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Originally Posted by davem
If you genuinely thought you'd get anything other from a Peter Jackson movie (forget Fellowship, think TT, RotK and King Kong) then I have a really nice bridge going cheap (pm me if you want details). As I've said, I don't think it's great art, or that it couldn't be done better. If you go a Peter Jackson film you're going to get exactly what you got here. AUJ is a perfect example of a Jackson film. Some fantastic bits, some average bits, some moving bits, some boring bits, some bits that make no sense. You go accepting that, and you have a good time. You go expecting a Lawrence of Arabia, or Ran, or Shindler's List or The Godfather (much though Tolkien might deserve that kind of treatment) and you'll be disappointed. Was there genuinely one single point at which you thought 'I can't believe I'm seeing this in a Peter Jackson movie!' I honestly doubt that. You may have hoped for better, but I don't believe you expected it.
So, I chilled out, went in expecting to watch a Peter Jackson movie, and because of that I had a very enjoyable afternoon.
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I had an enjoyable Christmas season afternoon with my 12 year old daughter watching the movie. She has had the book read to her and she in turn read the book. We enjoyed rolling our eyes at the more egregious errors and being delighted at the four or five times in the movie that Jackson actually adhered to the original plot. The movie is, as I said, a blockbuster Hollywood action epic, and as such can be enjoyed if you like such things, and are able to completely turn off your mind and gawk like a sentient cabbage.
Again, if it had been done with the same strengths as
Fellowship of the Ring or large parts of
Return of the King, it would have been far more enjoyable; unfortunately, Jackson went for
The Two Towers, Part Deux.
Have you seen Michael Drout's review? Professor Drout touched on many of the more troubling aspects of the movie (in a more politically correct manner than I, so that Lal may not consider it a flame). He also noticed, as I did, that Radagast was a lift from T.H. White:
The Drout Report
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That said, I had some issues. These are all more in sorrow than in anger, because I think Jackson had the opportunity to make a great film but missed it—in part because of the lowest-common-denominator needs of global Hollywood, but also in part because he and screenwriter Philippa Boyens didn’t entirely understand their material or trust their audience.
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Drout went to the movies because of Tolkien, not because of Jackson (Drout certainly would not have wasted his time doing a movie review unless the topic was Tolkien). I think that is the prime motivator for most of us here: we are drawn to anything "
Concerning Hobbits". Unfortunately, most us will not see another version of the events in 3rd Age Middle-earth unless it is filmed by Jackson. We are stuck with him. I would have loved to see Guillermo Del Toro's version, as I am not altogether sure he would have wanted to make a
Lord of the Rings sequel. And for all the kind words at Del Toro's departure, I can't help but feel that he had no interest in filming
The Hobbit as an adjunct to Jackson's previous films.