Finally got around to watching part 1 of The Hobbit last night, on a Netflik*.
Um.
Thing about making LOTR first... it creates the temptation to make the movie of the cute little children's** book even more epic, to drag in characters who weren't in the book, and to mess up the plot by throwing in a lengthy future-flashback introduction that tells the audience things that should properly be revealed as the story progresses.
So here we have a vast, intensely violent cinema epic which takes the title of the cute little standalone book, but which borrows extensively from LOTR and The Silmarillion, and adds material that, in the books, was only tangentially mentioned.
It's all excuses for doing Big Cinematic Stuff. And you've got to have the pod racer drawn by hedgehogs***!
Oh, well. The fifteen birds got out of their five fir trees, and I guess some other night we'll see what happens next. But wait! The thrush already knocked! Does that mean they missed their chance? Tune in next year! Same hobbit time - same hobbit station!
Afterthought: Hoods. I'm sure the dwarves were meant to be wearing hoods. Did they take them off at the border of the Shire to avoid drawing the attention of neighborhood watchhobbitses?
Also: I thought there was something wrong with the business of big spiders just moving into Mirkwood, and Mirkwood just starting to be called that. Looking at the actual printed-type book, and the copy of Thror's Map reproduced therein, what do I find? "West lies Mirkwood the Great -- there are Spiders." So, at the time the map was drawn, then?
Even more: The movie hobbits don't seem to dress in proper bright colors, do they? And, while it seemed mildly wrong for the Elrond of LOTR to look so much like Agent Smith, the Elrond of The Hobbit should definitely look more like a traditional merry eternally-young elf and less like a nasty creepy old dude. What's more, the dwarves are meant to have colorful garb and colorful beards, and look more like garden gnomes and less like cut-down Scotsmen****.
I guess next time there's an idle evening available, I'll see how Beorn is handled -- or if he's gone Bombadil-knows-where and been replaced by that mockery of Radagast.
* Spellcheck thinks I mean "Linnet".
** Spellcheck suggests "Nichiren's".
*** I may be turning their skins into squirrels, here, but you get the idea.
**** But not pictsies, either.
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