Positives
* Spectacular
sets and scenery
* Some unbelievably awesome action sequences
Negatives
* Waaaaay too long
* Those Orc creatures look fiercesome, but they’ve
got to be some of the most ineffective bad guys ever.
* As the sets get more and more elaborate, the story is
beginning to lose its original primitive mythic Norse feel, and is now closer
to resembling steampunk.
The Review
In my review of the first Hobbit,
I gave the 3-part Hobbit movie trilogy the benefit of the doubt. But by the second movie, it seems I must add
my voice to the chorus: there’s too much padding in these movies, and it feels
way too bloated.
I felt
about this movie the way I feel about most of Peter Jackson’s work: on the one
hand, there’s some absolutely incredible scenes. But in between those breathtaking scenes, the
slow plodding pace of the movie had me bored stiff. And 2.5 hours was way too long.
Rating :
6 out of 10 stars. (As
we left the theater, my friend wanted to give this movie a 5, but I figured any
movie with that river scene has to rate somewhere above average, whatever other
faults it may have.)
Links
My review of the 1st Hobbit movie. (Much of what I had to say in that review
holds true for this movie. I wish I
could have broken this movie into 3 smaller segments like I did for the first
Hobbit, but I’m not sorry I saw it on the big screen. It needs to be seen on the big screen.)
Language and the Mind Revisited - The Biolinguistic Turn with Noam Chomsky
2 comments:
By Grabthar's hammer, this movie gets a failing grade from me, if only for (very talkily) introducing the concept of Democratic Reform to Tolkien's Middle Earth -- a dunderheaded move that manages to reflect poorly on Jackson and the lamentably used Stephen Frye.
Speaking of actor abuse, it's hard to know where to begin, but if you're going to introduce a female adventurer to Tolkien's world surely you can do better than make her an elf who's twitterpated by a dwarf. And the direction: while her beloved lies dying on the bed, she grasps the medicinal moss, stares up at the sky and declares, "I shall save him!"?? Puh-leaze. I honestly wonder if Jackson hasn't handed the reins to an understudy while he stealthily potters on his next Big Thing.
You may have read this already, but I liked his pejorative use of "fan fiction."
I hadn't read that article before, so thanks for the link.
Yeah, there's no denying this film had its faults. At about the 2 hour mark, I was sitting in the theatre with a numb butt just wishing this movie would hurry up and end. And that's never a good sign. (Although to be fair, I felt the same way when I saw Return of the King in the theater.)
Sometime in the near future, all of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies and Hobbit movies will be all out on DVD, and no sane person will ever sit through them in one sitting, and together all 18 some hours will just be like one TV season that people can watch an hour at a time before pausing the DVD for the night and going to bed. And I like to think in that respect all this extra padding will be less annoying.
I don't disagree with anything you say, but I tend to think the spectacular action scenes in this movie push it slightly into the passing category, despite all its other faults.
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