We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

I was also about nine when my dad first read me the books! Faramir was my favorite and I was a very confused/irate smol when I saw Two Towers in theaters and he was Not Faramir??? (But over time Denethor has started bothering me a lot more.)

 

I've seen approximately 1 and 1/3 of them, and of the stuff I saw pretty much the only really good thing was the Riddles in the Dark scene.

 

There's actually some stuff I felt that the hobbit movies handled better than the book... but that just means that they wasted an opportunity for another great story on top of not adapting the book well. Whoops. >:I

 

The thing that made me whine the most in the Hobbit movie bits I saw was that Smaug knew Bilbo had the Ring, knew what it was, and implied something about giving it to Sauron, which is a grave misunderstanding of the characters of both Smaug and the One Ring.

On the other hand, it made me imagine a frankly awesome AU where Smaug becomes the new Dark Lord.

 

tbh I think the Hobbit movies could have been good if everyone wasn't so married to the idea of making it another Lord of the Rings style three part nine hour epic. I don't care how many times you cut to magic eye sauron this isn't that story. But as it is all of the good for me is drowned out by, at best, long periods of boredom with the occasional eye roll, and at worst (in a personal sense) thousand foot goddamn drops for zero reason
(also i am so fucking salty about how literally they took the giants fighting thing. And it isn't even a visually cool scene because in TYOOL whenever it came out we were/are all used to big ass cgi fight scenes)

 

why did Bard have to be Aragorn Lite™

 

There's actually a fan-edited cut out there that pares out all the gratuitous filler spectacle crap to make it one movie. I haven't watched it, but apparently it's a huge improvement.

 

Also because I am eternally salty about a lot of design choices people tend to take with various corners of Tolkien stuff, i'm just gonna casually drop my alternative designs here :U

 

So like, my biggest problem with the Hobbit movies—well, no, okay, my biggest problem is that they made three friggin' movies out of the book, and then I guess my other biggest problem is Tauriel, and then also everyone's characterization is butchered to hell and back—I have multiple biggest problems with those movies. But if I had to pick one? It would be that the titular hobbit is the least important character in the movies. I don't know how they did that! It's Bilbo's book! It's his story, it's about him! Where the heck was he in the movies?!
Also the battle with Smaug was an anticlimax. A DRAGON SHOULD NEVER BE ANTICLIMACTIC.
(This person has some really good analysis/meta about everything that went wrong with the Hobbit movies, I highly recommend reading through her stuff.)

:D I know, Faramir in the book is so intensely badass! "Even if I found this thing on the highway, I would not take it." Damn, son.

Also, let me just slip in a link here to one of my favorite Tolkien fanartists. Be sure to check out the comic strips, there's more adorable wee!Sons of the Steward + Calvin & Hobbes jokes than you can shake the White Tree at.

 

oh, and I glossed over this before, but... what the fuck, was the giant hellspider not enough of a payoff? Frodo was half dead! All seemed lost! That wasn't enough for them?

 

I don't even mind the a lot of the spectacle crap, honestly, it's just not Hobbit-appropriate. Make a d&d movie with all that BoFA crazy gonzo bullshit, pj, please and thank you.

 

Important question: does it set the entire dwarves v Smaug sequence to Yakity Sax? Or at least replace Thorin's face with Macaulay Culkin's?

 

Obviously pastede-on-yey interpersonal drama is the only drama that counts, duh.

 

I imagine it just removes the entire thing. (But yes, that's one of the bits I saw, and I had the same reaction. Along with "how is this still happening" and playing that MST3K padding song clip in my head.)

Well, since for some reason they decided not to leave that cliffhanger from the book in place... :::///

 

That has always bothered me! I mean, the ending of Two-Towers-the-book is so beautifully heartwrenching, not to mention it's a literal cut to black. It seems like it would have been a really good, dramatic way to end TTT-the-movie…

 

Because that would detract from TT being Battle of Helms Deep: the movie

 

Oh that's right. MORE ELVES, WE MUST HAVE MORE ELVES, NO ONE CARES ABOUT ANYTHING THAT IS NOT ELVES

 

Honestly, that doesn't even bother me as much, except for the title. A dwarf-centric Quest for Erebor would be a perfectly legitimate "just different than the books" film adaptation, and I really liked the direction the hobbit films kinda took with focusing on Thorin's doomed nobility and inevitable madness. Of course, the way to actually follow through with that would be to play up the contrast with Bilbo's essential hobbitishness, because Thorin's nobility will bring nothing but ruin and is only a pale echo of ages past, anyways -- see Smaug's "I laid low the warriors of old and their like is not in the world today." If you want to echo forward to Lord of the Rings, it's right there -- only the small and humble have any hope of success in these dark days with no heroes like the heroes of old. Also GIVE ME THE FUCKING RAVENS AND THRUSH BACK, JACKSON. TALKING ANIMALS ARE ONLY DUMB IF YOU MAKE THEM DUMB.
Also, if you're gonna spend a movie hyping up the black arrow, why the fuck would you cut bard's awesome soliloquy to it???
But I liked the way that the movies went with reclaiming their lost home -- or at least some token of it -- as the motivation for the quest more than I recall the books doing, it feels a lot more powerful than just recovering lost treasure.

 

Add that in general -- pointless altering of dialogue and especially speeches that would have worked much better if you'd just taken the words directly from the book.
Yeah, copying the book word-for-word the whole way is generally a bad idea, but don't just change shit that works for the sake of changing it. :I

 

Also, just, in general: The way to make a story less sexist isn't adding one (1) kickass girlpower character, its highlighting the inherent sexist problems and attitudes w/i the story and showing how those are destructive/self-destructive.