Movie Theater "Why The Hobbit Sucks"
- Thread starter steve podleski
- Start date
I worked my ass off on those movies...it was super frustrating.
I’m a Tolkien fan and really didn’t like the “Disney ride” nature of the movies and the stupid melting gold with the dragon. The art direction was beautiful, however the extended editions let certain scenes go longer and made the movie so much better.
There is a Chinese film called Red Cliff that has a similar problem. The original film is nearly 5 hours long and is immersive and moving. Thinking it was too long for western audiences, they cut it down to 2+ hours for an international release, basically leaving in the (cheesy) fight scenes. Totally sucks, just doesn’t flow or move.
There is a Chinese film called Red Cliff that has a similar problem. The original film is nearly 5 hours long and is immersive and moving. Thinking it was too long for western audiences, they cut it down to 2+ hours for an international release, basically leaving in the (cheesy) fight scenes. Totally sucks, just doesn’t flow or move.
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The Hobbit films are to Peter Jackson what the Star Wars prequels are to George Lucas. On LOTR, Jackson was under considerable constraints across the board, which forced him (and his team) to be exceptionally creative. They planned years of production and post production work meticulously and followed it very pragmatically. The Hobbit was quite the opposite: the only constraint was time, and even then things were still unbelievably chaotic. All of the planning was pretty much right out the window, and less-than-pragmatic decisions were made that just made everything a major compromise. This was especially obvious on the second film where we told him we could either do the billions of coins simulations with Smaug OR a fully CG river chase sequence, and he agreed that filming he river sequence was a smarter plan. They went and filmed the river down on the South Island, but once he started putting shots together in the edit, he decided he didn’t like it and now we scrambled to simulate a river at cm resolution over its entire length (enough waste of man power and CPU hours) because he still couldn’t decide where he wanted the spaction to take place (note: the smart way is to do the difficult detailed work only in the spots that matter). And then the end sequence in the mines was completely thrown out and redone with just three weeks to go. There are shots I did that basically only got one or two attempts to finish, let alone make it look decent, versus the normal process that would require 8-20 passes. It was nuts.
That’s just my opinion though.
That’s just my opinion though.
i still envy that you had worked on CG on a film 
The type of work I did on movies means I worked on a lot of VFX-heavy stinkers like "Armageddon", "The Core", "Battlefield Earth", and "The Day After Tomorrow." But occasionally there were pretty good films like "Shutter Island" and "Flags of Our Fathers." But then there were the stinkers that had work I'm still really proud of to this day (but that no one outside of work would understand why the work was so impressive) like "Speed Racer", "The Adventures of Tin Tin", and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." Cancer ended my VFX career, and after I went to college and finally beat cancer, I dipped my toe back in VFX and got to melt the iron throne for "Game of Thrones", but that just confirmed I was done. I work on self-driving cars now...and still miss night combat equipment jumps.
LOTR trilogy is a master piece. The Hobbit was good, but had issues. Part was trying to make a trilogy out of a much shorter piece of work. THe Rankin Bass animated Hobbit does a great job of following the book. I felt that many scenes were amplified or exagerated to make the series longer. Or added sub plots that were not needed like the female elf love story. I did like the Necromancer plot since it was foreshadowing for the LOTR movies. I also read that Tolkienn's family didn't allow outside works to be included in the Hobbit. It was a shame since in a few scenes the Elf's and Dwarves Rings of Power would have been on scene. And IIRC, it was one of the Rings that cause Thorin's Grandfather and Dad to go insane, not the ArkenStone.
These movies are better for those who have not read the books. Translating LOTR books to movies is like translating, anything written by Stephen King, to movies. It's so fantastic that it's very difficult to for video production to do anything close to what the imagination does, when reading. I think LOTR movies are excellent and Hobbit films are good, but nothing beats reading the books.
^^^ This. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was amazing. The Hobbit was just about promoting a yet-to-be-built amusement park somewhere. It was horrible. Awful.
The direction, story, scenery, etc. was all really neat. But the whole thing was for a short-attention-span generation who could never understand.
Sirhr
”Shutter Island” is also the only film I’m physically in. There’s a scene where DiCaprio returns to the cliff and finds that his buddy Garofalo is no longer there. He looks down and for a brief split second sees his buddy splayed out on the rocks, then waves wash over him. This idea came late in post-production and we quickly hobbled something together. We had his costume handy and it fit me, so I went down to the ground floor just outside the studio in Santa Monica, and the guys took photos of me laying down on the concrete from four floors up. Thirty minutes later I was in the Nuke composite and the shot was finaled.
First one I enjoyed, they went downhill from there IMO
CGI just doesn’t look as good, I still prefer Jurassic park 1 over the new one, same with aliens
CGI just doesn’t look as good, I still prefer Jurassic park 1 over the new one, same with aliens
From someone that actually read the LOTR trilogy 5 or 6 times, I enjoyed the extended LOTR movies immensely, however, I had pretty serious issues with how they portrayed Faramir and Aragorn, as both portrayals were vastly different than the books and were a disservice to the characters. Plus, the whole injecting Arwen into the story like they did. Liv Tyler is, however, quite beautiful, so I can forgive that.
I enjoy the movies for what they are but in my mind they have nothing to do with the books. Too many unnecessary changes after Fellowship.
The Hobbit movies on the other hand were just garbage. I think PJ was done with the Tolkien universe at this point and just made them to be done with it, since he could not find another director.
In Lord of the Rings, they cut out half of Fellowship and half of Return, then took chunks out of Towers so they could make three roughly equal-length films.
With The Hobbit, they cut a 250-page children's book into three films by adding parts of the story that Tolkien only alluded to in the novel (to be fair, we knew that Gandalf was off fighting the Necromancer long before the movies came out), by adding characters who had no purpose in the narrative (for instance, the love triangle resulting from Jackson's Tauriel character, who is torn between a man we know she will never marry because he's single in LOTR, and a man we know she will never marry because he dies in the book of The Hobbit), and by over-inflating every scene they could with material taken from Lord of the Rings, its appendices, or even throwaway comments about in-universe mythological creatures (as is the case with the giant worms that show up in TBOFA only to not be involved in the fight).
With The Hobbit, they cut a 250-page children's book into three films by adding parts of the story that Tolkien only alluded to in the novel (to be fair, we knew that Gandalf was off fighting the Necromancer long before the movies came out), by adding characters who had no purpose in the narrative (for instance, the love triangle resulting from Jackson's Tauriel character, who is torn between a man we know she will never marry because he's single in LOTR, and a man we know she will never marry because he dies in the book of The Hobbit), and by over-inflating every scene they could with material taken from Lord of the Rings, its appendices, or even throwaway comments about in-universe mythological creatures (as is the case with the giant worms that show up in TBOFA only to not be involved in the fight).
