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A couple of morning-after thoughts on the The Hobbit ...
So last night, after making my initial Hobbit post, I went and reread part of the book before turning in for bed, and like I was just saying in a comment on the other post, it took some of my ambiguous feelings towards the movie and turned them into outright dislike.
... ugh, I hate to be one of those book-purist people who wails, "But it's all DIFFERENT!" I think the problem, though, is that I really hate a lot of the changes that were made for the movie, not just the enhanced action-movie elements (though I think I'd mind them less if I found them less ludicrous), but the changes that were made with the characters, and their behavior, and their interpersonal relationships. It's not just that it's different, but that most of the differences take characters that I love and make them into people that I love a lot less. I was going to say that the LOTR movies changed the characters less, but I think what it comes down to is that the ones I was really invested in as characters from the books (the hobbits, and Aragorn) didn't change a whole lot, and most of the character-related changes were ones that I liked. Whereas with The Hobbit, I just basically dislike most of the character-related changes a LOT -- particularly Bilbo being all action-movie-heroish, as opposed to staying on the sidelines as he mostly does at this point in the book, and the completely unnecessary emo!Thorin and the whole subplot with Bilbo having to Prove Himself To Thorin.
All of that was rather obviously not just padding, but padding designed to give the first third of the book an emotional arc so that it could function as a stand-alone movie. But it's not a stand-alone story, in the way that LOTR breaks down into fairly distinct chunks; it's the first 80 pages of a not-terribly-long book. And in the process of turning it into a stand-alone movie with an emotional and plot arc, it ended up becoming Any Generic Action Movie (the Thorin and Bilbo plot, in particular, feels like Any Buddy Action Movie Ever) and losing the book's flavor completely. Which, again, you know - book, movie, different beasts. I can accept that, and I've enjoyed some movies that were utterly different from the book version. (Blade Runner is nothing at all like the book, but I love the movie.) It depends on what the changes are, and how they hang together as a story ... and I just don't like these changes, nope.
Partly because the action sequences are, I'm sorry, just stupid in a lot of cases. Not all of them, but the big set pieces -- the stone-giant fight, or the fight with the goblins ... the part at the end with the Wargs wasn't so bad, and from an action perspective felt a lot like the equivalent part of the book, but the fight in the goblin caves -- I was just laughing as I watched it, at the sheer ludicrousness of it. I realize that it's hard to separate my feelings on those parts of the movie, taken individually, from the way I feel about the movie as a (very unfaithful in many ways) adaptation of the book, but they were just poor action sequences. Look, I love action, and sci-fi, and adrenaline-packed thrill rides, but in order to really enjoy them, I have to believe in them. I have to be right there with the characters. The action sequences in the movie were a) too unbelievable to empathize with anybody, because it was patently obvious that no one could have survived, especially survived without a scratch on them, and b) so frantically kinetic that it was next to impossible to tell what was going on. (I had that problem especially in the stone-giant fight; you just can't tell where anyone is, or what's happening with the landscape.)
All in all, I think this movie is (for me) a good demonstration of why a director and creative team that were very well-suited to one adaptation (LOTR) are completely unsuited for another one. I am not in the "Peter Jackson is the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Tolkein (TM)" camp, but I definitely think this movie would have been, not only more faithful to the book, but a far better movie in the hands of someone who was more in tune with its small, low-key story than someone who tried to make it into something splashy and epic, which it is just not. Again, it's difficult to separate my feelings as a disappointed lover of the book from my feelings on whether the movie works as a movie, but I really feel as if a lot of the book's charm was lost in the translation to the big screen, without replacing it with anything that doesn't feel horribly generic and very Modern US Action Movie-ish.
ETA: But I feel compelled to add that I didn't hate everything about the movie -- actually, there was quite a lot about it that I liked! Like I said in the last post, it's absolutely gorgeous. A lot of the character interaction is really, truly fun (and, LOL, Mitchell!dwarf -- er, I mean Aidan Turner as a dwarf is just as much of a delight as I was hoping for). In the case of one character -- Gollum -- the movie was actually a lot more like the book than I'd remembered, as I discovered on reread, and the "riddles in the dark" part, with Gollum's creepy eyes gleaming in the dark, was very much as I'd imagined it as a child. My feelings on the movie aren't outright disgust or anything. But it wasn't the same delightful sense of "my childhood love, come to life!" that I got from LOTR. I guess I was hoping for more of that than I got. It's a completely different beast, and one which doesn't particularly suit my own tastes in the way the book does.
