One finds this thread of negative reactions to the trailer. And on some other sites one find very positive reactions to the trailer, with people saying how they “can’t wait” to see what will obviously be one of the greatest films of their lives.

Lines are being drawn.

Just like the LOTR film frenzy when this forum was young.

In comparison though, the appearance to me is that negative reactions are more widespread this time around. Perhaps PJ's first efforts left a lingering bad taste with some that the new trailers are doing nothing to assuage?

Six hundred milliion dollars and counting? For what?
 

I have not seen any of the trailers for the second three-hour-third of a two-and-a-half-hour movie for the same reason that I have studiously avoided a second viewing (on rental DVD or TV) of the first three-hour-third of the same two-and-a-half-hour movie. I suppose one could call that "drawing a line" of sorts. Bad film experiences with cynical, formulaic fan-milking will tend to do that.

Personally, I will wait for the Rotten Tomatoes film reviews and discussion on this forum before I will even consider watching another three-hour-third of a two-hour movie. As the old saying goes: "You can always tell the pioneers. They're the ones with the arrows sticking out of their backs." Not me. Not this time.

Sadly, I know that eventually I'll have to see Part 2, if only to have that much more to snark about. Not that the new trailer isn't providing much fodder on its own...

:rolleyes:

What one finds so dismaying (if one could actually be dismayed by anything Jackson might do at this juncture) is that there is absolutely no dialogue from the book in the trailer. Granted, this is my unscientific recollection of what I saw, but every word spoken seemed superfluously scripted by sophomoric Kiwi scribes.

It's as if PJ & Co. have decided that Middle-earth is now their personal litter box and they're ****ing in it as it suits them.

It's straight from the Appendices, duh! ;)

It's all there, word for word and a few between.

And even if there are lines straight from the book, you can bet they've been given to somebody else than the original speaker.

Or we could just talk about the contrasts cheerfully, recognizing that we're talking more about the book now than we were before the trailer came out; excepting of course those who recently posted in the books forum, such as in Chapter-by-chapter. I did not post much there, not as much as I wanted to, and I find myself wanting to reread the books-- the appendices, and the Unfinished Tales section, and There And Back Again, The Children's Book That Morphed.

I'm enjoying that lingering desire, and if a few of PJ's panoramic scenes contribute to that desire I shall not grouse; except perhaps about a few things such as Radagast's, erm, hair.

But I shall enjoy Tauriel. After all, she hasn't edited one word of the book.

There's the key! If PJ had simply written his own Tolkien-like "homage" screenplay and made up his own characters, there'd be no issues. ;)

I don’t see that.

Perhaps you intend this as some kind of parody?

Usually, a swollen appendix is surgically removed before it bursts and causes peritonitis, but I suppose in this case the proper terminology would be peregrinitis.

*Sigh!* Your old saying is no more true than most old sayings.

Rotten Tomatoes gives very high ratings to the three Lord of the Rings films:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_...p_of_the_ring/ 92% to 93% (audience 92%)
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_...he_two_towers/ 96% to 100% (audience 92%)
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_...n_of_the_king/ 94% to 96% (audience 84%)

So your seeing The Lord of the Rings films indicates you were not a non-pioneer, but just another dull norm, save that apparently you did not like those three films. But now you will then take Rotten Tomatoes as your guide in deciding whether to see The Hobbit, which admittedly got a much lower rating.

My own favourite film is currently Whisper of the Heart:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/whisper-of-the-heart/ 90% (audience 88%)

But tastes do differ. And I am not prepared to substitute Rotten Tomatoes or any website for my personal taste, nor to insist that my own taste is invariably better. I usually more-or-less agree with Rotten Tomatoes, but only more-or-less. It is interesting to sometimes look up film titles there and compare my ratings with that of the critics and the general audience, and sometimes to be amazed at the difference of the three.

I agree in this case, in respect to your own taste, you may be wise not to see The Hobbit films. However, remember that J. R. R. Tolkien had very idiosyncratic tastes.

Hardly so! I feel that had PJ had done so, there would be those screaming that PJ is an idiot who does not understand Tolkien and those screeing at everything that PJ put on the screen.

Intercepted script fragment from The Desolation of Smaug:

Gandalf: "Why, I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something.”

Bilbo: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Gandalf: "We don't want any adventures here, thank you!"

Elrond: "I don't hold with ironmongery, whether it wears well or no."

Gollum: "Fly you fools!"

