, which would upset purists.
(The above may or may not be true, I just wanted an excuse to write Silmarillion Blayne-Style.)
Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: I'm just a little confused why they thought Abigail Breslin was right for Smaug. But I trust that it's all part of Jackson's master plan.
Also Will Smith as Thorin Oakenshield. I can't imagine anybody else playing the part now.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Yeah but the Silimilililirilion is also unbearably convoluted and dense, and to draw any sort of cogent individual story out of it you'd need to write a lot of material from scratch, which would upset purists.
(The above may or may not be true, I just wanted an excuse to write Silmarillion Blayne-Style.)
That's why I'd suggest using something like Turin, who really does have a complete story. They'd have to add plenty of dialogue, but that's nothing new. It's not like PJ was even close to 100% faithful to Tolkien's dialogue. Anything beyond Turin though is really pushing it.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Casting his son as Bard seems like a bit much, though. I'm not sure the kid has the chops.
I like Shia LaBeouf as Beorn. He just has that je ne sais quoi gravitas about him that says "huge bear man."
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Yeah but the Silimilililirilion is also unbearably convoluted and dense, and to draw any sort of cogent individual story out of it you'd need to write a lot of material from scratch, which would upset purists.
(The above may or may not be true, I just wanted an excuse to write Silmarillion Blayne-Style.)
That's why I'd suggest using something like Turin, who really does have a complete story. They'd have to add plenty of dialogue, but that's nothing new. It's not like PJ was even close to 100% faithful to Tolkien's dialogue. Anything beyond Turin though is really pushing it.
That's fair. You're much more of a Silililililimilililimirilililion expert than I am, Lyr. I've poked my way through bits of it, but never really found it compelling.
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Turin would work, and the fall of Gondolin. As a series, they COULD do it justice as a series of loosely linked stand alone episodes, I think....
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I always thought Narn i Hin Hurin was a beautiful story, and it's probably the darkest and most personal thing Tolkien ever published. Then again, how many people would go to see a story about a guy who consistently goofs up and ends up committing suicide when he realizes what a failure his life was? Turin doesn't strike me as being your typical Hollywood hero.
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quote:Then again, how many people would go to see a story about a guy who consistently goofs up and ends up committing suicide when he realizes what a failure his life was?
It'll be huge in England.
I think we could sell Americans on the idea of a tragic hero though. It's not an overwhelmingly popular theme, but it's a powerful and potentially successful one. It's certainly dark, as most things in the Sil are. It's raw, it's powerful, emotional, tragic, heart wrenching, etc.
His mistakes are primal ones. None of them are due to inability to do, but come almost entirely from pride, which makes his mistakes all the more gut wrenching. There are also enough twists and turns to compel a modern audience. Beleg's search for him, and what happens to Beleg, when he marries his sister, when Hurin is tortured and later released and then ends up more or less betraying Gondolin in his grief.
There's no happy ending, and Turin is absolutely an imperfect, fatally flawed individual, but look at how well Game of Thrones is doing, and that show is RIFE with fatally flawed individuals that stretch and challenge our notion of what a hero is. That's part of why Turin is such a powerful figure.
Tuor would be a lot easier to deal with. Tuor IS the traditional hero.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: Turin would work, and the fall of Gondolin. As a series, they COULD do it justice as a series of loosely linked stand alone episodes, I think....
Given some of the huge jumps in between events, I think it'd have to be that way, but it would still work with some minor bits to explain how it jumped from A to B. I think for the sake of smoothing things out, they'd want to tell Tuor and Turin concurrently, and shift to Tuor whenever Turin makes a big geographic jump. The first episode would start with the Battle of Unnumbered Tears and the fall of Huor and the capture of Hurin. That alone would make for an incredibly powerful image. I keep seeing Turgon retreating from the battle and Hurin's axe smoking with troll blood as he shouts "Day will come again!" until he is finally overtaken. I get chills every time I read it.
In addition, juxtaposing their story lines would be a powerful way of showing just how stark the contrast between them is. And it might give people a bit to hope for considering how dark both Tuor and Turin's stories end. At least Tuor gets away with Idril, and eventually becomes the only man to sail to Valinor and assume immortality. Certainly a complete 180 from what happens to Turin.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: The Galadriel cameo was totally fan-fiction:
"She leaned in, shining with ethereal beauty, and brushed away a stray lock of hair from Gandalf's troubled face...."
Yeah. I know I was being pandered to, and yet... Posts: 10886 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Blayne Bradley
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Unless we add things in between though, the innate advantage of a Similirilion adaption is that instead of figuring out what to cut out instead you can figure out how to add stuff in and flesh it out.
Honestly I would settle for a God of War style game adaption, the narrative jumping around is forgiven a lot more readily in video games and you would get to be Faenor and all bad ass.
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Silmarillion. Sil-mar-ill-ee-un. Say it five times fast. Now right click and select "add to dictionary." It'll only take you a few seconds, but for me, it'll mean my brain not exploding. Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I couldnt agree more about ROTK. Those green ghosts won the battle in like 37 seconds, making a one hour battle completely unnecessary...
Posts: 723 | Registered: Dec 2004
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Gandalf helped turn the battle, certainly. (as did the Fangorn forest) He didn't make the battle completely pointless, though. Just like Aragorn showing up with the Dunedain in the book helped demoralize the enemy and turn the battle - without Theodin's sacrifice, though, they would've still lost.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I didn't like the movies of LotR, though I wouldn't have missed them for anything. To me there were two things I disliked: the changes to the characters'... well, character, (Frodo would never, ever, ever have sent Sam home, just to name one of the worst things), and secondly, the fact that the movies felt like action flicks instead of giving us the whole spectrum like the books did. I thought the movies came across as way too heavy, when the books had heaviness alternating with joy and light.
That said, the visuals were outstanding. Everything looked exactly like it should have looked, which is nearly miraculous, I think. Other than a few actors I felt were miscast (Elrond, Galadriel -- not looking forward to seeing her again) and the fact that we actually see Sauron, something that decreases his scariness, everything and everyone else looked really perfect.
The loss of the Scouring of the Shire, which was the point of the whole book, was dreadful. The addition of all that made up stuff in the middle was puzzling. Why, when there was so much wonderful material left out, did they feel it was a good idea to invent a long sequence with no point?
So, given all these things, I should *not* be looking forward to the Hobbit, but for some reason I very much am. I wouldn't miss it for anything. I've watched the trailer a dozen times and I can't can't can't wait!
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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I was meh on Elrond. I thought it was neither good nor bad.
I think Galadriel was a total and utter badass though. I'd have to reread the books again to see if it was perfect or not, but I thought she fairly well rocked it.
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Please, do not let HBO anywhere near The Silmarillion! Half/totally naked elf women?? Beren and Luthien going at it in loving detail??? Please, NO!
Posts: 40 | Registered: Jul 2011
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Yeah, Tolkien has always been rather chaste. But I assume the battle scenes would be awesome.
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