Adaptation by Vague Recollection

[Nerwen]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

It's a bit startling that the budget for "The Hobbit trilogy" was so much greater. Surely inflation alone can't have accounted for that. But I suppose the returning actors are pricier now, in many cases as a result of the earlier films, and they were using more advanced effects technology.

And yet the effects in many cases look noticeably worse... it's really hard to see where that huge budget went, a lot of the time. I guess implementing the HFR took up a lot.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Nerwen

And yet the effects in many cases look noticeably worse... it's really hard to see where that huge budget went, a lot of the time. I guess implementing the HFR took up a lot.

Yes I hear conflicting things about whether practical effects work or CGI is more expensive these days.

Originally Posted by Leaf

The situation of "the Hobbit Trilogy" was entirely different. This time, the threshold for the success of the films was not the novel "The Hobbit", written by J.R.R. Tolkien, but the mind-blowing success of the previous Lord of the Rings films. They knew, for a fact, that there's a huge demand for movies like this (!). And, I think, that's what leaves the admirer of the original Hobbit novel necessarily unsatisfied. We, ironically, had the misfortune to not be in the main target group, so to speak.

Leaf, I think you've made some very interesting points here, which tie in to the idea of the "Hobbit" films as a prequel to the other films as well as being an adaptation of an existing text. What that leaves me with, of course, is the feeling that in my opinion they're not terribly successful as prequels to the earlier films.

[Faramir Jones]

Zigûr, I agree with what you said here to Leaf:

Leaf, I think you've made some very interesting points here, which tie in to the idea of the "Hobbit" films as a prequel to the other films as well as being an adaptation of an existing text. What that leaves me with, of course, is the feeling that in my opinion they're not terribly successful as prequels to the earlier films.

One particular problem I had with the Hobbit films, which made them worse than the Lord of the Rings films, was that the first group didn't even attempt to give an idea of the size of Middle-earth. The second category of films, for all (in my opinion) their many faults, gave the audience the fact that Middle-earth was big; and if there was a long distance between points A and B, it was going to take a long time to travel between the two, even if you were in a hurry.

I didn't see any attempt to deal with this in the Hobbit films, particularly regarding Mirkwood. It wouldn't have been too difficult (and there was certainly the time to spare!) to show how big, dark, and mysterious the wood was, and how few safe things there were to eat and drink, not to mention the enchanted river.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Faramir Jones

I didn't see any attempt to deal with this in the Hobbit films, particularly regarding Mirkwood. It wouldn't have been too difficult (and there was certainly the time to spare!) to show how big, dark, and mysterious the wood was, and how few safe things there were to eat and drink, not to mention the enchanted river.

I wonder if an issue with this kind of thing was that they needed everything to look "right" on a 3D HFR camera, which affected what they could do with sets and constructed environments that needed to look real, as well as with makeup and practical effects.

I think perhaps my biggest issue with the Hobbit films as prequels to the Lord of the Rings films is that the visuals in the Hobbit films are much more stylised and/or exaggerated. Things like:

-the Dwarves' hairdos (especially Nori)

-Azog (especially compared to the soldier orcs of the earlier films) and other CGI creations, particularly the trolls used in the final film. They tried far too hard to make those trolls look weird and visually distinctive

-locations like Dol Guldur, Rhosgobel and Lake Town, which to me look very affectedly hodge-podge or ramshackle; they look designed to look chaotic rather than looking like they've organically come to look that way. By contrast, Edoras and Minas Tirith in the films look like places that could actually exist

I think this last part is especially noticeable when comparing the elements which returned from the other films, like Hobbiton and Rivendell, to those which were designed for these ones.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

-locations like Dol Guldur, Rhosgobel and Lake Town, which to me look very affectedly hodge-podge or ramshackle; they look designed to look chaotic rather than looking like they've organically come to look that way. By contrast, Edoras and Minas Tirith in the films look like places that could actually exist.

I think this last part is especially noticeable when comparing the elements which returned from the other films, like Hobbiton and Rivendell, to those which were designed for these ones.

The issue is, and always has been, that left to his own devices and being allowed to drift from the original plot leads Peter Jackson into excess and all but destroys a suspension of disbelief.

Dol Guldur is not necessarily described by Tolkien in any way that would lead to PJ adhering to a book description (like in the case of Minas Tirith, which is described in detail). Dol Guldur, as depicted by PJ, is Halloweenish -- a ghostly graveyard of trite tricks, whereas Minas Morgul in the LotR films is genuinely creepy because there is not an excess of eerie tomfoolery that makes it seem like a Disneyworld haunted ride. It's like Sauron hired a ghostly decorator to spread cobwebs and strew crumbly edifices about for a photo shoot for the magazine Haunted Architectural Digest.

