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.

Comments

[elliska]

I agree with every point. Basically, though, if I closed my eyes every time elves came on the screen (and this is me saying that), I really liked the movie:

--they kept most of my favorite lines from the book (I especially love, "If you don't like my burglar then please don't damage him.")

--I loved the dragon in Esgaroth. And the Master fleeing. I thought Bain (sp?) was a little odd, but I get PJ wanting to make more use of that character and he was brave for a child. So I could suck that up.

--Thranduil, once off the party elk, had some nice sword fighting scenes.

--Bilbo. All his scenes were great. I kind of like the scene with him showing the acorn to Thorin. That was supposed to be the Party Tree, wasn't it? That's kind of cool.

--Thorin--given what PJ gave him, I thought he did a great job. And I thought his last words were a perfect scene.

--I loved the ending. Bilbo coming back to the auction, proving his ID, taking back the spoons, seeing his wrecked house, which kind of played to the whole 'home' theme PJ tried to work into this (I don't deny he did an ok job of that) and I especially loved them tying it back to Fellowship.

I really wanted to like this movie, and as a fanfic, I liked it. I'm also in the middle of re-reading Hobbit and enjoying it thoroughly. I'm a little sad to see Middle Earth leave the theaters. It has been fun.

[perelleth]

I was overall bored, which surprised me. I don't think it was a good fanfic, and there were too many disconnected scenes that were there for the sake of being, IMHO. And what with the pseudo Wormtongue? For Eru's sake, he got nearly as much screen time as Frodo!

Also, the ending, linking with LOTR in such an obvious manner, sounded very heavy-handed, patronizing to me. I would have much preferred a glimpse of Bilbo using the ring sparsely during his comfortable life afterwards, and Gandalf visiting, and even Balin, coming to visit, telling of his plans to resettle MOria... The ending was rushed, to me. BUt, as I said before, the visuals are gorgeous.