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far over misty mountains cold
The other day Amiel and I talked out my entire Frodo/Sam headcanon. I did not realize I had a Frodo/Sam headcanon! It has little to do with the films and is very much about my book feelings, and of course I'm unsurprised that I have these feelings, but I'd never actually organized them before. I've shipped Frodo/Sam since I was ten! I am always oddly dissatisfied with the fic and, while I can pinpoint what I don't like about it, I could never figure out what I wanted instead! especially since "More of the book?" didn't seem like the right answer. But Amiel helped me work it out, and now I know exactly the story I want, so ... on the plane, or in between reading Yuletide fic, or etc, I think I'm going to do a Lord of the Rings reread, or at least a Frodo and Sam bits reread, and then maybe write this story.
All of which is by way of saying, hey, I'm thinking about this world a lot because I saw the Hobbit.
Summary: I loved it! although with some reservations. Slightly longer summary: I want someone to make a just-the-book-bits supercut of this film somehow, which is the opposite of all my desires for the Lord of the Rings movies, and also I have a lot of opinions about these books and the adaptations thereof.
When I first heard that Peter Jackson was making a Hobbit film in two parts, I was utterly thrilled; that's enough space to tell the entire story with room to breathe! When I then heard he had been given three, I was ... less than thrilled. It's a short book! When you get right down to it, not much actually happens besides a series of fun adventures culminating in several confrontations with a dragon and a Battle of Five Armies, so a film in two parts, with all the adventures leading up to Smaug as part one, and the rest as part two, is kind of perfect. Three? Three, okay, perhaps you can spend some quality time with the Necromancer and other foreshadowings of Lord of the Rings, but your pacing will be shot to hell unless you're really careful.
Peter Jackson is many things, but really careful is not one of them. Totally enthusiastic of all his material? Hell yes! Excited about the same stuff I am? Not all the time! I realize that the real flaws of this film born of the three-movie allowance are those of pacing and tone, because not much was stretched out over a good long while and there was definite mood whiplash between the stuff from the book proper and the stuff from the Sil and appendices &c, but I'm not sure if those were exactly my problems with it? I'm totally enough of a ridic massive Tolkien nerd that I was super happy to see the White Council (young cheerful Elrond! sarcastic Saruman! Gandalf/Galadriel what) and I love Sylvester McCoy's face enough that Radagast was enjoyable, although I think they didn't use him to great effect and I wish I could somehow magically transport him back into the part of the Lord of the Rings narrative to which he belongs. Of all the expansions, the one I really didn't care for was Azog, for reasons of ... the story that I care about is a totally different one than the one Azog is in!
Because, okay, I can see why Azog got greenlit. He gives Thorin some additional tragic backstory (like Thorin totally needed additional tragic backstory), gives Thorin and co something specific and urgent to make them get from place to place faster (because wanting to make good time to the Lonely Mountain and running from goblins wanting to avenge their king are not at all good enough motivations), and lets Thorin have an appreciating Bilbo moment after Bilbo does a heroic thing (because -- okay, I'm not going to give a sarcastic parenthetical annotation to this one, this is the main issue). The thing is, Thorin doesn't have to magically come to appreciate Bilbo after Bilbo saves his life; the fact that Bilbo followed them through the mountains and gave that excellent speech about helping them find a home is more than good enough, and in fact it shouldn't be Bilbo/Thorin hug times until ... probably until Thorin's deathbed scene, or if you really must, until Bilbo rescues the dwarves from the Mirkwood spiders.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that first of all, holy crap, okay, it's fine if Bilbo accidentally kills a warg that is too stupid to stop running straight at his sword, but the moment Bilbo discovers his own fighting strength has to be Mirkwood, or Sting should in fact be called something like Accidental Warg-Slayer or perhaps Fuck It, I Need To Save Thorin From His Own Stupid Revenge Plot. And second of all: if you want to do Bilbo's character beats right, you need to track the actual excellent heroic things he does in the book. If we're breaking this down film-by-film, we'll say that in the second, his big moments are rescuing the dwarves from the Mirkwood spiders, and again rescuing them from the wood elves via barrel -- feats of cleverness and bravery at various levels; and again in the third, figuring out how to get into the Mountain and discovering Smaug's weakness (oh my god by the way HOW MUCH AM I LOOKING FORWARD TO BILBO AND SMAUG I'll calm down now that's not until probably 2014) and then preventing war via theft of the Arkenstone. The first film's? should be delaying the trolls from eating the dwarves (that scene: kind of perfect, slightly gross humor and all, because it is exactly that ridiculous in the book) and sparing Gollum.