... ugh, I hate to be one of those book-purist people who wails, "But it's all DIFFERENT!" I think the problem, though, is that I really hate a lot of the changes that were made for the movie, not just the enhanced action-movie elements (though I think I'd mind them less if I found them less ludicrous), but the changes that were made with the characters, and their behavior, and their interpersonal relationships. It's not just that it's different, but that most of the differences take characters that I love and make them into people that I love a lot less. I was going to say that the LOTR movies changed the characters less, but I think what it comes down to is that the ones I was really invested in as characters from the books (the hobbits, and Aragorn) didn't change a whole lot, and most of the character-related changes were ones that I liked. Whereas with The Hobbit, I just basically dislike most of the character-related changes a LOT -- particularly Bilbo being all action-movie-heroish, as opposed to staying on the sidelines as he mostly does at this point in the book, and the completely unnecessary emo!Thorin and the whole subplot with Bilbo having to Prove Himself To Thorin.
All of that was rather obviously not just padding, but padding designed to give the first third of the book an emotional arc so that it could function as a stand-alone movie. But it's not a stand-alone story, in the way that LOTR breaks down into fairly distinct chunks; it's the first 80 pages of a not-terribly-long book. And in the process of turning it into a stand-alone movie with an emotional and plot arc, it ended up becoming Any Generic Action Movie (the Thorin and Bilbo plot, in particular, feels like Any Buddy Action Movie Ever) and losing the book's flavor completely. Which, again, you know - book, movie, different beasts. I can accept that, and I've enjoyed some movies that were utterly different from the book version. (Blade Runner is nothing at all like the book, but I love the movie.) It depends on what the changes are, and how they hang together as a story ... and I just don't like these changes, nope.
Partly because the action sequences are, I'm sorry, just stupid in a lot of cases. Not all of them, but the big set pieces -- the stone-giant fight, or the fight with the goblins ... the part at the end with the Wargs wasn't so bad, and from an action perspective felt a lot like the equivalent part of the book, but the fight in the goblin caves -- I was just laughing as I watched it, at the sheer ludicrousness of it. I realize that it's hard to separate my feelings on those parts of the movie, taken individually, from the way I feel about the movie as a (very unfaithful in many ways) adaptation of the book, but they were just poor action sequences. Look, I love action, and sci-fi, and adrenaline-packed thrill rides, but in order to really enjoy them, I have to believe in them. I have to be right there with the characters. The action sequences in the movie were a) too unbelievable to empathize with anybody, because it was patently obvious that no one could have survived, especially survived without a scratch on them, and b) so frantically kinetic that it was next to impossible to tell what was going on. (I had that problem especially in the stone-giant fight; you just can't tell where anyone is, or what's happening with the landscape.)
All in all, I think this movie is (for me) a good demonstration of why a director and creative team that were very well-suited to one adaptation (LOTR) are completely unsuited for another one. I am not in the "Peter Jackson is the Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Tolkein (TM)" camp, but I definitely think this movie would have been, not only more faithful to the book, but a far better movie in the hands of someone who was more in tune with its small, low-key story than someone who tried to make it into something splashy and epic, which it is just not. Again, it's difficult to separate my feelings as a disappointed lover of the book from my feelings on whether the movie works as a movie, but I really feel as if a lot of the book's charm was lost in the translation to the big screen, without replacing it with anything that doesn't feel horribly generic and very Modern US Action Movie-ish.
ETA: But I feel compelled to add that I didn't hate everything about the movie -- actually, there was quite a lot about it that I liked! Like I said in the last post, it's absolutely gorgeous. A lot of the character interaction is really, truly fun (and, LOL, Mitchell!dwarf -- er, I mean Aidan Turner as a dwarf is just as much of a delight as I was hoping for). In the case of one character -- Gollum -- the movie was actually a lot more like the book than I'd remembered, as I discovered on reread, and the "riddles in the dark" part, with Gollum's creepy eyes gleaming in the dark, was very much as I'd imagined it as a child. My feelings on the movie aren't outright disgust or anything. But it wasn't the same delightful sense of "my childhood love, come to life!" that I got from LOTR. I guess I was hoping for more of that than I got. It's a completely different beast, and one which doesn't particularly suit my own tastes in the way the book does.