Heh. My own reaction was less virulent, but boils down to "the dragon's CGI was amazing and I want to watch it forever; Tauriel was awesome but ROMANSU, WHY; most of the movie felt like filler."
...I have spent way too much of my life being disappointed by CGI dragons, okay, this is an important part of any dragon-featuring movie. :D
But a hearty AMEN! to the endless chase- and fight-scenes being annoying. *eyerolling* I began to wonder if Jackson was trying to make a children's film, because he seemed to assume that 1) I the viewer had a roughly six-minute attention span, and 2) the way to manage that was to shovel in lots of slapstick fighting scenes.
Aside from the dragon, I enjoyed the Mirkwood bits, mainly because I'm a sucker for any bits of Elven culture; seeing Elvish kitchens and trading agreements was cool, and of course Tauriel being a guard and alleviating the sausagefest was pleasant. (And then it turned into Endless Dying Orcs On A Plane River, and I looked around to see if there were actually a bunch of small children in the audience or if Jackson had just somehow suddenly forgotten the age of his likely viewership.)
Edited (incomplete sentence) Date: 2013-12-28 04:56 am (UTC)
YES it was 3 hours of filler, and that makes me angry.
Jackson did the slapstick falling skulls in LOTR (the cave sequence), the extended chase scene (Moria), but it didn't feel like filler there. Except the Moria sequence; that dragged on way too long. Maybe because LOTR has more to start with?
Something else Jackson seems to do is take away characters' growth moments. In Fellowship, at the Fords when Frodo was dying of morgul-blade, in the movie he just goes "gasp wheeze gasp wheeze" while Arwen takes him to safety, whereas in the book, he says, "By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you will have neither the ring nor me" and spurs his pony.
In DoS, the insert!elves get Bilbo's growth moment in Mirkwood with the spiders.
Something else Jackson seems to do is take away characters' growth moments.
Interesting that you noted this; I hadn't put it together as a coherent thing, but two of my pet peeves about the LOTR movies were...
1. Ents get their agency taken away in order to give Merry/Pippin a more dramatic growth moment -- in-novel, the Ents were well aware of Saruman's activities and eventually decide on their own to go to war! But Jackson makes them oblivious idiots so that a hobbit can give a rousing speech and show his new 'maturity'; made even sillier by contradicting the entire "Ents take a long time to say [and decide] anything" that he went to such pains to show us mere minutes before.
2. The Steward of Gondor is presented as a spoilt brat who dies more or less by accident so that the heroes can get on with things. (Not incidentally, "guy on fire running off a cliff" is yet another helping of Jacksonian My CGI Let Me Show You It, though mercifully a brief one.) His canon ending is far more self-aware, and chosen deliberately; the change irked me because it shaved off so much depth from his character. Jackson's Steward is a two-scene Minor Baddie, instead of a man who has ruled a city for decades and fathered two major characters, and presumably kept all those non-Gondorians Boromir mentions safe from Sauron's minions for years.
Growth moments really do seem to be a problem with Jackson in more ways than just not having them; he seems to have little idea how to do them if they don't involve a dramatic speech followed by someone dying. :\
Yeah, it's definitely a thing with him. He doesn't understand character motivation unless it involves action scenes or chase scenes or dramatically dying. It was less obvious in the LOTR films, because there was already a lot of canon to draw from, but since he's making up a lot of stuff to pad a 200-page book to 9 hours of movie, it's really obvious here.
It mainly makes me wish that Guillermo del Toro had been allowed to make a Hobbit movie years ago.
Gotta say, you're not making me more excited about seeing this next week.
Vaguely inspired by your comments on tumblr: I saw this crazy idea about reading Bilbo as a girl (http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/12/18/one-weird-old-trick/) the other day, and was far more tempted than I ever would have expected to be. We'll see what I eventually do. (At least for my first read through LotR, I honestly thought that Merry was a girl, so I know how viable that sort of switch can be.)
Sorry :/ The CG dragon is really cool, but the extended dwarves-chasing-Smaug-through-Erebor scene was about 30 minutes too long. (Also the Azog subplot brings orcs to Lake-Town. And the romance subplot *barf* And splitting up the party.)
If you didn't hate or were ambivalent about the parts Jackson invented in the LOTR films, you might not hate the parts he made up here.
I swear, if Jackson lets Kili live at the end or turns it into some "oh noes Tauriel has a sad and dies to save him" thing I am going to fly to New Zealand and punch a fucker.
(BTW -- I didn't hate the parts that Jackson brought to LoTR, and I was LIVID about these changes -- this despite the fact that I actually remember the LoTR books far better and have mostly forgotten Hobbit. Because while the LoTR changes messed with characterization a bit, the Hobbit changes are NONSENSICAL. Even with the current altered characterization.)
