Mim wrote:'Fraid I weigh in with Rich on this one
Don't be afraid, bask in the glory of it!
Mim wrote:P.J. & his staff repeatedly announce their intention to adapt the books as accurately as possible, then point out that you can't cover everyone/everything & that some deletion & compression is inevitable.
While this is certainly true (we'd have 30 hour films instead of 3 hours LOL), what bothers me is how they add characters/scenes, few of which fit properly into the context. Tolkien lovingly crafted his books & there is a ripple effect - if you disrupt someone/something at one point, it will bite you on down the road
They are very poor adaptions of the book, and I agree with your comments about the crappy additions and alterations of the characters which cause knock-on problems further down the line to the story. PJ has an ego to massage like most other filmmakers so the changes that they made didn't surprise me - but they really didn't need to make the vast majority of them, so the reasons that they gave were laughable for me to hear. Some of them were pure hogwash. The best thing he [PJ] got right was getting Howe and Lee as the conceptual artists. By and large the look of the LotR trilogy is truly excellent; not sure I could say the same for some of The Hobbit, although much of it was.
However, I didn't like the Hobbit solely on the grounds that it isn't a particularly good film never mind consideration and comparison to its source material. The acting is poor, pacing is choppy, action scenes are very dull and video-gamey, etc. For me it fails as a film and those terms alone.
Mim wrote:His son Christopher summarized it well for a French interview (I won't cite the source): "They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people..."
That really doesn't surprise me.
