I'd have probably liked LOTR a lot more if Freeman played Frodo

 

It was mentioned in the appendices of the Return of The King but never occurred in The Hobbit.

 

Went to see the 3rd movie a week ago with some people, then read the book. Didn't see the previous two movies. What can I say, I never bothered with Tolkien's works until much later than most people... Anyway. The review.

By far the most jarring thing to me throughout the movie was that the main cast should have been dead 10 to 15 times by the end, if the battle scenes had had a smidgeon of realism in them. The deus ex machina scenes were so bad that they ruined my enjoyment of the movie despite me telling myself over and over "relax, suspend disbelief, it's just a fantasy movie". Climbing falling bricks, really? Using your son to aim an arrow and then said son comes out with not a bruise on his shoulder? There were so many moments I was anticipating a character death (remember, I hadn't read the book by the time I watched the movie so didn't have spoilers) and it failed to come... All the time I was like "Come on, this is the end of him, he'd been lucky so far but there's no way he's going to make it through this" -- turns out he did, for most values of "him". I wasn't expecting GoT, but there should have been something more story-based propelling the action scenes forward rather than in-universe Very-Low-Probability God / out-universe screenwriters helping characters through.

Smaug's chat with Bard was downright comically bad. The dragon's foolishness and hubris were a nice touch in the book, and if I had read it beforehand that should have been expected perhaps, but in the movie they emphasized so much what a Big Bad Beast he was that the contrast between the terrifying appearance and the stupid things he spouted fell flat. In the book most of the ravages he made were basically offstage, what you get instead is a reptilian caricature of an obscenely rich person with nothing to do except predation and banter.

Liked the expansion on Thorin's character and inner conflicts, although the dream with sinking into a floor made out of his gold reeked of melodrama.

I don't think I've ever seen a guy who looks more like Lucius Malfoy than the guy who played Thranduil. Not even the guy who played Lucius Malfoy.

The contacts they gave the elf actors were... distracting, to say the least. Brown-eyed elves would have been more okay than that.

Oh, and the actor who played Bilbo did a wonderful job at it. Loved the character.

Finally, I must ask: who the fuck is Tauriel? :|

 

Tauriel is a mistake that should not have been in the movies at all. Keep the romance out of me Hobbit.

 

Or, alternatively, not with filthy dwarves.

 

The actress was fine.
The character was fine.
Her goddamn arc was a waste of time, and an embarrassment to watch.

 

Not to mention the way it cheapens the Legolas-Gimli friendship (as well as the Aragorn/Arwen romance).

 

What? How did you come to that conclusion?

 

Probably by making them less unique?

I don't know, there was a great potential in having her befriend the dwarves, in a contrast to Legolas's more stern and perhaps racist nature. That bit when she talked about the stars to Kili was probably the character's highest moment in the trilogy, and I wish she'd had more moments like that. They were definitely missed.

Hell, the actress herself said in an elf-actors only interview that she was surprised by how little action she got in the last film's fight scenes (with Lee Pace cracking a dwarf joke that did not go down well).

If they were going to have her (and I think she could have been great), then they should have given her more.

 

This, exactly. In the books the number of elf-man romances can be counted on one hand; and the very idea of the friendship between Legolas and Gimli receives special mention because it is so rare. There are alliances, but never anything more. That they added this in took away from the intent of Tolkien's work considerably, IMO, and left a bad taste in my mouth.

 

I think you have a weird definition of the word 'rare'.

 

Regarding Tauriel, I have a potentially stupid question.

I get that one of the primary reasons she was created for the film was so that there would actually be a female character on screen, which is fine. But...why not make one (or more) of the Dwarves female? Really, with the exception of Thorin and Gimli's dad, it wouldn't have made any difference to the story if any of them had changed gender as far as I can see.

Now, like I say, that might be a stupid question. I know in the Discworld series, for example, it's part of Dwarf culture that it's impossible to tell a Dwarf's gender without them telling you, and there might well be something similar in Tolkein lore (although that by itself wouldn't stop, say, James Nesbitt's character being female, just not obviously so), which is fair enough. Similarly, there might be some cultural thing that would stop Dwarvish women going on such a quest. And I'm not saying that they should have gone the gender-bending route; it just seems a little neater than creating some random elf for a generic love story.

 

It would have pissed off purists more, I think. A female elf has been a trope of the films thus far with Galadriel and Arwen, so there's a little bit more acceptance on that front.

 

It's both hard to tell the difference between the male and female dwarves and that they very rarely leave home. Making one of the dwarves the token female is also less impactful as far as token characters go considering how little screentime most if the dwarves got individually.

 

Plus, like, ew. Nobody wants to see that.

 

Fair enough, at least on the first point. Second point...eh, debateable depending on writing, but still, take your point.

 

What's rare to you? Ignoring all the implications included in the text, we have a maximum 3 known elf-dwarf friendships, in a lore that spans thousands upon thousands of years, with the other two being small mentions.

 

Ya that romance could take a flying leap. It was irritating from the first moment it popped up, the exact moment it did all I could do was groan at the cheap melodrama and it never improved. Other then that the movie was ok. The final battle was a mess but the rest was alright as far as I could tell.

 

Honestly, I think the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit is such a sausage-fest that I will take any female character (idk a female dwarf might have been funny too).

I love Tauriel (and the actress who plays her) because she's strong and most females would be fawning over Legolas as he's like a Prince of Elves (although they make him look like his face is plastic) but she goes for the poet, sensitive soul aka Killi. I didn't like the romance at first because I mean where does he reach in terms of her? Her knees? Her thighs? Then I just ignored that part and it works well.

As for setup with Legolas and Gimli, the Tauriel\Killi plot actually led me to think that is the first step in him departing from his father's views and led to his "I can't go back" moment.

The Hobbit is meant for children, right? So I think in that sense there is some leeway.

 

I hated Tauriel/Kili in Desolation of Smaug because it was an almost exact copy of Aragorn/Arwen.

However, it improved a lot in Five Armies because it was rather unique. Though she had feelings for him, Tauriel didn't choose him. She chose her people and heritage over her feelings, and that's not something you see often. It distinguished it, made it original, made Tauriel more interesting because she became something more than the Action Girl.