Yeah, the orcs chasing the dwarves into Laketown didn't happen in the books.
A lot of things didn't happen in the books... but it was still a pretty fun movie.
Also, to WilliamOssiss, I believe the point of the love triangle was to prolong the movie allowing for a part 3. In other words, they did it for da moneys.
Why are you acting so angry about this? Were you really expecting the movie to follow the book down to the last letter, including what Smaug looks like? And after seeing the first film, no less?
You don't like the film, fine, but there's no need to put words in my mouth. At least this film didn't take over 40 minutes to get even started, not to even mention the awful CGI goblins or cheesy Radagast the Brown the first one had. Smaug is likely the best movie dragon history has ever seen, or will see for some years to come, and you complain about how he didn't have the right amount of legs? Die hard fan of the book or not, that's a really petty complaint to direct at anything.
We don't want something that (to vaguely mis-quote some Terry Prachett) is scientifically correct. We want the Mythological beast in all of its' splendor and glory.
I wasn't a huge fan of Unexpected Journey, but Desolation of Smaug was worse in nearly every way. It's even more bloated and even more meaningless, padded in so many areas that you can see the seams of the story stretching, trying to fit in all of these dangling plotlines with unsatisfactory resolution.
Dirty Hipsters said:
The ending didn't really have any kind of resolution. I mean I know that this is the second movie of the trilogy, but it just kind of ended with a cliffhanger. At least the first movie had a full arch that it ended on (Bilbo finding his courage and saving Thorin), but this one just felt like it cut in the middle of the climax and was really unsatisfying. Not sure if there was anything that could have been changed, I just know that it massively deflated my excitement when I exited the theater.
Pretty much this. Ending on a cliffhanger does not give you an excuse to not have an at least somewhat emotionally satisfying conclusion. It pretty much stops abruptly after a meaningless 20-minute long action sequence that achieves nothing.
I'm no purist who demands that everything must be the same as the book, to be clear. Certain things work better in literature than they do in cinema and vice versa, and I feel that you're wasting your time making an adaptation at all if all you're setting out to do is regurgitate the story word-for-word. But this story just is not the nine-hour epic Lord of the Rings Zero that Peter Jackson wants it to be. It's a 300-page children's story, filled with whimsy and fun. This adaptation effort just isn't working- it's producing dull, overlong, and overstuffed movies that end up just being boring.
Smaug was great, though. I'll certainly give credit where credit is due.
Stuff I like: The 3D. While it wasnt VERY in your face, I thought it made Smaug be dangerously close to me when I was sitting in the theater. Only for that, it might be my first 3D purchase.
Smaug was awesome. Just everything about him. 10/10. They made Gollum look awkward and artificial.
The barrel scene. Absolutely brilliant entertainment, the passing of the axe, the halfway into the water filming, the barrel armor, Legolas standing on the dwarves...absolutely loved it.
That lost chick. I love her as Tauriel.
The elven king. Brilliant.
Gandalf in the ruins. Brilliant.
In general, when there was danger, things felt a bit more dangerous, instead of ridiculous like in the first thanks to the retarded trolls and the "funny" goblins.
Things I didnt like:
CGI orcs and wargs...I still like the visceral feel of the uruk-hai more, even though I felt the CGI here was better than in the first.
The romance......well...even if a bit cheesy, at least they didnt waste a lot of time on it. It made things feel a bit more dangerous...so I liked that part of it.
Notice how unnatural the movement of the vampires is? Especially when they have the spotlight behind them; it looks like they've got no bone structure in doing their flips and whatnot
I hate that in movies, but I could live with it if it wasn't interlaced with humans doing human things. Spider-Man and Blade notably bothered me because they had all these cool and ridiculous things done by CGMuppets and then you cut back to the admittedly athletic Snipes who still pales in comparison, or Tobey, who looks even less impressive.
I can't comment on this movie (I was mostlty reading the thread for the opinions of others and don't care about spoilers), but this can be super-annoying. I mean, it depends on the level. Often, it makes the actors AND the CG look cheap, though.
I'm genuinely amazed that people are still getting on this movie's case. Especially when a lot of the changes from the last movie were, seemingly, direct responses to the major complaints of the first movie (those being "the movie has too little action" primarily).
That's not to say that I don't understand the complaints, but they all seem to boil down to people in a few categories:
1) The "purists" ("They changed the story from the book, ergo it sucks, regardless of any redeeming qualities it has!")
2) The people who expected to see LOTR when they went to see The Hobbit ("The action scenes are too few/too cartoonish. I want more whining hobbits and unending sadness in my movie.")
3) The people who never read the book ("These movies are too light-hearted and childish compared to LOTR. Where are all the big battles and sexy cry scenes?")
And in all three cases, it's more a case of them not understanding the story or its intended purpose, rather than any actual flaw in the movie.
There's been a few fair complaints, I'll grant, but way, WAY too many silly ones. And it makes the whole "Hobbit movies are bad" narrative pretty hard to swallow. It's a movie adaptation of a book written for children, and furthermore, because it's an adaptation, that means things will change between the book and the movie. If you can't deal with these facts, then don't watch it. The only people who have any validity to their complaints, IMO, are those who are legitimately trying to judge the film on its own merits instead of making a pointless comparison to the LOTR movies or to the books.
You make it sound like just because it's a children's movie means it's not allowed to have battles. Children LOVE battles and fight scenes, what they hate are bullshit romances.
Oh-ho, we're doing THIS are we? Yeah, I've got a few nitpicks.
1. Yeah, too much CGI. Everything looks fake, nothing looks as good as it did in LOTR. Now, before I go on, I should say that I may (or may not, I haven't written it yet) be comparing The Hobbit to LOTR quite a bit. Some people may say that this is unfair, and that The Hobbit should be viewed as a movie it its own right. To this, I say "bullshit", for several reasons: (a) It's the same director, and the movies are in the same series. I'm allowed to compare Star Wars Episode I to Episode V. And (b) The movie INVITES the comparison. These movies are going out of their way to hit a TON of the same notes that the original trilogy hit, but they just aren't doing it with as much skill. Which brings me to...
2. Everything is rushed. Holy shit, if you blink at any point in the first hour and half or so, you'll miss something from the book being hurriedly checked off of a list and forgotten. The pacing of this movie is just fucking AWFUL. "OK, you've gotta go into this forest-WE'RE AT THE FOREST! By the way, you'll probably get all confused in there. Well, better get going. (5 steps later) WoooAAAAH Where ARRReee WEEEEeeeee? WhAAAAT MoooOOOnth is it? ConfUUUUUSionnn-OH FUCK SPIDERS! SPIDERS! SPIDERS! THERE ARE SPIDERS! SPI-ELVES! NOW IT'S ELVES! WATCH OUT FOR ELVES!" And throughout all of this, you get perhaps 2 instances of chraracter development, and as far as I'm concerned, one of them doesn't really count. The first one is when BIlbo brutally kills a monster for the ring and says "MINE." That was good. Would've liked to get a LOT more of that. (More on that later) The other was....
3. Dwarvish Love. Look, the story about the dwarf and Kate-from-Lost is actually pretty well written and acted. (Despite that it is, like literally everything else in this movie, rushed) So it's too bad that its in the wrong damn movie. Look, if you made a map of all the characters in this movie, like, wrote down everybody's name and circled each one, and then drew lines between them to demonstrate character relationships, the whole "Dwarvish-Elvish Triangle" could be completely removed and it wouldn't effect the finished product at all. The only time the characters in the triangle effect the rest of the characters is when Thorin has to leave a few dwarves behind, so that's the only thing that would change. Thorin would just take all the dwarves with him, and everything would be fine, plot-wise. The Triangle only effects the people inside it, and the people inside the triangle never effect the characters who are outside the triangle. This is the definition of padding, in a movie that already has way too much of that. Like, for example....
4. That Motherfucking Golden Dwarf. What. The fuck. Was THAT? What was the POINT? Why did we NEED this sequence? What did it accomplish? What did it ADD to the story? I'll tell you what: Nothing. Smaug could've just talked to Bilbo for a bit, concluded that the break-in was probably related to the town nearby, and decided to go burn it down. Instead, Smaug's thought process looks something like this:
-Someone's breaking into my gold vault.
-Smells like dwarf.
-Probably with Thorin and, I don't know, probably 12 other dwarves.
-?????????????
-I should go burn down the town.
Those questions marks are the bit happening while the dwarves are bouncing around the forge for no discernible reason. Literally everything stupid that Smaug does happens during this sequence. He was completely awesome up to that point, when he couldn't kill, or even catch, 10 smelly freakin dwarves and a hobbit. This entire sequence is just so much nonsense. It was just 40 minutes (or at least, it felt like that) of dwarves bouncing around and accomplishing nothing. Up until this point, I would've begrudgingly ignored the movies flaws and said I enjoyed it. But this...utterly pointless, nonsensical, and may I say again FUCKING POINTLESS bit of bullshit just pushed it over the edge.
Honorable Mentions for Complaints About The Hobbit
-The movie is called "The Hobbit", and Bilbo has about 4 lines in it.
-There were roughly 600 characters that contributing nothing but screen time.
-Just a few too many overwrought speeches about the beauty of nature. They fit the tone of LOTR, but here, it just feels out-of place next to all the dwarf bouncing. Or maybe the writing just isn't as good, I don't know.
-The Tomb of the Nazgul was pretty lame. Looked like a section of Minecraft hadn't loaded.
-In LOTR, every single setting had time to breathe and establish a sense of size and atmosphere. Here, Jackson kinda tries to do that, but it's literally like he was his finger on the fastforward button, and none of the settings feel established at all by the time we're leaving them.
-The music. Anyone want to hum a few bars of this movie's main theme? Yeah, I have no fucking clue what it is, either. I know there WAS music, because I noticed when it stopped for about 10 seconds, but I couldn't tell you what any of the music actually SOUNDED like.
PS: You may have noticed that a lot of the stuff I took issue with happened to be stuff that was not in the books. I just want to say that is NOT why I took issue with them. I actually ENJOYED the stuff with Gandalf. No, I take issue with this stuff because it doesn't contribute anything to the story, it only pads it out. It's clumsy writing, regardless of the book.
PPS: Oh, I forgot to mention. Quick note to the OP: You said they miscast Evangeline Lilly and should've gone with a relative unknown? Uh...An actress from a TV show that ended almost 4 years ago is the DEFINITION of a relative unknown. I don't even know what you mean by "distracting". I just want to say I thought SHE was fine, she just in the wrong movie.
I didn't see it in 3D and I don't know if it was in 48FPS, so I can't say that I had a different theater experience.
My little gripe is the action scenes were way too clustered in the beginning. With the exception of Legolas vs. the orc party at the end of the movie, there wasn't much to see. Smaug was there and he definitely was amazing, but they didn't have that Lord of the Rings action scenes of constantly moving action, constantly killing underlings in creative ways, and constantly cool characters. (Akin to the goblin kingdom at the end of An Unexpected Journey and the barrel scene in The Desolation of Smaug, that's what I needed more of.)
The new lore that's being thrown in is shaping up pretty nice. I was really iffy about Radagast and his sleigh of bunnies and the increasing focus of Azog being the main antagonist, but it's shaping up nicely. Gandalf and Radagast in Dol Guldur did shape up to a really cool reveal of Sauron, Tauriel (despite being the victim of bullshit love triangles) is a pretty good character so far, and especially the book fleshing out Laketown and Bard, compared to the book where Laketown and Bard came out of practically nowhere in the last fifty pages.
The only thing I really disliked was how long the chase sequence involving Smaug was. Chases are overdone as it is, but when it is a giant fire breathing dragon, and it is incapable of catching and killing a handful of dwarves in a reasonably open area, it just makes him look stupid.
It's one of those scenes added to be "cool" and serves no other purpose.
Another one has also been mentioned before, and that is that they seemed to do a quick check-list of all the events in the book to briefly go through, so they could get it out of the way for all the made up stuff. Beorn's section was barely ten minutes, the forest was the same. Yet they found time to add in a love story, which was another thing added just for the sake of it.
The only other criticism isn't that they added a bunch of newly made up stuff, it is that they still managed to have padding. If they trimmed off all of the things that didn't really add anything to the film and did the same for the last one, they could have comfortably made it into two films. Making three because you have enough material is one thing, but when it's padded out it comes across as being done for a more cynical reason.
Overall though I felt it was pretty good. Smaug looked awesome and was voiced just as well. The way they showed Bilbo slowly being influenced already by the ring was well done and the additional conversations amongst the dwarves were a welcome addition.
I've read the book and I loved the film. Went to see it in 3D IMAX at 48 fps and it was amazing, worth going to see it just for Smaug alone, my god how good was Smaug? And that voice? And yeah people are complaining about him talking too much? He's a vain ass fucking dragon so of course he's going talk so much; he loves his own voice.
Thought it was much better than the first one too, thank god they got rid of the singing and kiddy humour; helped that they sped up the plot somewhat too.
See I didn't have a problem with him talking too much. It was WHAT he said. (see below)
Robot Number V said:
Oh-ho, we're doing THIS are we? Yeah, I've got a few nitpicks.
4. That Motherfucking Golden Dwarf. What. The fuck. Was THAT? What was the POINT? Why did we NEED this sequence? What did it accomplish? What did it ADD to the story? I'll tell you what: Nothing. Smaug could've just talked to Bilbo for a bit, concluded that the break-in was probably related to the town nearby, and decided to go burn it down. Instead, Smaug's thought process looks something like this:
-Someone's breaking into my gold vault.
-Smells like dwarf.
-Probably with Thorin and, I don't know, probably 12 other dwarves.
-?????????????
-I should go burn down the town.
Those questions marks are the bit happening while the dwarves are bouncing around the forge for no discernible reason. Literally everything stupid that Smaug does happens during this sequence. He was completely awesome up to that point, when he couldn't kill, or even catch, 10 smelly freakin dwarves and a hobbit. This entire sequence is just so much nonsense. It was just 40 minutes (or at least, it felt like that) of dwarves bouncing around and accomplishing nothing. Up until this point, I would've begrudgingly ignored the movies flaws and said I enjoyed it. But this...utterly pointless, nonsensical, and may I say again FUCKING POINTLESS bit of bullshit just pushed it over the edge.
This is seriously one of my bigger complaints. Next to the stupid romance that didn't belong anywhere in it and added nothing to it. The book's dialogue with Bilbo and Smaug was beautifully done and ACTUALLY FUCKING MADE SENSE. The movie's? DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE.
And now that I'm on a computer and not my phone, to add to my original post....
When a 90 minute animated made for tv movie from the 70s can do a better adaptation than what we're getting now for live action, there might be something wrong. I mean hell, even the voice acting in that adaptation was great. (yes I do own it so shut up)
Someone else pointed out that the romance thing made it more accessible to them and less dry from the book. That?s perfectly valid. However, I DON?T FUCKING LIKE IT. (this was pointed out on tumblr) It may have been why it was added. Or it was just that lately it seems Hollywood seems to make everything have a romance necessary to the plot or not just because apparently movies without romances are boring? But regardless as it's been said, it is padding that's not needed.
And also, Thorin being a favourite character from the book (yes yes sexy dwarf blah blah blah thinking of changing my favourite character to orcrist because of that issue) he was an ass to everyone. The first movie he was more an ass to Bilbo. This one he doesn't appear to be that much of an ass. Really not fond of that.
