THE HOBBIT MOVIE

Well, so far I did not comment on this matter very much and I didn’t feel to do so. That is because Master Mornedhel and Master Gavin by now have already found words for my thoughts and I only, but entirely, can support their point of view.

Interestingly, this afternoon, I read about this:

https://tolkieneditor.wordpress.com/2015/01/13/i-have-recut-peter-jacksons-hobbit-trilogy-into-a-single-4-hour-film/

Well, today, I finally watched the Extended Edition of An Unexpected Journey.

What a difference it makes.

The individual extras are nothing terribly exciting. Some of them are extra dumbness. But they are useful extra dumbness. The weirdly stretched and overstuffed first film is now longer, and there’s more time given to scenes where nothing else is going on, but characters are interacting, expressing themselves and given moments of “humanity” (or hobbity, or dwarfity) that were not there before. Thorin, we learn is quite aware of the potential for madness in his family, and aware others around him are equally aware. Bilbo and Elrond actually make friends, the ancient distant immortal recognising, perhaps, a fellow scholar and lover of learning. The Shire sequences are much extended, feel fuller and are as charming as before.

Someone even passes a statue of an elf maid which looks eerily like a Chris Tubb sculpt – something to do with the hair, at any rate.

The big dumb moments are still there. One even gets dumber – one of the goblin songs sneaks back in. There’s a bit of useless pratfalling by the Dwarves when they are guests in Rivendell, a scene which gets a bit tiresome, but it breaks up some maybe slower, but important interactions between the key cast.

One of the key issues, for me, is the design of the orcs. And how they really shouldn’t have made them so front and centre. What makes the Orcs so effective in the older films is that you never really got a good look at them. You got impressions of wild eyes and violence and scars and inhumanity, something about how they were equipped, something about the character of the foe. I have been painting a bunch of the licensed GW orcs recently and they are really quite annoying. The designs are ok, but after a while, something about them becomes just seems wrong. The costume designs tell a story elsewhere, but the story is chaotic here. Contrast with the simplicity of the Mithril designs. The costume designs in The Hobbit are worse, with even less of a story and more stylisation. The film as a whole has some strange weapon designs, but nowhere is this more obvious than with the various Orc tribes. Physically, they are even worse. In the older films, they were clearly people in makeup, but the camera doesn’t dwell on them. In this one, imagining advanced in CGI technology and cinematic blending that clearly don’t exist yet, the director chooses to let the camera linger on different orc designs. They emerge as plasticy, characterless and overdone, as if they have fallen into this often quite charming film from some other genre entirely. The whole Azog plot is defensible as a cinematic change, but the execution is weak indeed.

And, sad to say, they did not take this golden opportunity to cut the “storm giants” sequence.

Completely agreed with these feelings!