And is there reason to not do that now? :rolleyes:

I was mainly being facetious there, but I do indeed wish that PJ and co. had chosen some other books for their treatment.

My point is that it is being done now.

There are the cute and seemingly brainless screeers at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10151697149436171 and in this thread a wet blanket who tries to look like some sort of rebel by substituting consensus at Rotten Tomatoes for his own taste.

To quote from another fantasy writer: “Dullness will conquer dullness: and it will not matter.”

There is always reason, it seems to me, to avoid being either a brainless screeer or an inveterate wet blanket.

A wet blanket or brainless scree
Are not the sort of folk for me.
But they are certainly better
than an inveterate blanket wetter.

Here is an essay on films based on previous works, in this case mostly on comic books and TV shows. Rilstone’s conclusion seem to me to be very relevant to Tolkien films. He actually starts talking about his feelings about a new actor playing Doctor Who in place of Matt Smith but then goes somewhere else.

Go to http://www.andrewrilstone.com/search...max-results=10 .

Then search on Hello, I Must Be Going .

Faith that the film is going to be a magnificent version of the previous work, exactly as we imagine it.

Revulsion when news comes out about what the film-makers are going to actually do with their source, or on seeing the completed film.

Retrenchment to the opinion that no-one who knows anything ever expected a purist film and all that matters is whether the film is good on its own terms.

Rilstone does not mention that many fans do not jump to the Retrenchment stage, but remain revolted. That may be because the film is so bad that most cannot now support it, even though they would like to.

I wonder if that's something which becomes truer as we get older. I was barely a teenager when the films of The Lord of the Rings were coming out, and the revival of Doctor Who only followed that by a few years. At the time, I enjoyed both. Now, I despise both - I'm not sure whether I detest modern Doctor Who more than the films of The Lord of the Rings; they're both, in my opinion, cynical and fatuous exploitations of classic pieces of genre culture (the original series of Star Trek is a more recent victim of the same disease). I am, however, willing to admit that once upon a time I did have positive feelings about these things.

To be fair, I do actually like Matt Smith's first series of Doctor Who, although the rest was a let down, Eccleston was forgettable and Tennant awful. Like the films of The Lord of the Rings, I don't understand why modern Doctor Who is popular, or at least I can't enjoy the things that their supporters do enjoy about them. Simultaneously I can at least attest that the films of The Lord of the Rings are not purely contemptible - the plot certainly could have been much less faithful (although that is surely the definition of damning with faint praise) and a few of the performances are quite admirable, doing the best they can with the butchered dialogue and simplistic direction they are given.

The "judge the film on its own terms" thing just doesn't make sense to me, incidentally. It's an adaptation - surely its 'terms' include a conversation with the source material, and whether or not the changes were necessary or successful. It is my personal conviction that a reasonably faithful adaptation of the book, omitting where necessary but not changing much, similarly to the 1981 radio series, would be a far, far better work as a film than anything produced thus far. Suggestions that the changes are necessary 'for modern audiences' and so on are only predicated, in my opinion, on the commonplace delusion that 'cinema' and 'Hollywood' are identical concepts.

Quite so. How can a film based on a well-known book avoid comparison with it, and why should it be expected to do so? That is, where the fans of the book have a personal connection with it, and that is certainly the case with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The more a book is loved, the more criticism any adaptation should be prepared to receive.

My main problem with the PJ films has not been the omissions of original material, such as Bombadil. That is to be expected when transitioning from book to movie. The additions and "expansions" that are contrary to the books are much more frustrating, and still, to my mind, unnecessary. A film adaptation could have been more faithful, though I admit it might not have been as lucrative from a profit standpoint. And there lies the motive behind the films. :rolleyes:

Originally posted by Inziladun:
I recently watched The Hobbit movie (quite by accident, on my brother's HBO) and was struck by how much time I spent thinking, "I don't remember any of this!" It took me out of the story and reminded me that I was watching a movie. It interrupted my "suspension of disbelief," I had the same experience watching The Lord of the Rings movies, but thought it was due to my love of the original books. I don't have that degree of affection for The Hobbit, but the feeling was there just the same, like watching a Saturday morning cartoon with a commercial interruption every eight minutes. it felt shallow and unimportant despite the epic nature of the source material or the visual imagery Jackson was creating. What a pity.

Changes when an older work is adapted into dramatic form are old hat.

