Ha, time makes fools of us all!
Anyway, I finally watched The Hobbit trilogy, not the first film though, I had a enough of it for twenty years.
*evil laughter*
So much and so bad is one way to describe them, but there is some light in the darkness. Peter Jackson is my least favourite director, he is going above Scorsese in this regard. This is after I worshipped, to the point of obsession, his
Heavenly Creatures for decades. Well, goodbye, it was good while it lasted.
The CGI is out of this world bad, it's so poorly done. One way to get comfortable is to make it into a drinking game whenever it comes on screen. I'm fairly certain it wouldn't take that much to get severely plastered, there are so many scenes.
I love how Jackson goes to where Italian producers went before him, if they did it so can he. So, the films are Asian historical action flick with flying Legolas action action, fan fiction, teenage angst, poorly done SFX, I was waiting like a spider for the gold and it happened!
The spider scene was awful, I lost all meaning, I was checking constantly if it was a real leaf or whether it was a real sun and not CGI. My mind was going places.
I liked watching Thranduil's character, I thought he brought much needed darkness and cynicism, really delving into Silmarillion territory. Those elves that are so old and have seen so much, they are totally aloof and world-weary. Bring it on.
The hobbits are some of my most favourite fictional characters of all time, I love Bilbo by Martin Freeman, he was charming and real. At least Jackson did good with the casting in the films, real solid actors that can turn the bad into good, kind of. Maybe. What I don't care for is that he is constantly upstaged by the other characters because a story with his name on it has to be about OTHER people. I want to see freaking Bilbo not Legolas flying around! The Swedish title is "Bilbo: En Hobbits Äventyr". And there are three films, three ******* films of the same.
That brings me to the badness, Legolas among them. Good grief, I don't know what happened to Orlando Bloom but here he was a black hole of a person, he was so bland, he should have been a chair. And the chair was pulled out! I don't quite remember him being this bad in LotR. It gets so much worse in the last film. Why.
Tauriel wasn't too bad, I don't blame the actors really, it's mainly a writing problem.
By god is my witness, I'm so grateful for Cumberbatch/some being a CGI monster and not a real person, that would have broken my mind if he would compete with Orlando Bloom. That is grim. Smaug's CGI was beautifully done, but kind of annoying, they tried too hard. I guess he went into that mine because he was all cunning and free like Zorro.
In all, I don't think too badly of the actors and their characters. I'm not one to be impressed by Thorin & co, the dwarfs to me are stoic and proud people that are way more relatable than the elves, and here they were merry band of Three Stooges.
The romance plot was as the French say, bad. It's more or less a fan fiction trope, someone read a Sailor Moon fic.
30 Rock has taught us many things about writers spending time online.


My biggest problem was that the films lacked that creepy feeling of doom the book had. I know I was like ten when I read it, the spiders and trolls scared me solid, the scene with Gollum was horror to me, it scared me so much. I felt none of this underlying threat and it felt like was watching a good-for-all-the-family kind of a chewing toy. I'm not going to defend Tolkien because just like my other favourite author HP Lovecraft, they weren't very skilled with character development and prose, but they were amazing with mood setting. Part of me would have wanted this to be made in the '80s like
A Neverending Story, that film had a lot of dark moments in a children's story.
I'm not going to dismiss or hate the trilogy because they have brought even more people into the fandom. Not the least, they have provided fodder for the slash/yaoi community, predominately female fans, for decades, endless amounts of fan art and fanfiction. It's similar to what The Transformers have going on, it's awesome for us long-time fans who lived in the fandom limbo for decades.