The movie is like my best friend's aunt says: If you've read the hobbit, take what you know of the general storyline and throw it out the window because apart from it following the basic quest, most of it will piss you off as it doesn't really happen.
And truthfully, I would have preferred the more badass looking four legged dragon that looked like it possibly couldn't fly to what we got. Though for what we got I guess he's alright. *goes to sit in a corner and cry over The Hobbit(book) again*
The only thing I genuinely disliked was how bad the gold statue was animated. It really took me out of the scene. When the melting had to share the screen with Smaug, it paited a contrast that was too jarring. Kind of ruined the end for me.
While Tauriel/Kili/Legolas was lame, I didn't overly mind it.
In terms of deviating from the book, the worst transgression in my opinion was the arrival in Beorn's house. In the book, that was a delightful scene but at least he's in there. Tom Bombadil will never be forgotten!
That and the time-scale got messed up. They're supposed to be en-route for weeks and weeks. Locked up in the Wood Elf fortress for weeks, stuck on the porch into the Mountain for weeks... now they got from Beorn's to Smaug in what... 5 days? Middle earth is supposed to be huge, now it feels tiny.
What we got was NOT a Dragon. That was a Wyvern. A dragon has 4 legs. I suppose that no matter how much I try and educate you all to the difference between the two, you neither accept or willingly learn.
Allow me to put it like this. Calling a Wyvern a Dragon is like calling donkey a horse. From the same family but two ENTIRELY different things.
I am angry because he (Peter Jackson) decided to make up shit that HAS never and WILL never be Middle Earth canon. It is no longer The Hobbit. This is just some asshats fan fiction. Yeah, I wasn't expecting a to the letter recreation of the book, but I WAS expecting to see Smaug with 4 legs. Which PJ changed from the theatrical release (4 legs) to the DVD release (wing hands). He takes artistic liberty where there should be none to take.
It's a lot like getting a tattoo, knowing exactly what you want. Only to have the artist doing it completely change it.
It was like all through out the movie PJ was SCREAMING Look At The References To The Other Movies I Did! Look at them! LOOK AT THEM!
Call me a fanboy if you wish, but no. Peter Jackson fucked up the Hobbit.
The last one was the only time of which I can think that I fell asleep at a movie. Very disorienting waking up to Bilbo looking around to see who was in his home. This is my kind of thing, yet I really did not like the last movie enough to actually get out of my home and see it. The best thing was Gollum. Not enough to merit a movie go rather than a DVD rental.
Y'all are talking me into wanting to see this one.
Legion said:
The only thing I really disliked was how long the chase sequence involving Smaug was. Chases are overdone as it is, but when it is a giant fire breathing dragon, and it is incapable of catching and killing a handful of dwarves in a reasonably open area, it just makes him look stupid. .
Yeah, the orcs chasing the dwarves into Laketown didn't happen in the books.
A lot of things didn't happen in the books... but it was still a pretty fun movie.
Also, to William Ossiss, I believe the point of the love triangle was to prolong the movie allowing for a part 3. In other words, they did it for da moneys.
As other people have stated, they could have taken out the love triangle and the movie would still be the same.
They could take out the Smaug vs scene at the end and saved themselves 40+ minutes of screen time. It was unneccasary, unneeded, and simply wasted your, mine, and EVERYones time. I found it simply ODD how the molten gold simply SHED off Smaug at the end. ....As if it never even happened!
I enjoyed almost everything about it. Definitely don't regret seeing it, and I'll be seeing the third one for sure. This is coming from someone who grew up reading the book.
That said, Tauriel came across a bit fanfic-ish. Has the attention of handsome dwarf and royal elf, misunderstood but turns out to be right about the stuff that all the other elves were too arrogant to see, gifted fighter AND healer, wasn't in the book yet gets a big spotlight (this part isn't usually a problem for me in these movies, but in combination with the other stuff it stands out).
Smaug exceeded all my hopes and expectations. The grandpa-statue was a little weird, but I'll forgive it.
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