I feel genuinely bad for how hard I am giggling now. Before even reading your tags. (I saw it too early to kvetch openly and have had to be circumspect.)
NO no no, it makes perfect sense to take a creature with an impenetrable hide that BREATHES LAVA and attempt to kill (kill? subdue? distract? FLATTER?) it with molten gold.
*briefly annoys a dragon with mild inconvenience* *tells dragon it was beautiful all along*
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chiming
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 04:55 am (UTC)From:...I have spent way too much of my life being disappointed by CGI dragons, okay, this is an important part of any dragon-featuring movie. :D
But a hearty AMEN! to the endless chase- and fight-scenes being annoying. *eyerolling* I began to wonder if Jackson was trying to make a children's film, because he seemed to assume that 1) I the viewer had a roughly six-minute attention span, and 2) the way to manage that was to shovel in lots of slapstick fighting scenes.
Aside from the dragon, I enjoyed the Mirkwood bits, mainly because I'm a sucker for any bits of Elven culture; seeing Elvish kitchens and trading agreements was cool, and of course Tauriel being a guard and alleviating the sausagefest was pleasant. (And then it turned into Endless Dying Orcs On A
PlaneRiver, and I looked around to see if there were actually a bunch of small children in the audience or if Jackson had just somehow suddenly forgotten the age of his likely viewership.)no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 01:46 pm (UTC)From:Jackson did the slapstick falling skulls in LOTR (the cave sequence), the extended chase scene (Moria), but it didn't feel like filler there. Except the Moria sequence; that dragged on way too long. Maybe because LOTR has more to start with?
Something else Jackson seems to do is take away characters' growth moments. In Fellowship, at the Fords when Frodo was dying of morgul-blade, in the movie he just goes "gasp wheeze gasp wheeze" while Arwen takes him to safety, whereas in the book, he says, "By Elbereth and Luthien the Fair, you will have neither the ring nor me" and spurs his pony.
In DoS, the insert!elves get Bilbo's growth moment in Mirkwood with the spiders.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 11:14 pm (UTC)From:Interesting that you noted this; I hadn't put it together as a coherent thing, but two of my pet peeves about the LOTR movies were...
1. Ents get their agency taken away in order to give Merry/Pippin a more dramatic growth moment -- in-novel, the Ents were well aware of Saruman's activities and eventually decide on their own to go to war! But Jackson makes them oblivious idiots so that a hobbit can give a rousing speech and show his new 'maturity'; made even sillier by contradicting the entire "Ents take a long time to say [and decide] anything" that he went to such pains to show us mere minutes before.
2. The Steward of Gondor is presented as a spoilt brat who dies more or less by accident so that the heroes can get on with things. (Not incidentally, "guy on fire running off a cliff" is yet another helping of Jacksonian My CGI Let Me Show You It, though mercifully a brief one.) His canon ending is far more self-aware, and chosen deliberately; the change irked me because it shaved off so much depth from his character. Jackson's Steward is a two-scene Minor Baddie, instead of a man who has ruled a city for decades and fathered two major characters, and presumably kept all those non-Gondorians Boromir mentions safe from Sauron's minions for years.
Growth moments really do seem to be a problem with Jackson in more ways than just not having them; he seems to have little idea how to do them if they don't involve a dramatic speech followed by someone dying. :\
no subject
Date: 2013-12-29 05:34 pm (UTC)From:It mainly makes me wish that Guillermo del Toro had been allowed to make a Hobbit movie years ago.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 03:52 am (UTC)From:Vaguely inspired by your comments on tumblr: I saw this crazy idea about reading Bilbo as a girl (http://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2013/12/18/one-weird-old-trick/) the other day, and was far more tempted than I ever would have expected to be. We'll see what I eventually do. (At least for my first read through LotR, I honestly thought that Merry was a girl, so I know how viable that sort of switch can be.)
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 01:35 pm (UTC)From:If you didn't hate or were ambivalent about the parts Jackson invented in the LOTR films, you might not hate the parts he made up here.
I swear, if Jackson lets Kili live at the end or turns it into some "oh noes Tauriel has a sad and dies to save him" thing I am going to fly to New Zealand and punch a fucker.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-06 04:37 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 08:21 am (UTC)From:*quietly bedazzles dragons*
no subject
Date: 2013-12-28 01:36 pm (UTC)From:All the parts Peter Jackson made up to make a 200-page children's book Epic In Scale are terrible.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-05 09:01 am (UTC)From:*briefly annoys a dragon with mild inconvenience*
*tells dragon it was beautiful all along*