Bored Druid Thread: The Next GenerationFollow

I spent a solid half of the second hobbit bored out of my mind. Talk about a movie that could use 1/3rd the amount of action sequences...

I've been enjoying them. I wouldn't worry about digg's concern, he doesn't enjoy anything.

Doesn't seem to me like there's enough source material to make 3 movies out of to start with.

Three movies is a stretch if you limit yourself to only material directly in the hobbit book (no appendixes etc), but it should take two movies imo.

I think stretching it out allowed them to develop some of the topics and scenes in a way that they couldn't otherwise and pull in really cool content from other Tolkien sources that provide a richer tapestry for the story.

Me either. I've never been a fan of Tolkien's books.

You know you don't have to watch them all at once right?

Edited, May 23rd 2014 2:02pm by Xsarus

hehe. I guess I never felt like I got stuck, because I knew the story and so it just felt like a new way of hearing it.

I think it would be really frustrating if I hadn't read the books though.

I know the story, things like that still bother me to no end.

The bits of the movie that WEREN'T ridiculously long fight scenes I enjoyed well enough. But holy crap, enough is enough.

I love fight scenes as much as the next geek, but jfc I don't want a 3 hour fight scene. And that's pretty much what the movie is. Stupidly extended fight scenes with little plot relevance, now with "Bilbo staring longingly at the ring" scenes.

I went into the first Hobbit with really low expectations and was reasonably happy with it. The fight scenes were still too long/numerous, but it was decent otherwise.

This movie? No. Just... No. I went into it with far lower expectations (only watched it because my dad wanted to see it). And, well, I really wish I hadn't.

Lord of the Rings had a lot of combat, but it was really well-edited. And they actually had to snip content. The Hobbit stretches content to its breaking point, then adds super extended fight scenes.

I mean, Legolas had a ludicrous amount of facetime in this movie, and he's yet to be relevant to the plot in any way. Literally. He probably had more screen time than Thorin, and all of that was just him killing Orcs.

Are you hitting on diggory now?

I hope so, because I'm hot and bothered.

But the thing about the second hobbit is that the only people I know IRL who liked the second Hobbit are the ones who would never have disliked it. I mean that in the most literal sense possible. It's an even divide between people who would have watched Peter Jackson jack off for two hours and those who just wanted the damn action sequences to be half as long.

And, surprisingly, even some of the people I expected to be in the first category came away from it with the same critique; that pretty much everything that happened in the mountain shouldn't have.

There just is NOT anywhere close to the amount of content here to justify three movies. There just isn't. If you're the sort of person that doesn't care if they pad out the remaining time with needlessly drawn out action sequences, that might not bother you. But it'll bother anyone else.

The combat in Lord of the Rings was there because the writers made the decision specifically to put combat in in lieu of content, because they had way more to work with than they could fit. So the end result was a really well-edited, well-paced, well-written trilogy that was heavy on both combat and content, but moved between the two quite well.

The Hobbit doesn't have anywhere near that level of content to work with, and you can really feel it.

I thought The Two Towers focused too much on the fighting already and that made it by far the weakest of the three LotR movies to me.