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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6233238" data-attributes="member: 32740">Personally I'd hoped for more but was not at all surprised at getting less in a longer run-time.Can't make too many comparisons to the book because although it's on my shelf it's been a couple decades since I actually read it. Probably merciful as the extravagant departures from the text would have been more jarring than they already were. Truthfully I don't consider the professors books quite as untouchable as some. I don't mind elimination of scenes, rearranging a story point or two or even making up characters and subplots out of whole cloth, but it's 2 hrs 40mins and those fight scenes DEFINITELY went on WAY too long. The movie should have been 30 mins shorter and would have been that much the better for it.Somebody just didn't know when to say when. The film would have lost NONE of its epic-ness just by being shorter. Ensuring that it runs closer to 3 hours than 2 doesn't turn Courtney Solomon into David Lean. It's even LESS justifiable knowing that this was split from 2 films into three. It would have been expected that the results would have made for 3 SHORTER movies instead of trying to make two 3-hour films into THREE 3-hour films. That's less forgivable to me than all the unrestrained creative license being applied.The one thing that bothers me about that last point - the new invented stuff - is Bard and his Black Arrow.[spoiler] It seems utterly pointless to me to change this from a humble arrow that had become special to Bard simply by not having been broken and always recovered after use, and instead make it Moar Epical(!) by turning it into a Ballista Bolt of Dragon-Slaying +9000 (!).[/spoiler] If they have a failure being demonstrated here it is that they convinced themselves that the already grand, sweeping, heroic source material was simply NOT sufficient to impress the snot out of jaded, modern fans of epic fantasy. With invented fights that dragged on they are dangerously near making it farce - not sweeping epic.As with the LotR trilogy I believe that it's unfair to judge the films by anything but its own merits - NOT by what it does or doesn't do faithfully to the source material. Not that comparisons can't or shouldn't be made but the films must ultimately stand or fall on their own. This one is definitely stumbling. Still worth seeing, but pacing and the fit into the greater arc of the (now) trilogy was simply not up to the standards THEY set.7.5/10</blockquote>

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