I hated the Rock'em Sock'em stone giants - I thought they added time without much oomph.
I also miss whiny bitchy Bilbo. Taking that stuff out makes it "The Hot Dwarves and their Epic Quest (as told by a Hobbit)" and not "The Hobbit".
I think the movie worked well as a fantasy novel but poorly as an adaptation of The Hobbit. (Though I also loved the Riddles in the Dark sequence and have wanted to have Andy Serkis' little actor-babies for years now.)
I think cleolinda said it best when she talked about the film suffering from 'tonal dissonance' - it zigzagged back and forth from epic brooding to comedy troll-snot so much it made me dizzy. Now, there are and should be moments of lightness in an epic or everyone just gets depressed. But when you go back to the main thread you then up the stakes so that the weight of the plot is that much stronger by contrast. But endless shots of The Seventh Doctor with bird crap in his hair and a magical sleigh with eight tiny reindeer huge rabbits and a whole lot of running just got distracting. And the Great Goblin wasn't scary at all.
I had said from the outset that this is exactly what I was afraid would happen - that PJ was 'getting his fanboy on' and putting in everything just because he could without being able to step away and see if it actually served the story. 'King Kong' was just like that - an gorgeous love letter to the story but it would have been a better and tighter film if it were 20 minutes shorter. I'm normally a huge fan of 'extended editions' but in a lot of these cases more was not necessarily beter.
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I also miss whiny bitchy Bilbo. Taking that stuff out makes it "The Hot Dwarves and their Epic Quest (as told by a Hobbit)" and not "The Hobbit".
I think the movie worked well as a fantasy novel but poorly as an adaptation of The Hobbit. (Though I also loved the Riddles in the Dark sequence and have wanted to have Andy Serkis' little actor-babies for years now.)
I think cleolinda said it best when she talked about the film suffering from 'tonal dissonance' - it zigzagged back and forth from epic brooding to comedy troll-snot so much it made me dizzy. Now, there are and should be moments of lightness in an epic or everyone just gets depressed. But when you go back to the main thread you then up the stakes so that the weight of the plot is that much stronger by contrast. But endless shots of The Seventh Doctor with bird crap in his hair and a magical sleigh with eight
tiny reindeerhuge rabbits and a whole lot of running just got distracting. And the Great Goblin wasn't scary at all.I had said from the outset that this is exactly what I was afraid would happen - that PJ was 'getting his fanboy on' and putting in everything just because he could without being able to step away and see if it actually served the story. 'King Kong' was just like that - an gorgeous love letter to the story but it would have been a better and tighter film if it were 20 minutes shorter. I'm normally a huge fan of 'extended editions' but in a lot of these cases more was not necessarily beter.