The film started by establishing a link to the Lord of the Rings which immediately sent up a red flag for me. In my mind, The Hobbit is mostly independent from LOTR except for the presence of the ring. Furthermore when you read The Hobbit the power of the ring isn't even touched on, for all you know it's just a magic ring that makes the wearer invisible. I'll probably talk about that a little later.
One thing I did sort of like is the description of how Smaug took the lonely mountain hold and routed the dwarves and all that, it was a cool sequence until.... The "Pale Orc". The Pale Orc will now become synonymous with additional characters added to a story for an unnecessary, similar to the way "Jump the Shark" now stands for when a TV series becomes ridiculous. It was not needed, not part of the story and seemingly only existed to add another antagonist to the plot. Splitting the film into three parts meant that they wouldn't have much of an enemy for the first two installations so they added some extra characters to fill the void.
Now, I can't evaluate the film objectively as a stand-alone work because as I mentioned, I have a boyish love for the book. However, if someone said to me "As a 10 year old who hasn't read the book, I liked the movie" I would weep for the decay of young minds, but also be open to that as a take on the whole thing. I just thought I would throw that out there.
I don't even want to speak in depth about some of the parts that were stupid and had nothing to do with the book so I will just list them here:
- Rhadagast the Brown, his rabbit 'sleigh', the spider thing, the necromancer thing, the bird poop in his hair thing... etc.
- The tepid allusion to Sauron. Why? It would have been fine without that. I get it yeah yeah it links the Hobbit to LOTR but I didn't want that, okay? It wasn't like that in the book...
- Saruman being in the film. Again, why?
- The scene with the stone giants playing rock 'em sock 'em robots. I hate this less because it was obviously for the little kids so whatever.
There are a few things I did like however included the whole scene where the dwarves come to bag end and trash everything and clean it all up again with a drinking song. That seemed to do the book justice and I thought it was just well done in general, chaotic and fun. Also, and by this point I wanted to actually get up and leave the theater, the riddle game. The riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo is one of the most vivid scenes in the entire book and it's so distinctly Tolkien, they really did it justice. I was very happy to see that and the rest of the movie from that point. The goblin - biter killing the goblin king was another little stupid joke for the kids but when they alluded to the chapter name "Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire" I was satiated. The eagles came to save them and flew them away and that was all well and good except of course for the silly part relating to the pale Orc and Bilbo being a hero and all that.
I think the biggest thing is that this movie, like other movies and video games and books coming out now, was watered-down for stupid people. They spoon fed you the hero's journey, the plot twists, who the protagonists and antagonists were... It's like they really don't want anyone to have to think to hard while they're watching and that disturbs me deeply. When I finish a movie or a book I want to walk out thinking about it, a few days or hours later I want to finally say "Oh.. now that makes sense.." I don't want the whitewash, I want to employ what I learned in High School English class. I know I'm not getting any smarter so that must mean everyone else is getting dumber and that's more frightening than fiscals cliffs, school shootings and certainly pale Orcs.
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