The Desolation

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Things must be bad if people on TORN are finally starting to turn on Jackson.

I found this comment extremely biting:



Edit: I also derived a certain morbid sense of amusement from Ostadan's specific predictions of the what, how, and why certain things aren't going to work in the third movie.

I venture that Ostadan will be banned from TORN shortly. Or, given that TORN takes a similar attitude toward dissent as does North Korea, perhaps executed by mortar shell.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

On anoter note, this thought came into my mind after watching Puccini’s Turandot the other day. The story is just several paragraphs long, there’s hardly any character development, the musical themes are repetitive and the whole thing lasts about 2,5 hours. Yet no-one seemed to complain that the opera was dragged out. I thought it was quite excellent, actually, but maybe I’m just easily entertained.

Nobody goes to the opera for the plot (well, except Wagner maybe). Opera is basically highbrow musical revue: performance numbers stitched together with a threadbare 'plot', plus costumes.

And TH: DOS is sort of a "CGI opera", a collection of f/x setpieces there merely for their own sake, with a threadbare plot made of 10% Tolkien and 90% PBJ wibble just to hold the Beheading Ballets together- like a Kill Bill, except without Tarantino's wit.

Or really, the proper comparison is porn, which exists only to present sex scenes with the barest pretense of a plot to string the bonking on, said bonking being the whole reason for the enterprise's existence. What DOS actually is is Violence Porn, just like a cheap kung-fu movie with a bigger budget.

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Nobody goes to the opera for the plot (well, except Wagner maybe). Opera is basically highbrow musical revue: performance numbers stitched together with a threadbare 'plot', plus costumes.

No offence to spawn, but my feeling is that if you need to compare a film to an opera (particularly that one) in order defend its pacing, plot and characterisation... well, there probably is something wrong with it in those areas. On a similar note (hey!) somebody else a while back pointed out that the entire running time of the completed trilogy would be actually quite concise if it were a television serial. I mean– what happened to the “different mediums” argument?

–But please, WCH, lose the porn-comparison. You know it’ll just start a flame-war.

[Alcidas]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

–But please, WCH, lose the porn-comparison. You know it’ll just start a flame-war.

Still, you must admit that the porn-comparison is just spot-on

[Michael Murry]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Nobody goes to the opera for the plot (well, except Wagner maybe). Opera is basically highbrow musical revue: performance numbers stitched together with a threadbare 'plot', plus costumes.

And TH: DOS is sort of a "CGI opera", a collection of f/x setpieces there merely for their own sake, with a threadbare plot made of 10% Tolkien and 90% PBJ wibble just to hold the Beheading Ballets together- like a Kill Bill, except without Tarantino's wit.

Or really, the proper comparison is porn, which exists only to present sex scenes with the barest pretense of a plot to string the bonking on, said bonking being the whole reason for the enterprise's existence. What DOS actually is is Violence Porn, just like a cheap kung-fu movie with a bigger budget.

Thank you for those excellent -- priceless, actually -- analogies: "Beheading Ballets," "Kill Bilbo," "CGI opera," "Violence Porn," and "cheap kung-fu movie," each -- or all together -- with a bigger budget. Well and succinctly done.

[dancing spawn of ungoliant]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Nobody goes to the opera for the plot (well, except Wagner maybe).

Well, after TT, I haven't gone to watch PJ's movies for the plot either. The story can be found in the books, after all, but what the books are missing are things like landscapes, costume design, score, hearing the characters talk... So WCH's term CGI opera is quite good actually, but I don't find it to be an altogether negative description.

Anyway, I can see that even though there were some parts that people generally liked in the film, the bad things weigh more in the debate, so I'm going to leave it at that.

[Juicy-Sweet]

It wasnt absolutely terrible as the first one. It was clear from me it would be bad when I heard The Hobbit would be turned into three movies - I think it was allright apart from a few things. I agree with too Little Mirkwood (weird since he has been struggling to fill the 3 hours) and too Little Beorn.

The worst things are though

1: Kili gets shot by a Morgul Blade. This is so un-cannon it makes me cringe. First, Morgul blades (and arrows) are special special weapons, random orc footies just shouldn't have them - it's WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Kili seems to be absolutely fine at first. WRONG! He should fall immediately into a stupor and turn into a ghost within hours.

Tauriel cures him. NO NO NO she is a forest elf warrior, no special skills and all. In LoTR I think it is stated that only Elrond is able to cure such a wound.

The Morgul Blade has been degraded from a fearsome rare weapon to standard orc equipment. Sigh.

2: The Kili-Tauriel romance just sort of perverse and weird to me Like if Boromir fell in love with a hobbit girl lol.

Both things seemed completely unnecessary to me.

