The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

All non-Nolan related film, tv, and streaming discussions.
User avatar
Posts: 13506
Joined: February 2011
I don't prefer this to DoS but I don't agree with people who say that the second film was a huge improvement. Both are very good 8.4-8.5 sorta films who fell short of being great.£

User avatar
Posts: 26414
Joined: June 2011
I feel that even though this one's pacing is slow, it's consistent. DoS has fast pacing in the beginning, normal pacing in the center, slow pacing in the end. It's just distracting. I'll give a controversial opinion, though. Two opinions in fact.

1. The worst thing about these movies is the color palette. There I said it. I hate the colors in these movies. All 3 LOTR movies had great colors. The first was vibrant (due to the adventure of it), second got darker and grey-er, and third continued on that path. But it all felt unified. AUJ had an over abundance of almost eye-hurting orange and blue everywhere. Then in the DoS advertisements it seemed they had gotten rid of that. And they had. Except instead of making the color good, they just took out half the colors. They made it all super grey and awful. It almost makes me feel MORE uncomfortable. Smaug is red. Gold is gold. You proved you could make it look beautiful in AUJ, why make it look so....bland and boring in DoS after setting it up.

2. Howard Shore's score is extremely underwhelming. The only good themes that aren't reused from LOTR are the Dwarf theme and Tauriel's theme. Overall the score just seems like noise to me and blends together, contributing to the dullness that is prevalent at times through the films.

User avatar
Posts: 26395
Joined: February 2010
Location: Houston, Texas
I don't know man, I'd say those are things a lot of people agreed with. I never really heard any major praise for Shore's score akin to what he did for LOTR. I feel like everything about this film and the series is essentially PJ's LOTR on drugs; everything is exaggerated.

I never saw the film in 48fps, but I'm sure I wouldn't have liked it as much in the theater if I experienced that first.

Posts: 55632
Joined: May 2010
I saw both movies in HFR and now I can't imagine seeing the third one in regular, just because I'm used to them in HFR (well, aside from blu-ray viewing).

Posts: 4794
Joined: January 2012
I think I'd give both of these films about a 6.5/10. Nothing awful but aside from some great scenes here and there nothing really jumps out to me as remarkable. I love the book and to me they could have gotten away with making 2 films but once they talked about 3 I lost a bit of respect for the director because it's obvious that MGM and WB were runing out of franchise to bank on and so they used this as a place holder. I was bitterly disappointed by the lack of practical effects and overuse of CG but most of the performances were good (especially Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis, Ian Mckellen and Benedict Cumberbatch) and some of the music on the soundtrack was nice here and there and sometimes they would have a real shot of a real environment and I wished the films had trusted old-school filmmaking with practical effects more. The action scenes are too much like video games and too goofy to be taken seriously with either too much slow-motion or with too many implausible feats and some of the tonal shifts between the lighter and heavier scenes are just really awkward. It should also be noted that Bilbo (you know, the main character), mostly takes a backseat to Thorin's story, which is a shame because this is called 'The Hobbit' but the films feel much more like prequels to LOTR and while the book leads into LOTR it was more enjoyable than this.

User avatar
Posts: 13506
Joined: February 2011
Bacon wrote:2. Howard Shore's score is extremely underwhelming. The only good themes that aren't reused from LOTR are the Dwarf theme and Tauriel's theme. Overall the score just seems like noise to me and blends together, contributing to the dullness that is prevalent at times through the films.
Nonsense with all due respect. There is The Feast of Starlight and there is also this really good theme that only plays in the first film when Gandalf is talking to Bilbo alone convincing him to come along (Also in the credits). Eagles theme was also decent, Smaug had a serviceable piece of music written for him. Before I forget there is the Erebor theme which is simple but really effective, to me at least. Other notable ones are Esgaroth and Goblin Town which are solid works done by Shore.£

User avatar
Posts: 8266
Joined: October 2012
Location: Gran Pulse
So i saw this film yesterday. It's and OK film. The pace is consistent, but slow. My main problem with this film is that it's an eventful film where none of the scenes sticks out.

Posts: 4794
Joined: January 2012
So here is a series of 3 videos by Lindsay Ellis that analyse and explain what the problems of the Hobbit trilogy are and while my experience with The Peter Jackson Hobbit films did not change the way I look at the LOTR movies, these are excellent discussions of the impact of the production of these films and our conflict with nostalgia:

Part 1/2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTRUQ-RKfUs

Part 2/2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElPJr_tKkO4

Part 3/2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi7t_g5QObs

Post Reply