Decided to re-watch the hobbit trilogy to see if they were as bad as I remember them being. Whilst there were some scenes I thought were well done (Bilbo’s conversation with smaug for example) the films just aren’t good in the way the Lord of the Rings movies are. The LOTR movies feel properly epic and the hobbit movies just feel so “Hollywood” for lack of a better term. All the fight scenes are stupid with excessive cgi but the worst part I feel is the acrobatics of them all with characters leaping off scenery and twirling around whilst slicing up enemies. None of the battles feel “real” or realistic in the way they do in LOTR. The dialogue in the hobbit movies also suffers from what feels like Joss Whedon-esque script writing with tons of witty quips and “humorous” observations on the situation.
Have you seen any of the fan edits? They’re limited by the source material obviously but you can do a lot with just cutting out all the unnecessary nonsense.
I have not. I thought about finding one of the fan edits that remove a ton of filler and so cut the 3 movies into 1 very long one but the pacing of the films wasn’t my main complaint with them. There are totally scenes I would have been happy to have been cut and whilst that would have been an improvement, I just disliked so much of the actual movie part of the movies and I don’t see how any fan edit could polish that turd into something I would happily re-watch over and over again like I do frequently with the LOTR movies (and don’t get me wrong I still have some minor gripes with those movies too - such as how Faramir’s interactions with Sam and Frodo differ from the books and how they turned Gimli into comedic relief for most of his scenes). But (despite being high fantasy) LOTR always feels real. The characters aren’t just flanderised and walking one-liner machines. The battles are brutal and grounded in reality and don’t feature any of this cinematic bullshit (goatshit?)
We watched the Tolkien Edit when it first came out and it was a huge improvement, but was also a fairly rushed project so while it was good at the time it apparently doesn’t hold up against newer ones. Nowadays there are tons of different ones with different approaches, I hear good things about the Maple Films one but haven’t had chance to check it out yet.
They truly are some of the greatest disappointments of our cinematic era. So much hype for nothing. The Hobbit and Game of Thrones will outlive most movies and shows culturally just based on how badly they were received
I mean, the hype when Del Toro was on the film and they were gonna split it into only two films to fill in the surrounding story … that was highest hype that ever deflated hard, at least for me.
Decided to re-watch the hobbit trilogy to see if they were as bad as I remember them being. Whilst there were some scenes I thought were well done (Bilbo’s conversation with smaug for example) the films just aren’t good in the way the Lord of the Rings movies are. The LOTR movies feel properly epic and the hobbit movies just feel so “Hollywood” for lack of a better term. All the fight scenes are stupid with excessive cgi but the worst part I feel is the acrobatics of them all with characters leaping off scenery and twirling around whilst slicing up enemies. None of the battles feel “real” or realistic in the way they do in LOTR. The dialogue in the hobbit movies also suffers from what feels like Joss Whedon-esque script writing with tons of witty quips and “humorous” observations on the situation.
Have you seen any of the fan edits? They’re limited by the source material obviously but you can do a lot with just cutting out all the unnecessary nonsense.
I have not. I thought about finding one of the fan edits that remove a ton of filler and so cut the 3 movies into 1 very long one but the pacing of the films wasn’t my main complaint with them. There are totally scenes I would have been happy to have been cut and whilst that would have been an improvement, I just disliked so much of the actual movie part of the movies and I don’t see how any fan edit could polish that turd into something I would happily re-watch over and over again like I do frequently with the LOTR movies (and don’t get me wrong I still have some minor gripes with those movies too - such as how Faramir’s interactions with Sam and Frodo differ from the books and how they turned Gimli into comedic relief for most of his scenes). But (despite being high fantasy) LOTR always feels real. The characters aren’t just flanderised and walking one-liner machines. The battles are brutal and grounded in reality and don’t feature any of this cinematic bullshit (goatshit?)
I’ve been looking forward to checking them out. How many are there … any recs?
We watched the Tolkien Edit when it first came out and it was a huge improvement, but was also a fairly rushed project so while it was good at the time it apparently doesn’t hold up against newer ones. Nowadays there are tons of different ones with different approaches, I hear good things about the Maple Films one but haven’t had chance to check it out yet.
They truly are some of the greatest disappointments of our cinematic era. So much hype for nothing. The Hobbit and Game of Thrones will outlive most movies and shows culturally just based on how badly they were received
I mean, the hype when Del Toro was on the film and they were gonna split it into only two films to fill in the surrounding story … that was highest hype that ever deflated hard, at least for me.
I liked The Hobbit and GoT. Furthermore I liked the higher framerate when I saw The Hobbit in a theater which was showing the higher framerate. 🤷