We see this first in adaptations of older works in Greek drama. That we don’t find more complaints about it may be because the poetic sources themselves disagreed very much, and by the time we have commentaries the new dramatic adaptations have themselves become ancient classics.

Shakespeare’s King Lear and Hamlet were likewise adaptations of older tales which took great liberties with them. King Lear in the earlier versions ended with Lear happily restored to the throne and his daughter Cordelia named as his heir. Hamlet in the earlier stories was the tale of a man who took revenge on his uncle by pretending to be a fool, and then had many other adventures before his death in a dual with Wiglek, ancestor of the early kings of Mercia.

Perhaps some contemporaries of Shakespeare likewise blamed Shakespeare for ruining the stories. And I suppose Shakespeare might have responded that the changes were necessary to bring in the modern audiences. The same could be presumed for Wagner who likewise could be said to have ruined Norse/Germanic mythology in his opera cycle Nibelungenlied and Arthurian material in his Parsifal and his Tristan und Isolde.

The difficulty is that films, like the older dramas, are made by creative people who can’t help being creative, being more interested in what they can make of a story than in the story they were given. Give all films to uncreative people to direct? That doesn’t sound like a viable solution?

And there are honest differences of taste among audiences. Rilstone also reviewed the original Jackson Lord of the Rings films and found the first one to be mostly excellent and the second bad and the third worse. But Rilstone also very much likes new Doctor Who for the most part, which is why he is writing a book on it.

Zigûr doesn’t like new Doctor Who much at all.

So who is right? Neither, I suppose, because there is no provable right in matters of taste. I once searched for a bad film to use as an example, but not one that was so bad it was considered good for that reason by some people, and one that was also well known enough to be likely to be recognized by the people I was addressing. I looked up loads of film titles on the web, but could not find a single one that was so bad that some people could not be found who really liked it for some reason. So I rewrote the reference to mention only an unnamed “notoriously bad film”.

The Harry Potter films were rather a shock to reviewers when they first started to appear, because author J. K. Rowling had full power over the directors to insist that no changes be made in the films over what was in the books, without her permission. The films accordingly followed the books very closely, leaving many reviewers to point out that this should not work, although it did.

I find it a relief that even in the days of internet-enabled mass consumer orthodoxy and opinion groupthink there are, however, still diversities of perspective to be found. To touch upon Doctor Who for a moment, there are places not unlike this forum where those who do not adhere to the majority consensus can discuss without fear of getting the flaming pitchforks treatment that, say, critics of the films get on certain major sites for enthusiasts of Professor Tolkien's work.

Concerning the matter of adaptation and changes, I believe there is an element of delusion in this belief that we, as Tolkien enthusiasts, ought to be 'grateful' that the films were made, regardless of alterations. Yet considering the enormous gulf of time alone between the culture of the period in which the books were published and that in which the films were produced surely it's far from unreasonable to find the films to not necessarily be to one's taste. If I like a heroic romance from the 1950s, why should I be expected to inevitably enjoy a Hollywood film from the 2000s, even if the latter is adapted from the former? The sensibilities and cultures in which they exist are still entirely different.

On that point, in my opinion the first two HP movies are the best, and those are the most faithful to the books. Funny how that works. ;)

I left the Doctor Who forums some time ago when the one I visited mostly was overrun with Doctor Who haters and a search elsewhere revealed that other forums had undergone the same fate. There was too much mindless hatred from both sides and it had ceased to be fun.

Indeed. I recall reading an old commentary on Tennyson’s The Idylls of the King which greatly blamed Tennyson for his poems which differed from Malory and praised those which followed Malory or the Mabinogion closely. The writer seemed to be entirely ignorant that there were also versions of some tales which were earlier than Malory and disagreed with them. Yet the influence of Tennyson can be seen in the most unexpected places, for example in Mists of Avalon and in the recently-released The Fall of Arthur by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Well, lots of people still enjoy Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, the original Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, The Seven Samurai, All Quiet on the Western Front, Sergeant York, High Noon, Shane, Django, the original King Kong, The Westerner, Gunfight at the O.K. Coral, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Duck Soup, Some Like It Hot, Psycho, Dracula (1931), The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Carnival of Souls, Peeping Tom, Dead of Night, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dr. Strangelove, and many others. Most large cities have art-houses where older films are often shown.

You should not inevitably be expected to like any film, whether it is an older film or a modern one, or to like any book regardless. Taste is really quite inexplicable, at least to the outsider.

