Re: The Hobbit:The Battle of the Five Armies, the end of an Age!
In reply to Eur512 (msg # 61):
*laugh* Yeah, that thought crossed my mind, too...
That's been my biggest gripe with the Hobbit trilogy. There were a lot of changes made in LOTR, yes, but the majority of them were to try and make characters more 'conventional' to what a contemporary audience would expect to see (Aragorn being reluctant to accept his birthright not out of a concern that the time might not be right yet, but out of a fear that he might not be man enough to shoulder the burden, for instance), or to streamline a story that was already somewhere beyond monumental.
I know a lot of people resented the fact that there was nothing about Tom Bombadil in The Fellowship, but aside from tying LOTR to a greater whole of Tolkien's narrative material, he showed up for a couple of chapters and had no noticeable impact on the rest of the tale. The Scouring of the Shire was entertaining to read, yes...but since the films never showed Saruman leaving Orthanc, they were already missing a critical element to that part of the narrative. Likewise, they didn't have anything about Sam seeing the Shire being ransacked in Galadriel's bowl...and, really, did we need MORE of the five or six endings they stacked on top of each other?
But with the exception of Legolas being able to warp the laws of physics at will, apparently, they managed to avoid making up too much stuff. Not so, with the Hobbit...characters that nobody had ever heard of before, creatures that I've certainly never read in any Tolkien material I've been through...and I'm not talking about stuff that was put together by cross-referencing other Tolkien works and extrapolating events that happened. While LOTR tweaked Tolkien's work, The Hobbit wove a whole lotta Peter Jackson in with Tolkien. I can see why the Tolkien estate would be annoyed.
I was lukewarm about An Unexpected Journey...just couldn't summon up the enthusiasm to see The Desolation of Smaug (and I even work at a movie theater and could have seen it for free). I liked Battle of Five Armies...I did feel like it was heavily adulterated, though. And I also feel like Jackson was working harder to make The Hobbit look like a prequel to LOTR than he was trying to tell the story Tolkien wrote.