Critics review 'Desolation of Smaug' | POSSIBLE SPOILERS

I don't know how much thought Tolkien had put into Gandalf's character when he wrote The Hobbit. To me he seems to be an addition of magic and mystery to make the story more interesting and appealing to children (as well as grown-ups). He's a bit like Bombadil in LotR, enigmatic and very powerful. He's the one who starts the whole thing, and eventually ends up playing a key role in ending it too. A character like Gandalf was needed to make the story work, without him it would have been difficult to include Bilbo in the story at all, because why would a bunch of dwarves ever take a laid-back hobbit with them on such a dangerous adventure? Did Tolkien ever write or say anything about what he thought about Gandalf when he wrote The Hobbit?

Wikipedia has a bit on that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandalf#Concept_and_creation

The idea of Gandalf being a Maia was probably developed for LotR. Hard to say when Tolkien first conceived of the Maiar, though.

Well, I don't know. (Good to say that from time to time.   )

But from the way Tolkien wrote, where he liked to imagine large parts of backstory that didn't necesarily appear in his work, I think it's highly plausible that a lot of it would have at least been in his mind at the time of writing.

Even if he didn't flesh it out until later.

The Abridged Script for DoS is up:

http://www.the-editing-room.com/the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug.html

Excellent critique of the film

that bit about 9 dwarves entering a desolate Dwarf Kingdom is quite LOTR... another comparison to add to the ever growing list

Its a brilliant script, speaks the truth throughout, about the only thing that does ! Shame Peejers doesnt know the meaning of ....truth !

Captain Falcon?!   

Is IT ? I just liked the piccy !   

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/01/11/86162-peter-of-many-colours-jackson-finally-leaves-the-path-of-wisdom/

Read the comments, just like the film it's a repetitive never ending circle of abuse.

malickfan wrote:http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/01/11/86162-peter-of-many-colours-jackson-finally-leaves-the-path-of-wisdom/

Read the comments, just like the film it's a repetitive never ending circle of abuse.

No, it is not. The tone of the comments is mostly respectful. (Assuming by "abuse" you meant disrespect.)

What it is, is a repetitive misinterpretation of film elements, book details, and the requirements of logic.

Things like "the dwarves in the book have no characterization" and "book-Gandalf selfishly manipulates Bilbo" and "the film-dwarves were not two-dimensional" are all over that page. At least one person argues that "PJ and Co. know what Tolkien wanted the story to be better than the average fan." It's ridiculous niggling nonsense, but it's not a repetitive circle of abuse, you'll have to look elsewhere on the internet to find that.

Edit: The further down the comments you go, the worse it does get.

I can't bring myself to read comments defending this movie. I don't see how the movie possibly works for anyone.

Agreed, it must work purely on an emotional level.
Where the emotion, that is, is almost entirely just in the minds of the fans watching, 'cause the film sure doesn't have much of it.

Well, perhaps the visuals are enough to satisfy, the "cool" bits and the action parts and the comedy.
The emotional stimulus behind the character arcs is the thing that surely exists only in the mind of the viewer, for the film provides very little real character development at all.

The only way for anyone watching to care about the characters is for them to have been following this whole thing through pre-production and production and have seen all of the video blogs, and know all the little pieces of information about a character that aren't explicitly told to us in the movie (e.g. all the little character details about the dwarves that aren't told or never expanded upon).

Pretty much the only way you can be emotionally invested in any of this is to have made a conscious effort to be at the beginning of it all.

Hmmm, I seem to have forgotten. Is that Dopey or Grumpy?

bungobaggins wrote:Pretty much the only way you can be emotionally invested in any of this is to have made a conscious effort to be at the beginning of it all.

Or to be a Peter Jackson fanatic.

Nope............ its the cowardly lion from The wizard of OZ   

"If I were king under the Mountaaaaaiiin!!!"

I mostly agree with this review:

http://www.hypable.com/2013/12/23/hobbit-trilogy-story-arc-problem/

Yeah a good summing up of some of its many, many problems.

Generally speaking I agree that PJ's additions to The Hobbit have been very poor, but I'm not sure I agree with the argument this guy tries to make.

I think this can be proven in the philosophy of the script. In the behind the scenes interviews for The Lord of the Rings, Philippa Boyens, one of the screenwriters, says that there was one simple thing that drove them in writing the script. This was that The Lord of the Rings is at its bare bones the story of Frodo carrying the Ring to Mordor, and hurling it into Mount Doom.

I mean, I've pulled up this quote before as an example of the writers talking out of their ass, because it bears very little resemblance to the film. Things are a bit more Frodo-centric in the theatrical editions, but even there Aragorn is pretty clearly the main character of TTT and ROTK (and would be in FOTR too but he's not introduced until a third of the way through the movie). Besides, LOTR is a complex story that jumps around between lots of different characters and settings. If it was just Frodo going to Mordor it would be a very different story.

On the other hand, The Hobbit is a very direct, straightforward story with a focus on the title character, which makes PJ's additions stand out more than they ever did in LOTR. (I'd also argue that the quality of the additions have decreased as PJ has grown more self-indulgent.) But I disagree with the comparison to LOTR.

The only sensible deviation IMO is following where Gandalf goes when he leaves the party. If there was to be anything else it should be seen by Bilbo. The only time this actually happened was when Bilbo was eavesdropping on thrandy and Tauriel, and I thought it was a good way of making bilbo front and center even though he's not really part of the scene; it suggests that the only reason we get to see this interaction is because Bilbo's there

Interesting you bring that up, Tin. I actually still wish they hadn't followed Gandalf, although I'll admit I'm not sure how well that would have worked on film. But Gandalf's excursions with the White Council in The Hobbit serve the same narrative purpose as his fall into the chasm in Moria does in LOTR: to remove him from the party so that they have to face subsequent challenges without a powerful wizard to back them up. What Gandalf gets up to in the meantime really doesn't matter, and in both books he merely gives a brief account when he returns to the party.

I also feel that including the White Council stuff attracts a lot of attention away from the Quest since the conflict with the Necromancer is far more important than the conflict with Smaug, both within the steam of pseudo-history and as a prequel to LOTR. Although Jackson has managed to avoid this problem so far by making all of Gandalf's and the White Council's scenes really boring.

I agree Tin, the White Council story line is the only one that merits inclusion.

Sadly it mostly ends up showing off the quality of Boyens and Walsh original writing, as they couldn't use much of what Tolien had written about it.

So I agree it can be a bit boring and doesn't really work. But I think it could have played a decent role in the movie, if based on Tolkien and done properly.

The stuff they did include was just convoluted crap. There was no reason, for example, for the "High Fells" (and the writers shouldn't be making up locations in ME—assholes). It's completely unnecessary and illogical, even to what the writers themselves wanted to do.