You see, I am fine with Jackson making a third movie. I loved all three of the LOTOR movies (I'm not a purist...I don't care if they changed from the books), and thus am really looking forward to the Hobbit. And I actually like the idea of adding in all this extra stuff (White Council, whatever is needed to make the third movie) since it means more quality work.

Honestly, complaining about the Hobbit having stuff added to it is kind of weird to me. But again, I'm not a purist in that regard.

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SDNW5: Republic of Arcadia...Sweden in SPAAACE

There's the problem right there. The Hobbit was about Bilbo going there and back again, nothing more. All the Ring War stuff happened in the background barely being mentioned and that's where it belongs. The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo, Thorin and Company. The Ring War background stuff adds exactly nothing to that. If anything, it detracts from the core story because it has you looking at 'so, how is the Ring War going' when what you should be looking at is what's happening to Bilbo & companions.

I think this film is intended as a companion piece to the LoTR trilogy. By including the war stuff it ties the films together.

CHA-CHING!

Some people actually thought the second cake was pushing it.

But, you know, why stop at three? If three cakes is good, seventeen cakes is that much bettah.

MOAR CAKE!



Thanks to a lack of CGI in earlier eras.



Thanks to CGI.

To set the record straight, Aragon never shot. Being a region in Europe, it found holding the weapon difficult.

Goddammit, please just shut up already. Hundreds of millions of people are going to love these movies, Skywalker_T-65 and myself will be among them. Stop telling us what we are allowed to enjoy; you are making an ass of yourself.

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http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Economic Left/Right: -7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.74

This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester

No he's not. He is pointing out that the story itself may well become weaker from the addition of this stuff. He's also saying, and I agree with him that he would enjoy just seeing "The Hobbit" more than all this Ring War stuff.

I must have missed the part were I said that people are forbidden from enjoying the (apparently) Ring War heavy iteration of the Hobbit. I think it's a mistake, and that sticking with what it originally was (the story of Bilbo Baggins going There and Back Again) would make for a better set of movies (and I still maintain that story can be told in a single one if you don't mind going LOTR SE length), nothing more.
As for telling people what they are and aren't allowd to like-you are the one saying hundreds of millions will like these movies. Did you actually ask them?

I actually agree that the story of the Hobbit (just the Hobbit) could be done in one movie. That being said, I'm not complaining about the extra stuff, since it will be quality work I'm sure (even if it doesn't relate to the Hobbit that much).

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SDNW5: Republic of Arcadia...Sweden in SPAAACE

has anyone tried the obvious?

Jackson: Masters! I've finished the two films!

Production Overlord: And are they 3 hours long each? Becuase you what we said would happen if they are too long.

Jackson: Gulp.

Jackson: I am pleased to announce we are adding a 3rd film,meaning each film is only 2hrs long!

and frankly, LoTR was magnificent, and so I expect, will be the Hobbit.

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"Aid, trade, green technology and peace." - Hans Rosling.
"Market forces are a good servant but a poor master." - Zaune

And here we have a textbook 'appeal to popularity'.

It's a fair point - the book is about Bilbo, Thorin, Smaug and the finding of the ring. If he wants to include all the other stuff, fine - but then it isn't The Hobbit.

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What is WRONG with you people

"'appeal to popularity"? He literally wrote that people being in favour of this is "the problem." A movie having a significant problem would be an unpopular movie. It would be a movie that fails artistically and/or commercially. Yet there is no indicator that this is the case. The only problem the movie has is that it's not the movie he wishes for.

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http://www.politicalcompass.org/test
Economic Left/Right: -7.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.74

This is pre-WWII. You can sort of tell from the sketch style, from thee way it refers to Japan (Japan in the 1950s was still rebuilding from WWII), the spelling of Tokyo, lots of details. Nothing obvious... except that the upper right hand corner of the page reads "November 1931." --- Simon_Jester

His concern is legitimate, though. The Hobbit looked to be the one film Peter Jackson managed to get right. Now, we know it will be a bloated incoherent mess like the LotR movies.

So, eh, I'll probably skip it and save my money for movies that are actually worth it. Fanboys, of course, will lap it right up, but fanboys are like that about everything- observe their hounding of the critics who dared to claim TDKR is not the perfect cinematic masterpiece (weeks before it came out, so without actually seeing it).

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

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My Fundie Guide The World Has Ended.....Life Goes On

Rubbish - lots of terrible films succeed commercially. It's a textbook appeal to popularity as you are suggesting that it must be a great idea because lots of people would like to see it. You have now gone further and said that if a film has significant artistic problems, it would automatically be unpopular. Textbook.

I suggest you re-read his post - his argument was not that "the Problem" is people will like the Ring Wars being part of the film, it is that the Ring Wars aren't really part of the plot of the Hobbit and including them will take focus away from that plot. He has since repeated this very point, so I don't understand why you are still claiming differently.

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What is WRONG with you people

If all the other stuff wasn't written by one J. R. R. Tolkien, you'd actually have a point.

Really, to people who protest 3 movies, what stops you from: 1) buying DVD; 2) deleting material you deem 'extra'; 3) watching?

Hell, you don't even need to lift a finger, I'm pretty sure some fan will make 'purehobbit' cut within a week of première...

Christ on a bike! Which bit of "then it isn't the Hobbit" do you not understand? It doesn't matter who wrote the other stuff, it doesn't form part of the Hobbit story, except in a very peripheral way, as The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo going "there and back". If you make a film about the Ring War "then it isn't the Hobbit".