That's the moment. That's the big thing, and actually it drives me a bit up the wall that Gandalf gives Bilbo helpful advice about how the responsibilities of carrying a sword include knowing when to spare a life, because -- argblarg I have about a billion feelings about how both Bilbo and Frodo feel pity rather than loathing for Gollum and thus save the world, and I'm okay with Gandalf telling Frodo the values of pity, but the really excellent thing about Bilbo is that he does it his damn self. He doesn't really want to be so terribly far from all his familiar creature comforts, but when he is, he becomes someone who is at the core decent, in very not-decent places, and all you have to do is show this.
So -- as with Frodo before him, this film did not understand Bilbo. (That's perhaps a lot of paragraphs for another day, but the summary of my issue with movie!Frodo is that he was written as someone who, faced with the oncoming Witch-King of Angmar, trips over his own fucking feet. Know what Frodo in the book did? Stabbed that fucker with a knife. I mean, it didn't work and he still got a Morgul blade for his trouble, but it kind of breaks my heart. If you want it, come and claim it, Frodo shouts across the river moments from unconsciousness, and months later with the Ring eating his mind he holds Sam's hand while they shuffle through the pass of Cirith Ungol together, and -- maybe someday I should properly write about how many of the Lord of the Rings film changes make me wildly happy, but Frodo kind of breaks my heart.) However, unlike Frodo, Bilbo was also cast as perfectly as he possibly could be cast, and Martin Freeman, despite leaping in front of why the fuck is Azog even here, determinedly and rather fussily tramps his way through this film with such an air of absolute decency that Bilbo still 100% works for me.
Because I can't stop harping on Azog, I also want to know whether he'll be leading the goblins in the Battle of Five Armies. Presumably? Which misses another fundamental point, of course, in much the same way that Thorin is retaking his homeland for Honor and Revenge (and totally not for the gold at all, it's super shiny but Thror is apparently the one who had cares about it, who wants to bet that Thorin's Arkenstone obsession is going to be about Family, not about Shiny Things). The thing about the Hobbit is that it's in large part a book about petty greed -- Smaug's, of course, and the Master of Laketown's, and the wood elves' before the goblins appear, and the dwarves' as well, here's your contract for a fourteenth share, Mr. Baggins -- and how when a real enemy shows up it transmutes into a story about actual heroics. I can totally see how one could come at the story from another angle! The elves who refused to fight against the dragon redeem themselves when there are goblins to fight? It totally ends up being about honor and heroics? Except it -- kind of started that way already, Azog, reveeeenge. Which mostly means Peter Jackson is interested in telling a different story than I would be! He's just interested in telling a story about how Middle Earth is full of pretty awesome people, and also here is a story of the things that happen to set in motion the events of Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile I'd love to be watching the story about how darkness is creeping back into the world, but when it does, various people discover that it's possible to put aside petty material concerns and recall those things that are actually important to fight for.
Help, whoops, maybe I should clean this up and turn it into a fucking essay or something.
Let's talk about the things I liked! As I said, I'm not totally thrilled by the way they wrote Bilbo, but sklfdjhfd help Bilbo was totally perfect anyway. In fact, everything pulled directly from the book made me absurdly happy: the dinner party, the songs the dwarfs sing, Roast Mutton, younger Elrond and the moon runes, &c. I ... may have actually teared up when Ian Holm started with In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. And then teared up several times again when proper verbatim book bits happened.
Riddles in the Dark, though. PERFECT. I've seen the complaint that the Gollum/Smeagol angle was played way up, and that in fact the Smeagol bits of Gollum aren't actually around until Frodo pulls them forth, that's the entire point, to which I say: well, yes! But having Gollum arguing with himself was funny, and didn't actually take away from any of the intrinsic horror for me, or subtract anything from the scene, and in fact I really love that "string or nothing!" is each of Gollum's personalities having a guess. Also, Gollum's glowing eyes? TERRIFYING. I was extremely pleased with the tense black box theater-feeling riddle game, is what I'm saying here.
