Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Why The Hobbit Trilogy Failed To Equal Lord Of The Rings" video.

  1.  @politicallycorrectredskin796  The Hobbit was written for kids and kind of a warm-up for LOTR. Dwarves were pretty helpless in The Hobbit, yet somehow in the larger story, they were pretty bad-ass. The Hobbit, itself, was pretty inconsistent about the nature and abilities of dwarves. I think they could've made a good trilogy out of The Hobbit, regardless. Painting the actual picture of the Barrow Downs, Tom Bombadil's abode, his wife, ... They could've worked in an Ents connection, there, because Bombadil's wood had trees that were pretty Ent-ish. They could've stretched out the parts fighting the spiders. The escape from the wood-elves. There, again, is another inconsistency within Tolkien's own work. The pettiness of the elves in The Hobbit, as opposed to their tragic nobility in LOTR. The incompetent blundering by dwarves in The Hobbit, but the near super-hero abilities of Gimli in LOTR. They could've spent a huge chunk of movie on how Bilbo engineered the escape from the elves. They didn't delve into that. It was actually a pretty cool thing that Bilbo did. Bilbo changed a TON in The Hobbit. Not to really capture that in the movies, and to insert a love affair between a dwarf and an elf that wasn't in the book was just bleah. Instead, they did a lazy montage of what could've been a HUGE part of the movie. Lots of room to be creative, there, because Tolkien uses a very few words to describe a pretty monumental achievement by the burglar. I think a trilogy for a story as rich as The Hobbit is totally appropriate. And while I agree that they did a pretty darn good job on LOTR, that could easily have been serialized into 10 beefy 1- or 2-hour installments. I hope that's what they start doing more of. Mini-series and midi-series-length is hopefully the wave of the future. But the creative types have to figure out how to make it and get their money back for it, in a changing marketplace. I think there's plenty of pent-up demand and $$$ for good movies and better, smarter adaptations. Peter Jackson's not the only one who can do them, nor is he going to hit a home run on every swing. Still, I wish I'd seen more elaboration on things Tolkien DID indicate, without going into great detail, because The Hobbit did need some tweaking to really stand up on screen. It would've been cool to actually see Beorn out on his night's travels, and not just a single shot from a distance, which is all Tolkien gave the reader. They could've built on that legend. Readers thirst for more on Beorn. More on Bombadil. There's so much room for some creativity that is NOT just standard Hollywood fluff.
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  2. I think there's enough material for a trilogy, if it's done right. A good writer could expand on things that were only suggested in the book, like Bombadil, Beorn, and maybe even tie things together between some of the entish trees in Bombadil's valley with the Ents, themselves. And there was a lot of "meanwhile" going on. Aragorn was busy doing ranger things. I'm not saying it would be easy, but bring in a room full of LOTR geeks and writers, and it's such a rich world with so many stories to be told, I bet. But they just hacked it all up, instead of treating the canon with reverence. Some of the issues with the movie(s) are actually issues with the original material. Tolkien still hadn't figured out whether dwarves were helpless buffoons or doughty warriors. In The Hobbit, they couldn't get out of their own way, but in Two Towers, Gimli kept up just fine with Legolas and Aragorn. They made a bit of a thing out of Gimli lagging behind in the movie, but near as I can tell from the Lore, mobility hierarchy is elves > orcs > dwarves > men. If anything, Aragorn was superhuman keeping up with Legolas and Gimli, and Legolas could've run down the Uruk-Hai pretty easily, if he wanted to. Tolkien just decided that the 3 would be as fast or as slow as required for the purposes of the story. Someone(s) with a strong vision and (a) tightly-written screen play(s) could've done something good/great here. More has been done with less. Usually much less is done with much more. But I still think the root problem is Tolkien himself was still feeling things out when he crafted a fun story for his kids. Are dwarves feckless and helpless fools who couldn't make it out of the Shire without a Wizard's help, (which begs the question of how they EVER managed to make it to Bilbo's in the first place) or are they super-awesome semi-superheroes? It depends on what the plot calls for, I guess. One of the things I could never figure out was how Smaug could terrorize Lake Town, which was supposedly built in the middle of the lake so that Smaug couldn't get to them. It's where all the residents of Dale moved to, after Smaug's first appearance. But Smaug could fly, right? Just one of the inconsistencies in The Hobbit that were never clearly explained. They could've exercised some creative license to flesh things out, rather than injecting the interracial couple. Heck, they could've made some real gender-bending without contrivance, just by showing some bearded dwarf women! Anyway, as a geek, I always wanted more of Bombadil's story. They could've spent 20 minutes or a half hour on Beorn. In the book, he had Warg hides nailed up, outside. There's some good bear-on-wolf and bear-on-goblin action, there. Fans would've loved some Beorn action in Battle of Five Armies, too. The time Bilbo spent fighting the spiders... "Addercop!" Bilbo's time in the Elf palace as a true burglar, piecing together a pretty clever escape plan would've been good. I think that episode got a 5-minute montage, maybe. Instead, they injected a massive and massively impossible Spielberg-style chase scene. The dwarves were sore and cramped from an otherwise uneventful barrel ride. For the record, I thought Radagast was pretty rad.
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