Sad or Elated now the Movies are at an End?

[Zigûr]

Yes I think it's interesting that the way PJ sees it is that he adapted "The Lord of the Rings" to be the story of a hobbit, but didn't adapt "The Hobbit" to be the story of a hobbit.

As for superhero films, of the recent (2008 onwards) batch I've enjoyed the first Iron Man, Thor and Captain America films (particularly Captain America) but I'm a bit bored of them now. At the same time, I am something of a comic book reader, but I mostly like old Fantastic Four and Captain America comics, at least as far as Marvel is concerned. I haven't read DC comics in a while. The changes they make for the films generally don't bother me too much because comic book stories are always changing, and they're collaborations of authors and artists with creative teams which change over time. For me there's a difference between, say, Marvel studios coming up with their own version of the Captain America story, which has already been through several iterations, and New Line adapting The Hobbit.

That being said, when they're adapting a specific comic, as they did with Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for instance, I do think they sometimes err when they diverge too heavily from the source material.

One of the things I think they missed was an opportunity to focus on the idea of the small person, Bilbo, among the events of history. By showing us too much, like Gandalf at Dol Guldur and the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, not only do we lose focus on Bilbo in general but we lose that sense of history going on around the protagonist just as much as he is involved in shaping it. Bilbo is very important to his own narrative, but I'd argue that it's equally important that he only glimpses the rest of what's been going on: the Necromancer is mentioned, but not seen. The War of the Dwarves and Orcs is mentioned, and Bilbo himself mentions it to Bard and the Elvenking, so evidently he knows or is informed about it at some point (apart from the party at the beginning I mean, in which Azog is mentioned), and the various goings on of the Dwarves and Men and Elves and so forth are all mentioned but the only frame of reference we really have, apart from a few more omniscient narrator moments, are things Bilbo learns, either at the time or after the fact.

That, I would argue, contains that "unexplained vistas" notion of which Professor Tolkien was fond. The films aren't willing to hold back, and disclose too much, which for me at least broke the illusion: perhaps it ought to be left to our imagination regarding what happened at Dol Guldur, for instance. Films are obviously a visual medium, but I often feel as if directors are too reluctant to convey information through dialogue. "The Hobbit" is one of those films where if you watched it with the sound off, you would probably be able to still have a vague idea of what was going on, significantly because of its obsession with cutaways and flashbacks.