Of course Gandalf was perfect because Ian McKellen is perfect, and I'm so, so glad that they made these films in time for him to still be up for tramping around New Zealand. I also loved a lot of the dwarves! You'd think in three hours they'd be more successful at properly distinguishing every single one of them, and there are a few I know nearly nothing about (Bombur: he's fat! Bifur: he doesn't speak Common! Nori: ...?) but I'm really charmed by a lot of them. I suspect they were making Fili and Kili the Merry and Pippin, with mixed success, and I appreciate that they also gave those two the stating-the-obvious Legolas-style lines, if by "appreciate" I mean "am extremely entertained by." I loved Ori and his defiance and slingshots and horrible cardigan; I loved Dori and his politeness and offerings of tea. I enjoyed Oin's hearing horn but wish he'd been given more dialogue about ~signs~ himself, and poor Gloin's entire character note was "Gimli's dad!!" but he did the same accent with aplomb. Dwalin and his tattoos and give-no-fucks attitude were pretty great, and Balin is everything I could've asked for, which of course he would be, since he was one of the only dwarves in the book to be given any kind of consistent personality. I am unsure why, besides Balin, Bofur was the dwarf that was given every line?? I mean, the answer is "James Nesbitt" but I think they maybe threw a dart at dwarf names randomly. In any case, Bofur and his fur hat and feeeelings were great!
Thorin cracks me the fuck up? I say this in the most delighted possible way. He has EPIC HERO SHOTS and BROODS and is an asshole to Bilbo but keeps saving his life and it's just wonderful! To my great surprise upon my second viewing I suddenly discovered that when Thorin dies in the last movie I am going to actually cry. I just care about this asshole a lot! I think I care a whole lot about his relationship with Bilbo! And by "relationship with Bilbo" I mean "I am holding off my own judgment until I've seen the entire arc they write in, but fuck, fandom better be ALL OVER Bilbo/Thorin." Is fandom all over it? I haven't been on tumblr in ages, I have no finger on fandom's pulse.
I think that's about it! I don't know if I need to see it a third time in theaters, and I may actually need a magical just-or-mostly-the-book cut so that I can show it to my parents without them getting annoyed with the needless battle sequences, but I am so pleased that it exists, and so excited to see the rest of it, because that is only the first third of the story and I'm so curious about what the whole shape of it is going to be.
All of which is by way of saying, hey, I'm thinking about this world a lot because I saw the Hobbit.
Summary: I loved it! although with some reservations. Slightly longer summary: I want someone to make a just-the-book-bits supercut of this film somehow, which is the opposite of all my desires for the Lord of the Rings movies, and also I have a lot of opinions about these books and the adaptations thereof.
When I first heard that Peter Jackson was making a Hobbit film in two parts, I was utterly thrilled; that's enough space to tell the entire story with room to breathe! When I then heard he had been given three, I was ... less than thrilled. It's a short book! When you get right down to it, not much actually happens besides a series of fun adventures culminating in several confrontations with a dragon and a Battle of Five Armies, so a film in two parts, with all the adventures leading up to Smaug as part one, and the rest as part two, is kind of perfect. Three? Three, okay, perhaps you can spend some quality time with the Necromancer and other foreshadowings of Lord of the Rings, but your pacing will be shot to hell unless you're really careful.
Peter Jackson is many things, but really careful is not one of them. Totally enthusiastic of all his material? Hell yes! Excited about the same stuff I am? Not all the time! I realize that the real flaws of this film born of the three-movie allowance are those of pacing and tone, because not much was stretched out over a good long while and there was definite mood whiplash between the stuff from the book proper and the stuff from the Sil and appendices &c, but I'm not sure if those were exactly my problems with it? I'm totally enough of a ridic massive Tolkien nerd that I was super happy to see the White Council (young cheerful Elrond! sarcastic Saruman! Gandalf/Galadriel what) and I love Sylvester McCoy's face enough that Radagast was enjoyable, although I think they didn't use him to great effect and I wish I could somehow magically transport him back into the part of the Lord of the Rings narrative to which he belongs. Of all the expansions, the one I really didn't care for was Azog, for reasons of ... the story that I care about is a totally different one than the one Azog is in!
Because, okay, I can see why Azog got greenlit. He gives Thorin some additional tragic backstory (like Thorin totally needed additional tragic backstory), gives Thorin and co something specific and urgent to make them get from place to place faster (because wanting to make good time to the Lonely Mountain and running from goblins wanting to avenge their king are not at all good enough motivations), and lets Thorin have an appreciating Bilbo moment after Bilbo does a heroic thing (because -- okay, I'm not going to give a sarcastic parenthetical annotation to this one, this is the main issue). The thing is, Thorin doesn't have to magically come to appreciate Bilbo after Bilbo saves his life; the fact that Bilbo followed them through the mountains and gave that excellent speech about helping them find a home is more than good enough, and in fact it shouldn't be Bilbo/Thorin hug times until ... probably until Thorin's deathbed scene, or if you really must, until Bilbo rescues the dwarves from the Mirkwood spiders.