The orc could just have said "a poisoned arrow" and it would have been fine for the plot. It's weird PJ unnecessarily introduces stuff that doesn't even make sense as compared with his LOTR movies. (Where the Morgul blade is "special" as well.)

And the romance would work so much better between Tauriel and Bard, I accept he has to be one, Holywood and all + it was necessary to introduce a female character and given the plotline, it had to be an elf as the first people they meet are elves.

But WHY pick a DWARF as a romantic character when you have a character with a lot of potential as a romantic character. (His wife is dead, he has a dangerous slant to him, and one day he will be king.) Seeing he made so many changes already, it wouldnt have bothered him if Bard went to tye Mirkwood elves residence (not sure of it's name in fact). Maybe they had had a good eye to each other for years etc.

Thus, I find it weird that of the choices between a quite good romantic liasion and a weird one, PJ picks the weird one. Bad script IMO:

The walnut pillow - we talked about it even during the movie. It seems they just put Kili on some table, and there happened to be a bowl of walnuts on it. It looked weird visually, like they purposely put his head on a pile of walnuts so I dont get Again why PJ did that - but there's nothing wrong with it, it's just a bit weird

[Juicy-Sweet]

Oh and the whole "let's cook Smaug in melted gold, this scene worked well in Terminator II and Alien III" come on!


Smaug should be this larger-than-life adversary that you can't outrun and dodge from. Several people said PJ made it more gloomy; I think the playing-cat-and-mouse with Smaug scenes heavily reduced the gloominess. The dragon seemed sort of inept in the end - I got the impression Smaug just gave up on killing the dwarves and left to attack a target he (she?) thought he (she?) could handle.

[Kuruharan]

...it was trite, childish, and vulgar. So…it was standard fare to expect from PJ. I am willing to give credit that there were no overt snot or fart jokes. There was the thing about coming up the toilet...but since the toilet just seemed to drop right into the lake, it didn't seem such a big deal.

I also want to credit Ken Stott's performance as Balin as I thought he did a good job with what he had to work with (and the writing wasn't his fault).

First major point: I can tell that Jackson did this film all wrong because he lost my wife and parents. Even they didn't think the movie was very good, my wife in particular.

Second major point: At the showing I attended at the end of the film there was a loud chorus of groans and a smattering of boos from the audience at the way the movie ended.

Minor point: Nice to see that Jackson has added "murdering helpless prisoners" to "killing ambassadors" on the Things the Good Guys Do list.

Other minor point: Is aiming loaded weapons at each other a common elven greeting? Makes me glad I'm not an elf. Last thing I'd want on my tombstone is "Killed when greeting his grandmother because granny's hand isn't as steady as it used to be and her finger twitched." Seriously, anybody who has ever used a weapon for real knows that you never point a loaded weapon at something you don't intend to shoot! Admittedly a minor point but geeze.

Now, rather than go on an extended rant point by point about what was wrong with this movie, I'm going to discuss something that hasn't really been discussed by other Downers in this thread as for the most part the problems of this film have at least been mentioned already.

I thought the confrontation with Smaug was very poorly done. I'm not even talking about on the level of how it was so different from the book, that sequence was just bad film-making par excellence.

The writing and conceptualization of the sequence were beyond awful, I will break this down point by point rather than in one long paragraph.

The biggest problem by far in my opinion was that the pacing was bad. The first thing my wife said to me when we got in the car after the movie was, "The pacing when they were in the mountain really dragged." I completely agreed. The movie was in a mad rush to get to that point and then it just hit a brick wall of tedious, uninteresting action. Boredom set in when Thorin was dancing on Smaug's nose. (Personally I will start using the phrase "danced on Smaug's nose" in place of "jumped the shark" for the future...not that I didn't already think the film and indeed the series are irredeemably bad, it just amuses me.)

From a writing standpoint the dialogue was dreadful (that was the thing my Dad disliked about the film as a whole, and it’s the first time I remember hearing such a complaint from him). While the bits of dialogue retained from Tolkien in this sequence were partially let down by the poor performance of the actors (I will get to that below) the...alterations that Jackson made to the basics of the scene made everything just really strange. As an example, why did Smaug show such a marked reluctance to actually killing Dr. Watson and the dwarves? In particular, that Smaug could see Watson throughout almost all of their conversation and didn't kill him was just nonsensical. However, at least he was consistent because he showed the same overall tendency to not kill as soon as he'd started chatting with the dwarves. If only the dwarves and the Dalemen had started shouting zippy one-liners at Smaug the day he first attacked the dragon might not have taken the mountain in the first place.

