My spoilery review for TH:DOS
First of all, just going to the movie was a lot of fun. Our son took his dad and myself to the local theater, so it was in 2D; we didn't dress up this year, but I did wear my Bilbo's journey shirt and my hobbit feet. Here's a link to a picture of me that our son took
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I was accepting of shortened scene with Beorn, the shortened Mirkwood scene AT first but then i saw what was put instead post Lake-town and i just... am confused, just CONFUSED.
I am not canon police by far. I agree with deviations but deviations that do not add anything is not worth having. As a fanfction AU, PJ did that but that is not what some fans want. It seems like most are in favor of his changes but i don't think they were for the better.
If it were more faithful, he would have truncated Lake-town, made no Fili/Tauril healing scenes, had the worm die in this episode and left us with the siege of Erebor in which i kind of expected.
I've talked with several fans about it and it seems like majority is treating this as a fanfic. However, is that really the expectation you are left with? You want a classic to be adapted,but PJ manages to mangle things that shouldn't be mangled, manipulated to something unrecognizable. I don't even think this movie had anymore Tolkien in it. Are the deviations just to make more money by elongating the movies? Are the deviations because they needed more action? I think there is too much action in this film and not enough plot development and character development of the dwarves. Bard and Thranduil were fine but the book moment they held on to like giving the dwarves a "warm welcome" is what i liked. Lake-town shouldn't have been so dark in the first place in my opinion. Seemed more dangerous and dark and it wasn't like that in the book.
I wished for deviations that made sense; i just thought the deviations were like fanfiction and if PJ wanted to make fanfiction, just don't put Tolkien's name on there anymore.
I'm glad you liked it and hated it. I was wondering what your reaction was going to be. I think im' the worse and i dont' even know why. I guess my expectations were too high but given what i've seen with spoilers, i still thought it would be quite epic. :sigh:
A second viewing is in order when i get my emotions in check. :)
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And I've seen faithful word-for-word adaptations of some books that were dead boring.
And I've seen some that fall in between. To my mind PJ does fall in between. I know that he loves Middle-earth and the stories Tolkien gave us; in LOTR he mostly upheld the basic story as it was, with a few additions and some timeline complications, and some decisions that were head-scratchers. But with that book he HAD to truncate and delete because of its very length. He added stuff, but he couldn't go overboard.
I think the flaws in PJ's TH are from an excess of enthusiasm. Contrary to what many believe the three movies weren't made because of money. They were made because PJ did not want to leave out a lot of things he'd filmed. IMO, he simply did not want to finish playing in M-e, he wanted to keep it going as long as he could. Because TH is a shorter book, he had a lot more room, and I won't deny that I think he made several poor decisions.
I knew as soon as it was being expanded that it was going to be a huge fanfic, and a very AU one at that.
A second viewing may help. And (as I often do when I want to rant at PJ) it helps to remind yourself of what things you do like about his cine-verse. I always say I can forgive him any number of things for introducing Howard Shore into Middle-earth. I'd add to that, I can also forgive him a lot of things for giving me Martin Freeman's Bilbo.
Plus, he's NOT Ralph Bakshi...
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Sorry that is at least my point of view...
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