Which brings me to my next point, which is that first of all, holy crap, okay, it's fine if Bilbo accidentally kills a warg that is too stupid to stop running straight at his sword, but the moment Bilbo discovers his own fighting strength has to be Mirkwood, or Sting should in fact be called something like Accidental Warg-Slayer or perhaps Fuck It, I Need To Save Thorin From His Own Stupid Revenge Plot. And second of all: if you want to do Bilbo's character beats right, you need to track the actual excellent heroic things he does in the book. If we're breaking this down film-by-film, we'll say that in the second, his big moments are rescuing the dwarves from the Mirkwood spiders, and again rescuing them from the wood elves via barrel -- feats of cleverness and bravery at various levels; and again in the third, figuring out how to get into the Mountain and discovering Smaug's weakness (oh my god by the way HOW MUCH AM I LOOKING FORWARD TO BILBO AND SMAUG I'll calm down now that's not until probably 2014) and then preventing war via theft of the Arkenstone. The first film's? should be delaying the trolls from eating the dwarves (that scene: kind of perfect, slightly gross humor and all, because it is exactly that ridiculous in the book) and sparing Gollum.
That's the moment. That's the big thing, and actually it drives me a bit up the wall that Gandalf gives Bilbo helpful advice about how the responsibilities of carrying a sword include knowing when to spare a life, because -- argblarg I have about a billion feelings about how both Bilbo and Frodo feel pity rather than loathing for Gollum and thus save the world, and I'm okay with Gandalf telling Frodo the values of pity, but the really excellent thing about Bilbo is that he does it his damn self. He doesn't really want to be so terribly far from all his familiar creature comforts, but when he is, he becomes someone who is at the core decent, in very not-decent places, and all you have to do is show this.
So -- as with Frodo before him, this film did not understand Bilbo. (That's perhaps a lot of paragraphs for another day, but the summary of my issue with movie!Frodo is that he was written as someone who, faced with the oncoming Witch-King of Angmar, trips over his own fucking feet. Know what Frodo in the book did? Stabbed that fucker with a knife. I mean, it didn't work and he still got a Morgul blade for his trouble, but it kind of breaks my heart. If you want it, come and claim it, Frodo shouts across the river moments from unconsciousness, and months later with the Ring eating his mind he holds Sam's hand while they shuffle through the pass of Cirith Ungol together, and -- maybe someday I should properly write about how many of the Lord of the Rings film changes make me wildly happy, but Frodo kind of breaks my heart.) However, unlike Frodo, Bilbo was also cast as perfectly as he possibly could be cast, and Martin Freeman, despite leaping in front of why the fuck is Azog even here, determinedly and rather fussily tramps his way through this film with such an air of absolute decency that Bilbo still 100% works for me.
Because I can't stop harping on Azog, I also want to know whether he'll be leading the goblins in the Battle of Five Armies. Presumably? Which misses another fundamental point, of course, in much the same way that Thorin is retaking his homeland for Honor and Revenge (and totally not for the gold at all, it's super shiny but Thror is apparently the one who had cares about it, who wants to bet that Thorin's Arkenstone obsession is going to be about Family, not about Shiny Things). The thing about the Hobbit is that it's in large part a book about petty greed -- Smaug's, of course, and the Master of Laketown's, and the wood elves' before the goblins appear, and the dwarves' as well, here's your contract for a fourteenth share, Mr. Baggins -- and how when a real enemy shows up it transmutes into a story about actual heroics. I can totally see how one could come at the story from another angle! The elves who refused to fight against the dragon redeem themselves when there are goblins to fight? It totally ends up being about honor and heroics? Except it -- kind of started that way already, Azog, reveeeenge. Which mostly means Peter Jackson is interested in telling a different story than I would be! He's just interested in telling a story about how Middle Earth is full of pretty awesome people, and also here is a story of the things that happen to set in motion the events of Lord of the Rings. Meanwhile I'd love to be watching the story about how darkness is creeping back into the world, but when it does, various people discover that it's possible to put aside petty material concerns and recall those things that are actually important to fight for.
Help, whoops, maybe I should clean this up and turn it into a fucking essay or something.
Let's talk about the things I liked! As I said, I'm not totally thrilled by the way they wrote Bilbo, but sklfdjhfd help Bilbo was totally perfect anyway. In fact, everything pulled directly from the book made me absurdly happy: the dinner party, the songs the dwarfs sing, Roast Mutton, younger Elrond and the moon runes, &c. I ... may have actually teared up when Ian Holm started with In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. And then teared up several times again when proper verbatim book bits happened.
