Posted on 12/02/2012 10:56:54 AM PST by Eurotwit
WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- There’s only one real wizard in Middle Earth - and it’s director Peter Jackson.
The auteur from Down Under unveiled “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” - the first installment of his prequel trilogy to his “Lord of the Rings” series - in his native New Zealand Wednesday.
It was an eye-popping night, from the celebrity-filled red carpet to, more important, the action on screen.
Based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s tale which set the stage for the author’s much darker and heavier later books, Jackson’s “The Hobbit” harkens back to a more innocent time when men were men and gold-hoarding dragons were the biggest evils plaguing the land.
Martin Freeman stars as the titular reluctant hero, who’s tricked by the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) into accompanying 13 dwarves — led by Thorin (a square-jawed Richard Armitage) — on a quest to reclaim their ancient homeland from the worst of those dragons.
The movie offers technological wizardry, thanks to a 48 frames-per-second format, twice the industry standard. Critics who saw a trailer earlier this year were unimpressed, but after a minute or two of adjusting, the higher resolution is eye-popping, similar to discovering HD television for the first time.
Gollum, voiced by Andy Serkis, makes a cameo in Peter Jackson's 'The Hobbit.'
Alas, the higher resolution has one downside: it really makes you wince when you see the obscenely corpulent Goblin King in such crystal clarity.
Lighter and funnier than its “Lord of the Rings” predecessors, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” remains faithful to the fantasy world last seen in the 2003 Academy Award-winning “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
The connections abound through the two-hour-forty-minute epic, including important cameos from Andy Serkis’ Gollum and Elijah Wood’s Frodo.
The result runs rings around most special-effects driven blockbusters.
The movie opens Dec. 14 on this side of the Pacific.
I agree. They are all relevant in the books. Not all information relevant in the books would work well on film. They are two different mediums.
However, for example, the Ring was supposed to have an unyielding temptation to whomever holds it. Tom Bombadil was able to play with that ring and it had no effect on him. How could it be explained, so the movie goer could understand that Tom was another force of nature, which is why the Ring had no effect on him?
Probably the only storyline missing that could have been told in a way that movie goers would understand was the scouring of the Shire. This could have been told in small ways, across the three movies, until their was a big buildup towards the end.
But that is really the only story line that could have been worked into the film, I think.
Wow, that brings back memories! RCA SelectaVision video discs, or CEDs as they were called, had great technical promise. Unfortuneately, RCA’s market timing was poor - delays caused them to go head-to-head with Laser Disks, which had the “wow” factor of being read by an ultra-cool device, a laser (OMG!!), as well as video tape, which offered home recording along with playback, and had a small but rapidly growing infrastructure of video tape rental businesses. CEDs just couldn’t compete.
When they released the Return of the King, my theatre offered tickets to see all three movies, in the extended version, for $50.
Thirteen hours and many minutes, with just a few minutes breaks between each movie so you could reload up with pop and popcorn.
They only screwed up a few things. One was the way they got their swords. The second was Tom Bombadil. The third was Arwen rescuing Frodo instead of Glorfindel. The fourth was the reforging of Aragorn’s sword. Other than that they were fairly true to the story.
They added a third one because they didn’t want to take anything out and they added Gandalf’s encounter with the with of Angmar in Mirkwood.
My main complaint with LOTR was that entirely too much was cut out in the understandable interest of fitting it into three movies, one for each volume. A much lighter and less thought provoking Hobbit still has enough complexity to fill two or three episodes. JMO
Quite agree with you about Aragorn’s character.
By the time of LOTR, he was 87 years old, he’d been in love with Arwen since he was 20, and engaged to her since he was 49. He’d been consciously working to gain the thrones of Arnor and Gondor for at minimum 38 years.
He might have gone thru the crises of confidence shown in the films, but certainly would have worked them thru long before the time shown by the movies.
In PJ’s partial defense, he may have been trying to show the arc of Aragorn’s life story compressed into the few months of the story.
A bigger personal pet peeve is the distortion of Faramir’s character. He was the sole Man (or indeed Elf or Hobbit) in the story shown as immune to the lure of the Ring, presumably because he was devoid of the lust for domination of others that the Ring keyed in on.
The Faramir of the book was a completely admirable character, the Faramir of the movie not so much. And I cannot see why this distortion was necessary to the story.
Oh, and don’t get me started on The Dead.
Since he had this unbeatable, indeed unfightable, army it turned the Battle of the Pelennor into a one-sided massacre rather than a hard-won victory by (mostly) Men fighting in defense of their countries and homes. In the books all The Dead really accomplished was to gain him control of the Fleet of Umbar, and they did that simply by the terror they induced in the Corsairs.
That said, I am astonished at how effectively he filmed this essentially unfilmable story. He kept almost all of the plot elements and improved on a few.
The Arwen as warrior bit really wasn’t that outre, and I wonder if Tolkien might not have used it himself had he thought of it. In some of his other writings he mentions that some of the female elves went into combat, notably Galadriel, Arwen’s grandma, who fought to defend her mother’s people at the First Kinslaying, if I remember correctly.
Agree with the complaints about too many “endings” in ROTK, but that was built into the book, where it was not as distracting as in the movie.
Also REALLY wanted to see the Scouring of the Shire.
Ping!
Ha - just picked this up in a library sale - be careful not for the young ones that. But it was hilarious.
Ferocious meant CED, an early 12-inch disc developed by RCA roughly contemporary with the laserdisc, but lower in price and quality.
CEDs were played with a pickup that tracked grooves like a phonograph needle, but the grooves were much smaller and more closely spaced, and the disc turned more than ten times faster than an LP. The pickup of the signal itself was not through any vibration of the needle; it was electronic (capacitive, to be specific).
This was before VHS or Beta, which soon killed the CED format.
blasphemy!
“The Trilogy of the Ring of the Nibelungen,” by James Richard Wagner Tolkien.
“I hope they haven’t screwed this up as they did the Lord of The Rings.”
Me too. Jackson seriuosly screwed over several characters making Frodo feckless and Faramir evil. I’m hoping he leaves the Hobbit characters and story line alone.
Unless you live in NYC and can only get Nanny Bloombergs ‘mini-sodas’ so you wont get fat drinking 32 oz at a time. Has he banned the big bags of popcorn yet?
Ditto. While I loved the movies, that omission was a big disappointment.
bmfl
yes! I totally agree that the distortion of Faramir was the worst error.
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