Movie Review: The Hobbit - Part 3

[hrj]

Hollywood, we have to talk. Someone needs to take away Peter Jackson's carte blanche and put a grownup in charge of his projects until he's demonstrated that he's responsible enough to be given the keys again. Hobbit 3 was a complete snoozefest, filled with endless massed CGI battles and sword-porn, self-inflicted man-pain and synthetic emotion, some wildly inappropriate slapstick party tricks, and not a scrap of salvageable plot or genuine characterization. I re-watch a lot of movies -- I generally run through the entire extended edition LOTR a couple times a year. But I cannot imagine ever voluntarily watching Hobbit 3 a second time in the entirety of my natural life. In fact, it's a wonder I didn't claw my eyes out in the theater to avoid having to complete the first watching. I suggest that Jackson turn his talents to creating hack-and-slash video games. It's clearly his preferred genre.

Comments

[irinarempt.pip.verisignlabs.com (from livejournal.com)]

Jackson's LOTR is so wrong (though enjoyable) that I don't even dare watch Hobbit 1 or 2. It shows that he's really a horror film-maker and I hate horror.

[aimeric.livejournal.com]

I have my issues with Jackson's LOTR movies, but I generally think the good outweighed the bad.

However, here is all you need to know about Hobbit:

- part 1 turns Bilbo into an action hero, Thorin into Aragorn (seriously) and gives him an arch-nemesis, has Sylvester McCoy driving a sleigh full of gigantic rabbits, and removes just about all mirth in favor of ponderous portent in order to make it feel more like LOTR (and fails)

- part 2 has a (pretty, as in human-featured) Dwarf/Elf/Elf love triangle, where one of the elves is completely made up from whole cloth, and the other is Legolas. Also, the dwarves selflessly rush in to save Bilbo from Smaug, then smelt a 100 foot statue of Durin and dump the molten gold all over Smaug, who nevertheless shakes it off and goes to burn Laketown. Oh, and Gandalf vs Saur^H^H^H^HNecromancer (s'okay, Galadriel, Elrond, and Saruman show up in part 3 to bust him out)

I was so disgusted with part 1, I vowed to not pay money to see 2 and 3. I ended up with free tickets to both, so I dragged myself to it and kept an internal MST3K monologue throughout the whole thing, as it was the only way I could survive. Actually, I liked 3 more than 2, though that's really not saying much.

[gurdymonkey.livejournal.com]

Thought the first Hobbit was so tedious, I've skipped the other two.

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning.

[zeborah]

The idea of splitting the Hobbit into three films was so ridiculous to me that all I've seen of any of them was the trailer for part 3. It took me a while to realise what it was meant to be, and then I spent the rest of the trailer trying to figure out if any of this had ever happened in the book in any form whatsoever. (Until finally Bilbo put the ring on. I recognised that bit.)

Friends invited me to attend with them. I declined.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

The silly thing is, if you stripped out all the pointless set-piece battles, you probably could take it down to one movie's worth.