No, this does not make me want to watch any more of the series. And Jackson's penchant to make up scenes has now morphed into making up entirely new characters. No doubt this is targeting a particular demographic, as Lucas did in his prequils. That didn't work out very well, although admittedly it could have been worse.One year after the Unexpected Journey began, here is the Unexpected Detour. The second leg of Peter Jackson’s three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, is mostly stalling for time: two or three truly great sequences tangled up in long beards and longer pit-stops.There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.
There's your stature, Jackson. Still, it could have been worse. Jackson might have cast Kristin Stewart as the elven love interest. Err, because elves don't smile, or something.
Jackson has completed his voyage to the Dark Side. As with Lucas an initial blockbuster was never quite followed up, and after a long pause it's nothing but silliness. Oh, well, mustn't grumble. But I don't expect I'll be watching this particular flick, or the next.
Read Tolkien, no desire to see the movies...
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ReplyDeleteThis is more or less why I didn't see the first one in the theater and don't plan on seeing the current one or the final one there either. It should have been an enjoyable romp that could have fit into one feature film, but ego and greed meant it had to be another trilogy.
ReplyDeleteI'll probably wait until they're all out on DVD and watch them all together. Although there are probably some grand, sweeping visual effects that work better on a huge screen, by the time all three are available to watch in my living room I'll probably have a big enough TV that I won't feel I'm missing anything.
Saw the first one on Dad's 3D TV, and I liked it...but I'm a geek. I did notice it was a bad movie, and was SLOOOOW as Death!
ReplyDeleteAlso it could be my Mom was coddling the baby, and I knew I could watch a 3 hour movie uninterpreted for the first time since Little LaWeer'da was born.
Still I knew these movies were going to be bad when they went from making 2 movies, into 3.
The Hobbit doesn't have enough materiel for ONE 3 Hour movie, Two is possible if you cook up some Lord of the Rigs and Silmarillion stuff between the lines.
Three is an impossibility, and it was obvious in the first one.
I'll watch the other's at Dad's in 3D for free...but that's a low bar to clear.
I'm being dragged, under protest, to these movies. I love Tolkien, and hate Jackson's greed in turning a short, delightful novel into a 3 movie marathon.
ReplyDeleteMy excitement for the first movie slowly dropped as the release approached - to the point that I waited til I could rent it from Red Box for $1.25 before seeing it.
ReplyDeleteI imagine I will do the same with the second and third movies, which makes me a sad sad geek... The only upside is that the first movie did make me want to re-read Tolkein's books. I hadn't picked on up in 10 years.
Matt W, my plan is to wait until parts 2 and 3 are at the dollar theater, so I can see it on the big screen, but so that Peter Jackson doesn't get much money.
ReplyDeleteI just read the other day that a simple experiment was performed. A fan of the book pressed play on the DVD while starting to read the opening sentence of the book.
ReplyDeleteThe movie ended 30 minutes before he or she finished the entire novel. For once, it's faster to read the book than see the movie.