Hobbit Trailer looks crap

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by jallanite

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.