Riddles in the Dark, though. PERFECT. I've seen the complaint that the Gollum/Smeagol angle was played way up, and that in fact the Smeagol bits of Gollum aren't actually around until Frodo pulls them forth, that's the entire point, to which I say: well, yes! But having Gollum arguing with himself was funny, and didn't actually take away from any of the intrinsic horror for me, or subtract anything from the scene, and in fact I really love that "string or nothing!" is each of Gollum's personalities having a guess. Also, Gollum's glowing eyes? TERRIFYING. I was extremely pleased with the tense black box theater-feeling riddle game, is what I'm saying here.
Of course Gandalf was perfect because Ian McKellen is perfect, and I'm so, so glad that they made these films in time for him to still be up for tramping around New Zealand. I also loved a lot of the dwarves! You'd think in three hours they'd be more successful at properly distinguishing every single one of them, and there are a few I know nearly nothing about (Bombur: he's fat! Bifur: he doesn't speak Common! Nori: ...?) but I'm really charmed by a lot of them. I suspect they were making Fili and Kili the Merry and Pippin, with mixed success, and I appreciate that they also gave those two the stating-the-obvious Legolas-style lines, if by "appreciate" I mean "am extremely entertained by." I loved Ori and his defiance and slingshots and horrible cardigan; I loved Dori and his politeness and offerings of tea. I enjoyed Oin's hearing horn but wish he'd been given more dialogue about ~signs~ himself, and poor Gloin's entire character note was "Gimli's dad!!" but he did the same accent with aplomb. Dwalin and his tattoos and give-no-fucks attitude were pretty great, and Balin is everything I could've asked for, which of course he would be, since he was one of the only dwarves in the book to be given any kind of consistent personality. I am unsure why, besides Balin, Bofur was the dwarf that was given every line?? I mean, the answer is "James Nesbitt" but I think they maybe threw a dart at dwarf names randomly. In any case, Bofur and his fur hat and feeeelings were great!
Thorin cracks me the fuck up? I say this in the most delighted possible way. He has EPIC HERO SHOTS and BROODS and is an asshole to Bilbo but keeps saving his life and it's just wonderful! To my great surprise upon my second viewing I suddenly discovered that when Thorin dies in the last movie I am going to actually cry. I just care about this asshole a lot! I think I care a whole lot about his relationship with Bilbo! And by "relationship with Bilbo" I mean "I am holding off my own judgment until I've seen the entire arc they write in, but fuck, fandom better be ALL OVER Bilbo/Thorin." Is fandom all over it? I haven't been on tumblr in ages, I have no finger on fandom's pulse.
I think that's about it! I don't know if I need to see it a third time in theaters, and I may actually need a magical just-or-mostly-the-book cut so that I can show it to my parents without them getting annoyed with the needless battle sequences, but I am so pleased that it exists, and so excited to see the rest of it, because that is only the first third of the story and I'm so curious about what the whole shape of it is going to be.
no subject
Also yes, riddle scene, PERFECT. Though even with my spotty recollection of book canon, Gandalf's "when to spare a life" line made me go "I thought... that was... something he said to Frodo? Very significantly at that? And that Bilbo didn't really struggle with this decision?" And now I am slowly realizing that all the Peter Jackson changes I hate are the times when he looked at LotR and went "you know what? This isn't dark enough! Let me sow MOAR strife and misery amongst the characters!"
Mostly though I am just amused that everyone in Middle Earth is getting interior design tips off Emperor Palpatine, because seriously guys, did nobody think of handrails for all those bottomless chasms.
no subject
Re: your spotty recollection of book canon, Gandalf indeed has that conversation with Frodo! Gandalf gives some Gollum exposition, Frodo says "It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance," and Gandalf says "Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. ...Before the end, Bilbo's pity may rule the fate of many, yours not least." And it's actually a great speech because it both sets up Frodo to, y'know, not kill Gollum later, but also foreshadows the actual goddamn climax of the story with Gollum being instrumental to destroying the Ring &c. So that is useful! Gandalf ... retroactively rehashing the same speech to Bilbo in the prequel is kind of uncool, because BILBO DID IT HIMSELF OKAY, he needed no encouragement! Bah.
gjkfsdkdfshjdf yeeeah if you live inside a mountain, perhaps handrails!
PS you should totally reread the Hobbit, it is really adorable and delightful and will take you like a day or two. :D
no subject
And wait, Elrond looks young in this movie? He was born way back in the First Age, no way should he look younger in this movie than in LotR!
Checking the AO3, Bilbo/Thorin does seem to be a thing that exists? But there are also fics pairing Bilbo with various other dwarves.
no subject
I hope you do enjoy the movie when you get a chance to see it! :)