Lake-town looks like PJ borrowed the set from the dreadful 1980s Popeye movie that featured Robin Williams. You've not seen it? Go on YouTube and check out the architectural elements:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-HbIkCjDbk

Again, like the Chutes 'n' Ladders(TM) lunacy of Goblintown, Lake-town is set up for stunts 'n' chases, and does not at all look like the drawings Tolkien made. Not at all, not one bit. Tolkien's depiction is reminiscent of Northern European prehistoric villages built on piles offshore, but with more medieval architecture, as Michael Martinez offers here:

http://middle-earth.xenite.org/2011/...in-the-hobbit/

It seems purpose built and orderly, whereas PJ's looks like a kindling and recycled wood convention, precarious and architecturally ludicrous.

Rhosgobel? As I have said previously, the whole Radagast shtick was lifted almost wholesale from T.H. White's The Once and Future King, with Radagast's bird droppings an exact match for Merlyn, and the interior of the wizard's abode sharing many elements. And while I cherish the works of White, his work is fairly incongruous to that of Tolkien's and PJ borrowed the most clownish aspects of Merlyn and none of his character. Once again, PJ, left to his own devices, creates a silly character (on a C.S. Lewis bunny sled, no less) that would make Tom Bombadil blush in embarrassment.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

I think those are very good points, Morthoron; and to bring the discussion back around, would observe that the production design of Laketown or Dol Guldur couldn't have been driven by any impetus to make the films more (or less) commercial, but rather can only be explained by an imagination straitjacketed by conventional Hollywood memes. Perhaps it's worth suggesting that the sort of mind which can't discern that White's and Tolkien's universes have utterly different "feels" is not one which is qualified to adapt Tolkien.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

I think those are very good points, Morthoron; and to bring the discussion back around, would observe that the production design of Laketown or Dol Guldur couldn't have been driven by any impetus to make the films more (or less) commercial, but rather can only be explained by an imagination straitjacketed by conventional Hollywood memes. Perhaps it's worth suggesting that the sort of mind which can't discern that White's and Tolkien's universes have utterly different "feels" is not one which is qualified to adapt Tolkien.

Jackson is a big kid, and while that sort of attitude has its charms and can be quite admirable, even enviable, on occasion, from a storytelling standpoint it can wear thin relatively quickly. The utter lack of nuance and sophistication from a screenwriting standpoint is evident whenever Jackson diverges from the original story or invents items broadcloth where little information exists.

This relates back to what Jackson really loves, and that is what every boy loves. He loves those B-grade buckets-of-blood horror movies that he began his career with. He loves big, scary monsters, the more and the bigger the better, hence his remake of King Kong. He loves cartoons and comic books, and has brought comic characters to the screen. One can tell the juvenile delight Jackson has for special effects in his commentary (the one that I remember is his demanding the WitchKing's mace be bigger in the duel with Eowyn, and he was not satisfied until it grew to ridiculous proportions). Jackson loves what every other little kid loves about the film making process. However, all that naiveté and adolescent adoration for film has its price.

When Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, he certainly wrote it for his children, but the motifs, naming conventions and dialogue all harken to his philological studies. This is why so many of us felt that we had read our very first "grown-up" book when we were children. It was an accomplishment that we cherished. The ingenious method by which Tolkien took a stolid, middle-age Hobbit and made him a reluctant hero, interspersing a gentle and genuine wit with some very adult observations (the section where he describes Goblins/Orcs as the sort who eventually invented the weapons of mass destruction that plague modern humanity comes to mind), but all the while left us clamoring for further vistas of Middle-earth, is what make the book a classic.

Jackson, on the other hand, worked in reverse, hence the title of this thread "Adaptation by Vague Recollection". He certainly read The Hobbit. He even read the Appendices from RotK. But he did so much like a miner digs for ore. Once the metal is removed from its native soil, it is melted and mixed with alloys and hammered and molded until it barely resembles the original element in it virgin state. Bilbo is relegated from central hero; in fact, he is swallowed into the collective chaos Jackson presented, and we as viewers are no longer treated as children striving to be adults, but are relegated to interminable chase scenes, incessant adolescent jokes about bodily functions, and menacing monsters and villains that played no part in the original story, or ones that are conflagrated into overblown and overwrought enormity. Even the addled attempt at romance is written like a teenager would write fan-fiction, with all the silly dialogue and stilted plots a neophyte writer would stumble through on his or her way to becoming an adult and discovering sophistication.