The Hobbit Trailer

GreyLord said:

I would tend to say that Tolkien himself would also be mortified by the movies...however he'd also simply take it in stride and probably remain quiet about it as he did about a great many other things through his life.

It amazes me the changes in people's attitudes towards LotR throughout the years. The Hobbit originally was a CHILDREN'S book...yes...a Children's book (though probably more in the line towards older children/Young Adult). The Lord of the Rings themselves were actually more as sequels for the Hobbit. A tad darker, but still lighter fare. They tended towards more adult enjoyment as they were directed in many ways towards his children (I imagine his original stories of hobbits were basically engendered towards his children when they were about...well...the size of hobbits! Imagine that).

I'd say for Tolkien, anything more than a PG rating was making the films about his books too dark, too violent, and too messy (note, the new LotR films were at least PG-13 in the US...so for Britain I'd say the movies would have had to e PG-12 or under at least).

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Tolkien was unhappy with the "children's book tone" he took in The Hobbit after Lord of the Rings was published. He started (and abandoned) an attempt to rework The Hobbit to fit in tone and presentation closer to Lord of the Rings. He particularly regretted the 'narrator's voice' in the story.

Am I alone in the fact I liked the Rankin-Bass version of the Hobbit (and the song "Fifteen Birds in Five Fir Trees?"). I felt lucky when our 8th grade class did a play on the Hobbit and I got to be the voice of Smaug.

It's with great anticipation I'm looking forward to seeing this - and most especially my "hero", Smaug the Golden.

Also, I wonder if they'll do the entire Riddle contest - and maybe throw in a couple new (old?) chestnuts?

I recently read the Hobbit to my daughter at bed time, the first time I've read it in about 30 years - and I was astonished at what a powerful, emblematic character Smaug is. I'd forgotten what a terrific job Tolkien does of writing him.

Gentlegamer said:

The original bearers of the Elven Rings were:

Vilya - Gil-galad (High King of the High Elves, ring passed to next High King on his death, Elrond)
Narya - Cirdan (Gil-galad's lieutenant, lord of the Grey Havens, gave ring to Olorin upon his arrival in Middle-earth)
Nenya - Celebrimbor (lord of Eregion, smith of the Elven Rings, gave Vilya and Narya to Gil-galad, Nenya to Galadriel when Sauron overan Eregion)

So the poem when Sauron forged the One Ring was accurate.

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Thanks for this. For the record, I didn't think the rhyme was wrong, that was just a recognition of the holes in my knowledge of the situation. I have read Silmarillion, but it has been nigh onto 30 years since I did so, and at the time I was far too young to appreciate the depth of the work.

Celebrim said:

My ears were in heaven, but it made my eyes bleed.

It angers me, I don't think that is too strong of a word for what I feel, that the Tolkien property is in the hands of a man who loathes and despises it.

And before you go there, I've read the Lost Tales, Morgoth's Ring, The Long Road and all the other unpublished notes. He is NOT just incorporating material from the larger story. As with the LotR movies, he's deliberately fundamentally altering the meaning and focus of the story not merely because he's ignorant of the stories meaning, but because he doesn't like it. By his own admission, upon reading the stories he felt that they didn't have enough fighting or (his word) "T&A". So he's putting in what he feels they miss and taking out the parts he doesn't like.

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I agree with you, and I say thank god. I found the LOTR books crazy boring, and I was quite happy with the more action oriented story he put on the screen.

Stalker0 said:

I agree with you, and I say thank god. I found the LOTR books crazy boring, and I was quite happy with the more action oriented story he put on the screen.

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That's the general impression I have. He made movies that were successful with people who don't like the books. And, you can hardly from a business perspective argue with the success. After all, when Tolkien thought to adapt the books to the big screen, his first inclination was to remove all the boring and unimportant fight scenes from the story so as to better concentrate on the important parts.

I doubt that would have gone over that well with a mass audience.

