Hobbit 3 - Battle of the Bloated Trilogy (Soilers) (Page 2 of 3)

I would not mind having that debate. On another forum, a poster was actually happy to see "wet stuff" referring to the Orc blood on Orkrist making it more realistic. I'm sitting there going, I don't need to see that in order to know that this is a rather violent film.

I agree with BDA in regards to the child-like tone of the film as to the physics, the over-the-top cartoonish actions that he listed. Unfortunately, PJ tried to blend such elements in to a progressively darker film, as Doc mentioned, with the grittier aspects of a war, and beheadings, and torture and madmen and the like. It is, in my opinion, a ridiculous blend that waters down both elements to the point that it is hard to take the film seriously.

Sorry if that's how what I said came off, it's not what I meant.

How do I put this... the problem I'm trying to get at, is that PJ wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted The Hobbit to have that child-like wonder and be aimed at a younger audience. Hence why all the silly cartoon physics, and bad physical gags and the funny bad man with the weird eyebrows. But then at the same time, he's trying to directly tie this series into LOTR, so he's trying to bring in all these darker and more violent elements, but he keeps getting tripped up with the whole "younger audience thing" so he keeps pulling his punches.

So at the end of it what we have is this thing weird oblong thing that has a lot of the violence and darkness but all the edges are sanded off. There's lots of fighting, but everyone dies with one hit, there's a beheading or two... but no blood (I still don't know where you're getting this idea that every other orc is getting his head cut off, I remember one maaaaaybe two, but otherwise it's just a bunch of paper cut deaths), there's lots of dangerous situations but no actual danger.

So there's too much violence to really call it a movie suitable for younger audiences, but all the violence that is there is neutered so an adult audience isn't really going to enjoy it because it just feels fake and contrived. So at the end, it's not really a movie made for anyone, it's just bleh.

Hopefully that makes more sense and is closer to what I'm actually trying to say.

You know, BDA, we are closer than you think

The beheadings, I remember 3 distinctly in AUJ, right off the top-Thror in the Moria battle rememberance, and two in Globin town.

I agree that PJ is trying to have his cake and eat it too. But, the source material is also a child's book, which makes me more forgiving of it than LOTR, which I  take as a much more of an epic, good vs. evil, tale. One is far grander than the other in terms of scale and scope. I think that the Hobbit events can become more epic, but it still should be viewed from the original point of view, in my opinion.

As it is, I think PJ tried too hard to shoehorn in LOTR elements (Legolas, especially) without a clear way of not taking away from the Dwarves' story. I think that is my biggest problem with the Hobbit films.

A Film by Terrence Malick...

I totally agree on that. Sorry, I didn't mean to address the point about the violence to you alone. I just learned the new perspective over christmas and this seemed the most opportune moment to mention it!

I listened to it, and wanted to keep listening. Looking forward to your psychology take on it, which is yet to come...?
It'd be nice to lay some Hobbit score underneath your commentary but that probably breaches copyright, even if it's not a commercial product you're making.
The theatrical Hobbit 3 will be out on Blu-Ray soon, so you can do a 8 hour trilogy commentary because I don't think Friends in Your Head are gonna be bothered

For those (like myself) questioning whether it was a good idea to break it into three movies, we now have the answer from Box Office Mojo - another $1 billion. We should be lucky they didn't break it into four parts. 

Apparently the Hobbit trilogy costs $1.1BILLION! and it's dubious whether all the money the NZ taxpayer kicked in (almost $200M!) actually paid off, as there are hardly any locations for tourists to visit...

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2015/09 … yers-191m/

Compare that to LotR, which was under $300 million, and it's rather abundantly clear where a lot of the problem came from.

Yes, I'm looking forward to a good fan edit once all the Extended Editions are out in November and you have about 8 hours of raw material to cull down to about 3-4 hours. The action sequences can be trimmed, a lot of the Kili love subplot, Stephen Fry's assistant in BOTFA, most of the stupid dwarf antics, etc. There might even be a decent movie there for a dedicated editor to extract. Whether it's worth anyone's time - probably several weeks' worth of work...

Ok, so Hobbit 3 EE is 'available'. It's definitely a lot more violent, and the battle scenes are the most expanded element of the film (understandable given the nature of this one).

There's no fix for the Ravenhill scenes (obviously), and these are still probably the weakest parts of the film (it's needlessly convoluted and the whole 'Kili and Fili are sent ahead to investigate' stuff makes no sense).

It's also filled with humour that's a whole lot funnier than 99% of the Alfrid stuff. I'm amazed at how out of place his scenes are. He's Jar Jar Binks level awful in this.

There are a couple of scenes, including a bit with Legolas, which are absurdly ridiculous.

I'm looking forward to getting the bluray and listening to the commentary.

Just ploughing through the 11 hours of extras on the blu-ray EE set. Amazing bonus features, as always. Peter Jackson's team does the best DVD extras by far, ever since LOTR. Must be 70 hours worth in total for the two trilogies. Some parts are warts 'n all. Some are just contrived "funny" events that happened on set, rather than a technical lecture on behind-the-scenes. Very watchable. The craft of Weta Workshop is extraordinary. They burned through more money that you didn't see on screen than the entire budgets of other tentpole movies.

The commentary is alright - but I get the sense both Jackson and Boyens are happy to see the last of Middle Earth. Jackson doesn't seen very knowledgeable on the Tolkien mythology despite being immersed in the universe for 15 years. It's not that informative and repeats material already in the extensive Appendices.

Now waiting for some fan commentaries of the EE Hobbit movies (wish it was a FIYH marathon) and a fan edit.