> Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? "They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25," Christopher says regretfully. "And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film."
no, hobbit is worse. the first episode of hobbit was a 3 hour long trailer with zero substance.
Wait, what do you mean no substance? We had a rabbit-powered Santa Clause-esque sleigh, a "thunder battle" between two Michael Bay-esque transformers ("robots in disguise" as mountains), lots of silly makeup for the dwarves, Voldemort from Harry Potter made a cameo as the "pale orc," and we got to re-watch maybe 25 minutes of The Fellowship of the Ring again. Oh, and we learn that Kili is apparently related to Legalos, when you see his unrivaled agility and skill with a bow and arrow.
It takes a lot of effort and hard work to take a great story that would have easily made the best 3 hour movie of the decade and turn it into a 10 hour, 3-part ridiculous something. "No substance," he says!
The giants were in the book. Everything else was in the books and writings around the Hobbit (apart from the rabbits of course). I'd heard that the Radagast scene was terrible but I didn't think it was that bad in the end - they portrayed him pretty well as one of the wizards that had lost interest in the peoples of Middle Earth in favour of animals.
Yes. But the giants were in the book for all of one paragraph.
The Hobbit is a much lighter work than LotR, and it was aimed at a younger audience, and so can sustain a lot more whimsy and silliness.
IMHO the Radagast stuff worked well enought, and the giants a lot less so, mainly since the movie was too long and there's no good reason why they were there at all. They didn't add to any plotline, or tie up with anything else.
Do you mean the mountain transformers? Sorry, they weren't.
Here's a quote from the "thunder-battle" scene:
> He knew that something unexpected might happen, and he hardly dared to hope that they would pass without fearful adventure over those great tall mountains with lonely peaks and valleys where no king ruled. They did not. All was well, until one day they met a thunderstorm, more than a thunderstorm, a thunder-battle. You know how terrific a really big thunderstorm can be down in the land and in a river valley; especially at times when two great thunderstorms meet and clash. More terrible still are thunder and lightning in the mountains at night, when storms come up from East and West and make war. The lightning splinters on the peaks, and rocks shiver, and great crashes split the air and go rolling and tumbling into every cave and hollow; and the darkness is filled with overwhelming noise and sudden light.
To me, that quite clearly is a symbolic "battle." Not mountains turning to golems or giants or transformers or what-not.
I think Tolkien meant the giants to be real in the Hobbit. The paragraph after then one you quoted starts with:
When [Bilbo] peeped out in the lightning flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching then, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang...They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountansides.
"This won't do at all!" said Thorin, "If we don't get blown off or drowned, or struck by lightning, we shall be picked up by some giant and kicked sky-high for a football."
After the party escapes the goblins and gets through the mountains, Gandalf suggests blocking up the entrance in the pass through which they had been ambushed:
"I must see if I can't find a more or less decent giant to block it up again," said Gandalf, "or soon there will be no getting over the mountains at all."
You shouldn't, at least not completely. The giants in the book are giants--very large humanoids. They are not mountains that transform into something else.
Tolkien never actually describes them, so we don't know if they're stone-giants because they live among the stones of the mountains, because they throw stones, or because they are made of stone. I actually pictured them as Pdonis describes them, as very large humanoids, although I can't be sure.
But I don't think we can definitively settle the question of the giants' form, as we simply don't have enough data. So I suggest we branch out to another unanswerable question: would Gandalf have used Emacs or Vim? How about Sauron?
Tolkien doesn't come right out and say "giants are very large humanoids", but so what? They are described as throwing stones, which clearly implies that they are humanoids. The "very large" part is implied by the word "giant"; also, of course, there are plenty of mythological references to giants, in particular in Norse mythology, which Tolkien is known to have drawn upon, and they're always very large humanoids.
Yeah, most of the silliest things in The Hobbit movie [er... "Part 1"], where "silly" sometimes turns into "cringe-inducing", were places where they expanded a couple of sentences in the book into a long drawn-out super-CGI-heavy battle/chase scene.
I can forgive the moviemakers some poetic license, but these sequences typically feel very out of place, like very expensive padding, and detract from the general atmosphere rather than adding to it.
The worst, in my mind was the whole undergound goblin battle sequence ... realllllllllly long and repetitive, resembling a roller-coaster ride more than anything else. That sort of thing is great for Transformers Part VI, but it's utterly out of place in the Hobbit.
The book was not an action adventure, it was much more about exploration, leaving the familiar for the wider world, a sense of wonder, whimsy, etc, and the movie often just completely flubs this.
I really, realllly, wish stupid movie politics hadn't resulted in Guillermo del Toro quitting, because I think he could have done a much better job at capturing the atmosphere of the book. Pan's Labyrinth is a much, much, better movie, and shows a deft touch with this sort of material that Jackson (though I respect him greatly) just doesn't seem to have. Nature, for instance, in Jackson's movies is basically a very pretty backdrop; in Pan's Labyrinth, on the other hand, it's a presence, fantastic, a little threatening, full of portent and vast depths. That's the sort of sense The Hobbit should have had.
Wrong quote. The giants were in the book. Some quotes:
> When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang.
> They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides.
> "If we don't get blown off or drowned, or struck by lightning, we shall be picked up by some giant and kicked sky-high for a football."
Quote:
> "I must see if I can't find a more or less decent giant to block it up again," said Gandalf
You see, the producers discovered J.R.R. Tolkien belonged to the Lucas and Rowling school of thought, and named Kili — or should I say… Kill-i — after the role he was meant to play in the story.
Which was at least partly in the book: ""Good heavens! Can you ask! Goblins fighting and biting in the dark, everybody falling over bodies and hitting one another! You nearly chopped off my head with Glamdring, and Thorin Was stabbing here there and everywhere with Orcrist. All of a sudden you gave one of your blinding flashes, and we saw the goblins running back yelping. You shouted 'follow me everybody!' and everybody ought to have followed. We thought everybody had. There was no time to count, as you know quite well, till we had dashed through the gate-guards, out of the lower door, and helter-skelter down here. And here we are-without the burglar, confusticate him!""
Yeah, I hate it when they do that. The worst part is when the MPAA henchmen break into my house and steal the copies of the original books that I legitimately paid for. I guess Orwell was right... control the past, and you control the future.
Or maybe Christopher Tolkien needs to STFU, sign his royalty checks, and let culture take its course. Or - gasp - get a word processor and earn his own keep.
I haven't seen the Hobbit, but as far as I'm concerned, Jackson owns LotR now. The best-rendered edition of the story is his.
He has, by organizing, editing, and publishing all of his father's posthumous work, from The Silmarillion on. He is his father's literary executor, so he was doing his job, and publishing books that people will pay for counts as earning his keep.
I think people hating on The Hobbit were just mad they ran out of popcorn before the third act. It's a valid criticism that the film does run a little long to not have a definite conclusion.
I did pretty much that. Which makes it even weirder that the movie was so dark and gloomy and showed so many cut-off heads up close. (Maybe some of the darkness was caused by the 3D.)
I had somehow managed to never read or see any of the Tolkien books or related films, until going to see The Hobbit a few weeks ago. I greatly enjoyed the movie, and have thus far greatly enjoyed reading the book (about 2/3 of the way through now).
I suppose I can understand how he feels though, as he is probably closer to the original material than anyone else alive today.
no, hobbit is worse. the first episode of hobbit was a 3 hour long trailer with zero substance.