I think you all would appreciate my tampering with newly-discovered sound-mix stems from the latest "Hobbit" trailer as I added appropriate music that better works with the film.

http://youtu.be/4ndXKnZuvbI

Hi, this is my first post here. Nice to meet you all.

That remix from LordPhilock was the weirdest thing I've seen for a long while.

But here is an even newer trailer for DOS that came out on 4 nov. What do you all make of it - an improvement on the last one?

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lfflhfn...%3Dlfflhfn1W-o

Oh, it’s an improvement, all right. It doesn’t look like a bad videogame anymore. In fact, it’s starting to look like a fairly decent one. Heck, I’d play it.

Morth will no doubt be gratified that this time they’ve taken the drastic step of *almost* including some lines from the book. Did you know the “King beneath the Mountains” song was really an Ancient Prophecy of Doom? No? Must be in the Appendices.

//end sarcasm

Well, enough of that. Welcome to the Downs, Jabberwocky Took! Enjoy your death!

It looks better than the first trailer. Maybe it if weren't for all the bow-twanging elves being beautiful, but ancient and terrible beings I'd like it even more. I do hope this is better than the first Hobbit movie.

I looked up the soundtrack today, but iTunes had a sample of one song up for preview. I See Fire by Ed Sheeran. Now, I liked all the credit songs, Enya's May it Be, Emiliana Torrini's Gollum's Song, Annie Lennox's Into the West, and even Neil Finn's Song of the Lonely Mountain (though this one took me some getting used to). I felt the songs for the trilogy always fit the mood of the movies. Song of the Lonely Mountain was ok, though it felt too folksy and somewhat of an odd choice, but I liked it. I See Fire song just seems entirely out of place. The song itself isn't terrible, but sounds more like it belongs on the Hunger Games soundtrack with Taylor Swift and The Civil Wars. Anyone else listened to the sample?

Also welcome to the Down Jabberwocky!

I'm actually gratified they kept the character names from the original book. I was expecting the dwarves like Kili and Fili to have racier names better fit for the modern HBO series viewer demographic, like Brace and Flint or Clovis and Jehan. Maybe Gaelicize them and call them Conor and Ciaran or make them Welsh like Dylan and Deryn. :rolleyes:


My 13 year-old daughter loves Ed Sheeran. He is a talented young man, but the majority of Ed Sheeran's fan base is 13 year-old girls. That should be enough to tell you that the inclusion of this song is based on demographics and not warranted by artistic qualities conducive to conveying a Tolkienesque feeling for the movie.

I had never even heard of him. I suppose there are worse choices out there and maybe this song will grow on me like Neil Finn's. *shrug*

Reviews
 

The reviews are starting to come in.

I like that the Huff Po reviewer acknowledged that this whole thing is a massive ego trip by Jackson, a sentiment I have not seen as bluntly stated as this very often in the media.

However, I am depressed by her closing line:

"Jackson is back on track."

This exercise in rampant unchecked greed and indulgence started off anywhere near a descent set of tracks..? I've not seen evidence of such.

Or does she mean that Jackson's knack for self-indulgence and hijacking stories is even more on display in the latest film...

We wonders, precious, we wonders...

I don’t know, Kuru, I can’t even get much idea what the reviewer actually thinks of the movie– the tone is enthusiastic, yet the substance seems to be largely, “hey, here’s some stuff that actually didn’t get screwed up this time... Yaaay! Go Peter!”

This perhaps shows the benefit of setting the bar low enough to begin with...;)

The bar is set so low that I believe it can now be referred to as an underground cable.

Ah ha ha ha!

The trickle of released reviews has now become a flood.

Just browsing the leading lines from the reviews I'm guessing the film has pacing problems (whodathunk) because it is something alluded to repeatedly even by the critics giving a positive review.

The guy from Newsday who said the romance was a welcome addition infuriates me. I suppose he is entitled to his opinion, but that doesn't make it a good one.

I'm also becoming wary of these repeated references in reviews to Thranduil being "campy." What did Jackson do to the Elvenking's protrayal?

Oh yes...and...from the Time review...

SLAVISHLY FAITHFUL TO ITS SOURCE?!!!! :mad:

We need to start a petition drive to get this man fired AT ONCE! Either that or force him to watch a movie adaptation that actually is slavishly faithful to its source...in the hope that it might make his head explode.

Continue, Kuru, continue... I'm profoundly enjoying this! :smokin: