by MouthForWar » Sat Aug 04, 2012 2:47 am
I'm not even saying I won't see the movies or aren't looking forward to them, so I think I'm being taken out of context big time here.
But I don't see why so many people are ok with a director known for stretching simple stories to the point of being BEYOND pedantic are ok with him turning a small children's novel into a three part film.
I never said I wouldn't be seeing them, but this raises an interesting debate. At what point do we say that Jackson is (whether he even knows it or not), essentially, taking advantage of an audience that he knows will throw money at any LOTR related material he does? Let's face it - pretty much no one could honestly argue that The Hobbit requires three two-hour-plus films. But Jackson's career could certainly use three big hits, since King Kong and The Lovely Bones both kind of underperformed. I already figured the ONLY real reason it was being put into TWO films was because WB knew they didn't have another sure-fire hit franchise now that Batman and Harry Potter are done and they wanted to get more of that Potter money by splitting it in half and stretching it as thin as they can to squeeze every penny possible. Its happening all over the place. The last Twilight and Hunger Games books are being split also (which, from what I've heard from the people that have read those books, isn't necessary AT ALL). Now they are splitting this one in three? The whole thing just seems... insincere to me.
I just don't understand how he could justify making the same amount of movies out of one thin book that he did out of three massive books.
WHY does he want to stretch it out and add characters and storylines and flesh out the appendices? Appendices have a purpose in a book, but there's a reason they are never included in film adaptations. I haven't heard anybody tell me WHY this is necessary at all. All I hear anybody saying is "It's Peter Jackson doing Tolkein, so it'll be good!" I can't think of anything more boring and pretentious than taking such a small book and loading it up with a bunch of minor stuff from these appendices, stuff that nobody but uber Tolkein nerds would ever care about.
My whole point with "Why don't they call it something else" was that they are no longer adapting the Hobbit. They are adapting the Hobbit and a ton of other stuff that spans a very long time period in the Tolkein universe. Going from Jackson himself said, the only reason the book was being stretched to two movies in the first place was because he was already adding new stuff and fleshing out some of the appendices. I guess he was upset that he left one paragraph somewhere unturned or something.
People keep saying "Yeah, but the LOTR movies were great!"- Yeah, that's true, but Jackson didn't add his own padding to those films like he is here... that was a huge epic that deserved to be treated as such. This is him trying to take a simple book into a huge epic. His process of adapting those books was totally different than it is here. If he did the same thing for LOTR as he is doing here, we'd have six LOTR films, not three.
Heck, if he made Dead Alive now, it would be a 6 hour mini-series.
I never said I was boycotting the movies, I was just voicing my concern, which apparently I can't do without being told I'm just a big sourpuss that doesn't want to enjoy anything..
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