So Long, PJ, And Thank You For the Visuals...

[perelleth]

...but please, please, do stay away from The Silmarillion.

So I went to see The Battle of the Five Armies on Christmas Day.. The she-balrgogling loved it. Me, I almost fell asleep in places.


I got through The Hobbit trilogy mostly unharmed because I didn't expect to like it from movie the first. I set up low expectations for myself, and this way I found a few unexpected bonuses in each movie.

So what did I enjoyed in BOTFA?

• Bilbo, every time he was allowed on screen, as someone on my f-list put it, "doing his best to drag the whole production back to something resembling a Tolkien movie." I think Martin Freeman nailed it as BIlbo, pity they didn't focus more on his character's growth.
• Smaug, even if he got killed before the  movie actually began, and I loved him best in the second movie. I was looking forward to Bard whispering to his arrow... instead he was whisperng to his son. Weird, that scene.
• The scene when Thorin comes to his senses, drops crown and mantle and goes back to his friends clad in his dwarven leathers. You could really feel the weight of the moment, right until they charge. It was quite epic, to me.
• Thorin and Bilbo's interactions. I think Richard Armitage did a great job conveying Thorin's nature, all the anger and bitterness bottled inside for most of his life, and yet the protective, fond side that emerged when he was confronted with Bilbo's good heart. Those are Thorin's redeeming qualitites, and even if the story didn't focus on that, they showed up in their exchanges.
• The visuals. The landscapes, mostly. The doors, and the barricade, the vastnes of Erebor...

What made me laugh in chagrin:

• The sand worms. the Hobbit-Dune mash up you had been waiting for all your life. So was Sauron actually the God Emperor with the One Ring?
• Legolas going all "Prince of Persia" or was it Willy E Coyote? when the bridge was falling.
• What's with all the parental issues? "I'm not my grandfather" "Your mother loved you, Legolas" "My mother was killed, there, my father never speaks about it" (And I've known you for hundreds of years, Tauriel, and I choose this moment to disclose the news of how the Queen of Greenwood died...? Really? Tauriel didn't now how the Queen died? As Bilbo would say "Come on!"
• Thranduil's ninja elk. For the love of Yavanna...
• Martin Freeman's excesive winking and blinking. THis my niece noticed. She said " the actor that plays BIlbo.. does he have a problem with his eyes?" Me: " No that I know of, why?" "Because he's blinking all the time, like this" (mimics Bilbo's rapid blinking) Me " Oh, that. I think he's trying to express bafflement, confusion, puzzlement, and since BIlbo is so out of his depth, that's why he's doing it all the time." Anyway, when a 10 year old catches up on it, maybe you're overdoing it. Poor man didn't have a lot of chances to express himself otherwise, though.

What annoyed me:

• Thranduil mansplaining true love to Tauriel
• Tauriel threatening Thranduil with her bow. Really?
• The laziness: many scenes look like copy paste from LOTR: gandalf dying and coming back to life, Azog moves and acts very much like the commander of Helm's Deep orc army, the light and drums in Gundabad while Legolas and Tauriel are stalking the orcs is exactly the same as in Moria, in the chamber of Mazarbul in FOTR . At this point I was like, "OK, the bring a balrog here and I'm leaving the theatre." Fortunately it was only Shaitan.   We all know Tolkien upcycled many elements of his lifelong mythology into the Hobbit and many things from the hobbit went into the Ring, but the laziness in which this version of the hobbit mimics LOTR was quite annoying.
• Thorin hallucinating. That scene was really weird.
• Thranduil sending Legolas north to find a ten-year old ranger- to-be whom he profetically names "Strider." Head meet desk. Really, PJ?
• Fili, Kili and Thorin dying so far from the main battle and apart from each other.
• Beorn reduced to a bear drop.
• Dain Ironfoot turned into comedic relief.
• The scene when Bilbo sneaks into camp to offer the Arkenstone as bargaining chip, the only way he sees to save Thorin from himself. It's a deeply moral decision, and a difficult one, but in the movie is mostly glossed over, taken as a hobbity antic, and there's no trace of its impact on Thranduil and Bard, how they come to admire and respect Bilbo's ingenuity, loyalty and bravery. Also, it's Bilbo who convinces them that he has to return to Thorin. Instead, Gandalf is gruff and delivers Bilbo into Alfrid's custody? Really? My niece's interpretation is "Bilbo was stupid, and did Gandalf want him dead that he sent him with the traitor?"
• Fili and Kili's deaths could not be more senseless, and having Thorin -and them- die so far away from battle only remarks on his selfishness in looking for revenge, rather than having him fall in heroics surrounded but dwarves, fighting for and with his people like a true king of old. I was quite looking forward to that scene in which Beorn cuts through orcs to rescue the body of the dwarven king, and Thoring not dying alone, but was quite sure it was not going to be on screen.
• Also no trace of Thranduil's budding friendship with Bilbo, and their friendly parting, or with Bard, nor the conversations with Gandalf, nor time at the Carrack or Rivendell, how he got the chest and shield he carries home... no traces of Bilbo's desolation at the end of the battle, not just over Thorin's death but for the senseless slaughter that took place... Bilbo's horror for the battle is one of the things that stayed with me since the first time I read The Hobbit.

I may be going through Peter Jackson fatigue. The movie bored me in many parts. I think it suffered the most from the bad idea of turning such a short book into a 7 hour event. Pointless, meandering, not really knowing where it was going or whose tale it was telling, people coming and going in short notice. as if all places were close at hand..Storytelling suffered from lack of good edition.

But then, I stopped caring about PJs interpretation of Tolkien in TTT, after he murdered Theoden's character and turned his motivations inside out. He does the same in The Hobbit, which , to me, diminishes the actual stakes.. The values and motivations that Tolkien explores in his books are, perhaps, not appealing to 21st century audiences.

Anyway it's done, and I just pray we are saved either PJ's Silmarillion or "The endless adventures of Legolas and Strider" There are a lot of beautiful visuals going to memory, but to be honest, this last movie quite bored me.  On the bright side, I re read The Hobbit again and enjoyed it.