(no subject)

[brushwolf]

So... I saw The Hobbit. Short review; good, but very Peter Jackson. If you like Peter Jackson movies, you'll like this one and unfortunately you've also basically seen it. I find it unfortunately easy to criticize, which is too bad because it's a good movie, it really is, I enjoyed it!

• The biggest thing that the movie did better than the book was providing what exactly Bilbo was trying to do picking a troll's pocket.
  
  
• Initially I didn't get the way Thorin looked like the front man for a Swedish metal band, but it makes perfect sense in a movie where he's basically Aragorn Only Shorter.
  
  
• The awesomest thing about this movie are the locations. I saw this and wanted to visit Dale, live in Bag End, see Erebor, and run adventures as dimensional and as cool as Goblin Town. Seriously the goblin escape sequence was pretty much what a 4e D&D scenario should be; being able to swap vertically between multiple levels, having both potential advantages and traps for the player characters built in as part of the terrain, and having a variety of opponents.
  
  
• Along those lines I couldn't stand the stone giant insert. It struck me as very tabletop game gone wrong; the players get to sit on their asses rolling skill checks while unassailable big NPCs pound on each other. Yep, uh-huh, got 14 on that Dodge, got 18 on Acrobatics, gotta roll Dodge again, oh hey, the DM doesn't want the characters to take 20d6 falling damage so they manage to all survive the stone giant getting pounded and falling into the gorge. It would be annoying in a game, it was actually boring here.
  
  
• An impressive bit of old-skool special effects lost in the sea of incredible effects; horses well trained enough and smart/mellow enough to be okay wandering around in full torso pony costumes. It took me a while to spot this; the jawline and heads are just not pony-like. I'm guessing probably some sort of cob?
  
  
• Radagast. Ugh. I imagined Radagast as a sort of druid/beorning type, the "big bearded dude with chunky brown clothes who doesn't say much so people just think of him as simple" archetype, but that isn't the same thing as comic relief. And Sylvester McCoy. So now my least favorite Doctor can be my least favorite of the Istari! The Dragonlance problem; the bumbling funny wizard stops being comic relief when you also have comic relief dwarves and other comic relief bumbling funny wizards.
  
  
• Wow, Saruman was a jerk. I don't think Saruman was ever that jerky. Put Christopher Lee being a jerk with Hugo Weaving being a pedantic prick (for an imminently likeable big name actor, Hugo Weaving does pedantic prick very very well) and Cate Blanchett being oh so enigmatic elfy that she shits glowing Tengwar, and you've got the Council of Maiar Whom I Would Like to Kick in the Shins.
  
  Incidentally, today's cheap humor; the White Council doesn't sound like a group of powerful wizards protecting Middle Earth. It sounds like a batch of rich guys protecting Palo Alto from getting a BART station.
  
  
• Teh Drama. Some of it was good and fun, but there's just soooo much Teh Drama in this movie, with Thorin not wanting to deal with Elves, Thorin feuding with Gandalf, Thorin not trusting Bilbo, Thorin's rivalry with Azog, the Necromancer and the coming of greater evil into the world, Gandalf not getting anywhere with the White Council, Bilbo becoming a hero at the last minute, and so on. Even in a three hour movie there's a limit to how much overdramatic makes for good pacing and whatever that is, this movie went beyond it.
  
  
• Mirkwood. The Greenwood slowly falling to evil is one of the big things that happened in the earlier chunk of the Third Age; it's why the hobbits are nice suburbanites rather than whatever semi-wild Smeagol-like ancestors camped out in The Greenwood. Having it be suddenly whoa, the Necromancer, whoa Mirkwood! is changing a pretty hefty chunk of Middle Earth canon that nobody's going to spot other than dweebs who read The Silmarillion for fun. It actually doesn't bug me; it's just, that's a big thing to fiddle with. But the movie scores major Tolkien dweeb points for discussing Angmar and Mount Gundabad.
  
  
• One thing the book definitely did better than the movie; trapped in a high tree, Gandalf is preparing his last, badass spell before the eagles show up. JRRT lets us know it's gonna be epic. The sort of thing you expect from a guy who later stands off one of the most terrifying demons in Middle-Earth by taking out a solid chunk of dwarf-carved masonry. A lot more epic than sparking pinecones with difficulty and tossing them at wargs. Seriously, guys? Seriously?
  
  
• Oh man so many long or high angle long shots of people falling off precipices. I think I can go for a few more months now without having to see another long shot of people falling off scenery. It's cool, it's dramatic, and it's a good contrast with medium action shots and close/collar reaction shots, but there's a lot of People Falling Off Scenery in this movie. The end of the movie with the trees falling and tree roots of surprisingly inconsistent strength manages to have exactly no impact whatsoever because you've just spent a lot of the last three hours watching People Fall Off Scenery.

... uh, and I kinda want to see it again.