Would you like me to repeat it one more fucking time? I don't care what he does with the movie, he may well do a fantastic job with it, but if it isn't confined to the story of Bilbo going there and back, then he has not made "The Hobbit".

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What is WRONG with you people

Which I understand...even if I could care less. If I wanted 'just the Hobbit' then I wouldn't be happy about the extra material. Being as I like the LOTOR movies, I could care less if Jackson makes 'the Hobbit...plus all this other stuff' since I still expect it to be good.

So yes...it isn't The Hobbit in that it isn't just Bilbo's journey...but that doesn't mean it will be bad.

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SDNW5: Republic of Arcadia...Sweden in SPAAACE

There is good reason to suggest that it will be though. The story of The Hobbit is quite straightforward, and there isn't much content in it in the time that most of this extra nonsense will need to take place. What this means is that the pace of the Mirkwood and Dale sections of the Hobbit story will basically grind to a screeching halt whilst we deal with stuff that's completely unrelated to the story that was going on up to that point other than the fact that it has Gandalf in it.

Nothing that will happen in any of the extra nonsense affects anything that is going to happen in the main story except that Gandalf will have finished his business and come back in time for the Battle of the Five Armies.

It's going to be a great bulbous tumour on the back end of the movies, weighing down the actual story for no benefit other than to be a prequel to Lord of the Rings.

It's worth remembering that at the time The Hobbit was written it was not supposed to tie in to Tolkien's mythology, despite the few elements that crept in, which is why it has things like trolls as comedy working class stereotypes (It's gonna be pretty hard to reconcile the troll seen in Fellowship being called "Burt"), so all those extra ring war elements really are extraneous and have no business being in it.

I'm having a hard time making sense of this. It wasn't supposed to tie in to Tolkien's mythology, except for the places where it was?

At the time it was published, it was the sum total of Tolkien's mythology that had been released to the public.



The LOTR movies were in no way incoherent, but I'm sorry you found them confusing.

Tolkien had been working on, for years, for his own private amusement, the whole backstory of Middle Earth. When he wrote the Hobbit, it was as a one-off children's book, from, if I remember correctly, something random he had dashed off for his children.

It was never intended to be tie into his overarching mythology, although elements did creep in (such as the elves, even if they were portrayed rather differently than the elves he had been creating for his other project), and when the Hobbit was a larger success than expected, he was asked to write a sequel.

That sequel of course was the Lord of the Rings, and with some retcons to the Hobbit (chiefly in the account of how Bilbo got the ring from Gollum), he was able to more or less stuff the Hobbit into his Middle Earth framework.

Isn't it at least as typical of fanboys that they'll decry a major work of literature or cinema as 'ruined forever' if it doesn't exactly match their personal image of how the story was supposed to look?

Like Gondolin. So here we are again: it was never intended to tie in to his overarching mythology, except for the places where it was. But the other places? Never!

Are you deliberately being dense?

Just because certain themes and elements appealed to him so much that he couldn't help but include them in an unrelated work does not mean that it was ever intended to be linked. It was really mostly a happy co-incidence (made possible I'm sure by the unconscious desires of the creator) that the Hobbit was so easily modified to work with his existing mythology.

Remember, the original edition had references to (iirc, among others) policemen and China. Does this mean that it was meant to be set in modern-day Earth?

*shudders*
"lord of the online rings"?
The breathtaking story of the kids who play LOTRO?
Or is this one of those rule 34 thingies where you don't want to know what the rings are?


@DesertFly
1) Tolkien started on the mythologies of what would become Eä long before the 1930s when the Hobbit was finished.
2) After the Hobbit became a success the publisher asked for more. Tolkien made a draft on Silmarillion, which was rejected, and then The New Hobbit which became the Lord of the Rings. During the work on the later volumes he came up with new/more ideas, myth and backstory for the myths which he wanted to revise in the Hobbit. So later editions of the Hobbit included retcons to fit better with the Lord of the Rings stuff. (Like Gollum no longer parting on good-ish terms with Bilbo).
3) Some of those things that came up after the Hobbit became a success was that the mythology needed names so people could refer to them. So when drafting silmarillion he re-used the north germanic use of middle earth as the world of men (middangeard). While the world was called Arda, and the universe was Eä.

So it's not that the Hobbit was not set in middle earth, but rather that Tolkien's concept of middle earth always was a work in progress and wasn't fully formed at the time. After the release of Lord of the Rings he even started completely rewriting the Hobbit to better fit with his later ideas, but that effort was rejected by the publisher because it ruined the original's happy-go-lucky feeling and was horribly paced.

Now what you are refering to is stuff like this:
http://www.newsfrombree.co.uk/jrrt_int.htm

But I wouldn't agree on your interpretation. Instead I'd say it sounds more like while the 'idea' for the Hobbit came by itself, but during the writing progress the backdrop and the world became Eä. So when finished it definately took place in that mythology.

Also regarding your earth comment:

EDIT: Never mind, I didn't read the post above me properly - they basically said the same thing. The changes made to the Hobbit in the second edition by Tolkien during writing of the LotR changed the ring story to match that as set out in LotR rather than the original happier finding. IMO, that basically opens the door for further additions as part of a film adaptation, particularly as it will be viewed in the context of the previous films, not as a separate entity.