Nonetheless, it generally sucks from the perspective of a fan of the books who would like for them to have a big screen counterpart in much the same way that the David Lynch 'Dune' sucks if you are or were a prior fan of the book. Both are 'B' rate scripts with big budgets filled with wierd departures and digressions from the book. Neither does the book they are loosely derived from much justice as a work of literature, nor for that matter is the LotR movie particularly well made beyond the excellent art direction provided by Howe and Lee. There are times, if you turn the sound off, that the movie is like a dream come true, and the very vision of what I always saw in my mind's eye. The first fifteen minutes or so of the first movie is delightful.

But it all just goes wrong. I expect much the same thing of the Hobbit movie. Some scenes may well delight me, but the whole is likely to be terribly disappointing.

Gentlegamer said:

Tolkien was unhappy with the "children's book tone" he took in The Hobbit after Lord of the Rings was published. He started (and abandoned) an attempt to rework The Hobbit to fit in tone and presentation closer to Lord of the Rings. He particularly regretted the 'narrator's voice' in the story.

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At the time of the writing of The Hobbit, I don't think Tolkien had really yet found his own voice. There was a lot of George MacDonald in the Hobbit, and in particularly in the style adopted by the narrator.

I think Tolkien admired MacDonald and Dunsany greatly, but he wanted to move beyond the Victorian fairy tale back into the darker world of the Germanic epic and recapture that seriousness missing from his immediate predecessors. At the time though, I don't think he took himself seriously enough as a writer to attempt it. Without the acclaim he recieved for the Hobbit, I don't think he would have dared try The Lord of the Rings.

Sadly, the acclaim of The Lord of the Rings would have the reverse effect on his ability to publish The Simarillion. People took his story - and its author - so seriously, that he began to doubt whether his stories were good enough and most importantly to him moral enough, and he spent the rest of his life as a fiction writer in continual self-doubt and deconstructing his own work.

Stormonu said:

Am I alone in the fact I liked the Rankin-Bass version of the Hobbit (and the song "Fifteen Birds in Five Fir Trees?").

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Probably not. For what it was, it wasn't bad, and The Hobbit's origins as a children's story suited the animation well enough. My first copy of The Hobbit was an edition illustrated with the Rankin-Bass stills, so it still plays somewhat in my imagination when I think of that book.

I can't say that I think they did everything well, but despite the overly feline appearance of Smaug (at least IMO), they did a good job with the dragon. My biggest complaint is that its rushed and disjointed, but they were actually far more faithful to Tolkien's dialogue than PJ tends to be. PJ has a really bad habit of rewritting all the most famous lines in the story. Hopefully he learned his lesson somewhat. Things were even worse before he brought Christopher Lee on board the project and the big scary man went around the set quoting Tolkien verbatum and pointing at his tattered copy of the book while growling, "That is not in the story." PJ's original drafts were horrid (or even more horrid depending on your perspective).

Celebrim said:

That's the general impression I have. He made movies that were successful with people who don't like the books.

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I disagree. I love Tolkien, I've read almost all of his writings and I've read The Hobbit, LotR and The Silmarillion multiple times. I also enjoyed the movies (especially the extended editions).

Sure, a lot of things got changed, but movies are a very different media from books and, furthermore, I find movie adaptations that are excessively faithful to books to be mostly pointless. I already have the book, so I expect something different from the movie. As another example, Kubrick changed a lot of things in Shining and made an awesome movie that's not faithful at all to the great novel.

Stalker0 said:

I agree with you, and I say thank god. I found the LOTR books crazy boring, and I was quite happy with the more action oriented story he put on the screen.

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Although I was happy with the action he put on the screen, my complaint with the films was the degree to which they changed the character of people significantly. The Aragorn who doubts his future, the Faramir who certainly isn't a man of quality, the played-for-humour Gimli, the aggressive and duplicitous Elrond, the willing puppet Saruman - these were not characters I immediately recognised from the novels, and I don't think Peter Jackson brought any additional value to the story through his changes there.

Cheers