Now I'm sure the answer to that is, "But, but Kuru, dragons love and can't resist riddling talk. Not only is it in the appendices that is in The Hobbit itself." Yeah...except that whole situation in the book was predicated upon (aside from obvious differences like the dwarves being absent) Smaug not being able to see Bilbo. In the film Smaug could see Watson almost the entire time and yet for some reason did not kill...even though he apparently knew somehow that the dwarves were coming for him and had known for some time. It just made no sense, except that Smaug couldn’t kill them, the script said so. One can only shake one’s head.

The computer animation: for Smaug it was good enough. The gold looked awful, awful, awful! I play video games that have more realistic images than that. What Jackson ended up doing was creating a set-piece that not only was absurd and not at all based on anything in the book, he didn't even have the tools at his disposal or maybe the artists with the ability (not sure which, could be either or both) to make said set-piece look anything approaching good or believable. The giant gold statue in particular looked laughably bad. I think part of the problem lies in that I've observed in CGI it is paradoxically easier to make complex things look realistic as opposed to simple things. I'm not sure why, it may have something to do with texture. However, that doesn't absolve Jackson from going down that path when there was nothing compelling him to do so.

Performances: I have to say that given how well he did in Sherlock, almost against my will, I wanted to see Freeman do well. Overall in the film he kind of faded from view in my opinion. I think the intent was that he was really supposed to shine in the confrontation with Smaug. Alas, I'm not certain why (I have a few theories) but I thought Freeman's performance in this sequence was terrible. I don't know whether he was just genuinely phoning it in or if the silliness of the situation just left him sort of flailing about but everything about his performance from his delivery, to his tone, to his physical movements just struck me as completely off kilter and just…bad. I also have a growing impression that Freeman basically plays the same character no matter his role and I kept on seeing him as Dr. Watson. However, Watson is the only other role I can remember seeing him in so that may be an unfair criticism of Freeman as an actor...but Bilbo and Watson sure don't seem that different.

Cumberbatch as Smaug...well, might be nice to see that in something more grounded in what Tolkien wrote. As it was, I couldn't get past the strangeness of Smaug's behavior. I think the material itself was so bad that the actor’s performance was irrelevant.

Thorin...umm...I gather the Arkenstone is supposed to have a similar effect to the Ring? Thorin was certainly...uneven. Was anybody else reminded of Treebeard seeing the destroyed forest in the scene with the starved dwarves in what I assume was supposed to be the guard post on Ravenhill?

Parting shot: My wife was reminded of the Little Engine that Could by Smaug's closing lines. She said it was like he was trying to give himself a pep talk. "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." I thought her comment was hilarious because I’m pretty sure The Little Engine that Could was not an intended association.

[Juicy-Sweet]

Another stupid thing ....

When they first think they failed to open the secret door into the mountain, thinking they are to late, they dwarves just give up and leave - and Thorin even tosses the key away !!!

Why the .... not just wait a year for the next Durin's day? Sure, it's cumbersome, but definitely doable to sit a year in Dale and wait for a year.

just dumping the key, the one and only chance for getting the mountain back after waiting that long, makes no sense at all - given PJs own portrait of the characters and the situation and all.

This I think is just lame Holywood over-emotionalism. Makes no sense to spent a lot of time protraiying the dwarves as being wiling to do everything to get that mountain - and then have them give uo so easily *shakes head*

[Rhod the Red]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

Minor point: Nice to see that Jackson has added "murdering helpless prisoners" to "killing ambassadors" on the Things the Good Guys Do list.

Big turn off for me.

It taints the Elves as modern-day war-criminals. yes, in Medieval times normal, but I picture the Elves being noble. They took pity on Gollum and just held him prisoner. My heart tells me even Orcs/Goblins would be imprisoned if captured by Elves.

Kings don't normally conduct executions either. They have a 'King's Justice' for that.

A second one for me was literally 0% black blood. Pathetic! The did it again! They were willing to in TLotR films, but not The Hobbit films as well. Why?

While the last half hour re-writing inside the Mountain was interesting in one sense, stadier compliance with the book would have sufficed, as well as the rest generally.

I was also disappointing the enchanted river crossing part in Mirkwood was excluded. Come ON! That's like 5 minutes at most surely!

[Alcidas]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I venture that Ostadan will be banned from TORN shortly. Or, given that TORN takes a similar attitude toward dissent as does North Korea, perhaps executed by mortar shell.

Not bloody likely.

This film is so bad that even the folks over at The One Ring are griping about it. Here are some examples

"While I know the makers will no doubt earn billions of dollars from DoS and will be laughing all the way to the bank as it were, (and that makes me a little ill I suppose) I got to believe that down the road with time DoS will be known as the pile of nonsense and fecal material that it in fact it is. "

"I finally know what it is to be a Purist after being a huge fan of the LOTR movies and even "The Unexpected Journey". I walked out of DoS stunned in a bad way. ... I don't know what happened, suddenly I've found myself untethered from the PJ's Tolkienverse with this film and I hate feeling this way."