Unless the third film is going to be solely about Dol Guldur and the White Council, I cannot fathom how on earth they are going to make the story work.ĭunno if the threads are going to merged at some point, but here's my review again: My biggest problem is that it really does feel like one more film should finish off the whole story with Bilbo and the dwarves. Overall: decent, but over-indulgent in places. Jackson also gave just the right amount of weight to the 'mercy' sequence without over-egging it. Gollum was great, with Serkis topping his performance from the trilogy. The Witch-King of Angmar showing up was also unexpected and cool. The scenes at Dol Guldur were really well-handled, if straining at violating the whole "Sauron has not yet taken physical form," assessment from the earlier movies. The scenes in Rivendell with the elves playing harps and the dwarves sitting there going, "What the fuck?", is the comic highlight of the movie. The depiction of the fall of Erebor and Dale is fantastic (despite the silly contrivances they use so as not to show us Smaug fully). ![]() The changes to the Azog storyline actually work quite well in giving Thorin a nemesis and a more omni-present threat than in the books. The rest get fleeting moments of cool (Dwalin as the first dwarf to arrive in particular), though Bombur's character is pretty much just the same in the book: he is fat and that's it (though he does kill a goblin with his belly at one point). Richard Armitage is beyond awesome as Thorin (frankly, he's better than Viggo as Aragorn) and Balin, Bifur (brilliant use of James Nesbitt), Fili and Kili all have their moments to shine. Someone behind me (I guess they hadn't read the books) actually said, "What, the eagles again?" Finally, continuing Jackson's fine (and admittedly irrelevant) tradition of paying zero attention to time and distances from the books, the Carrock would have to be about 13,000 feet high to allow them to see Erebor, which seems a bit ridiculous.Īgainst that, we have the characterisation of the thirteen dwarves which is highly successful. And, out of the books or not, the eagles showing up again was really anti-climactic. The exact same size (relative to the dwarves, anyway) and skin tone/texture. Every time I looked at him it took me right out of the movie. Also, Azog is a fucking Engineer from Prometheus. ![]() There's also some bizarre use of locations: the very identifiable Plains of Rohan location from TTT is re-used in the Radagast chase scene and where the dwarves find the secret passage to Rivendell, which is really jarring. The biggest problems are just what lots of people had identified already: the added subplots which feel extrenuous, the various tonal variations which feel jarring (the comedy washing-up musical number sits uneasily alongside later scenes of decapitations), some of the more pointless departures from the book (err, Mirkwood has been called that for a thousand years, Peter), the unnecessarily bum-numbing length and the overload of CGI even when completely unnecessary (and a lot less success in making it sit well in the enivronment than in LotR: during Radagast's chase scene he is clearly not actually there). Nowhere near as good as The Fellowship of the Ring or the extended version of The Two Towers, but superior to RotK (both versions) and the original cinematic version of TTT.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |