The Hobbit: Addition By Subtraction

[sonetka]

Presidents' Day isn't something that usually registers with me except as the occasion of a day off school for children and mattress sales for adults, but this year we ended up observing it by visiting friends and watching this edit of The Hobbit. This is the FunnyPuzzle/David Killstein edit (though I have my doubts about either one of those being

Comments

[matril]

Interesting! We haven't even seen any of the Hobbit films; it seemed apparent even when they were only planning one or two of them that they'd be done in the overblown, bloated fashion of the LOTR movies instead of the lighthearted children's story it was meant to be. And then they ended up making the Battle of Five Armies an entire film of its own? Sheesh. (Also, it makes much more sense going from a fun, low-stakes story into a more serious adult tale, as Tolkien originally did, rather than going backwards from the weightiness of LOTR to the simpler fun of the Hobbit.) But there may be some value in watching a condensed version. And I'll give Peter Jackson this much: his Middle-Earth visuals are very pretty. Though that's at least as much to the credit of the set and costume and lightning people. ;)

[sonetka]

In fairness, the director does have a good bit of say over who the set, costume and lighting people are, so I'll give him credit for that. The fan edit would be a little tricky if you didn't know the story *at all* -- there are a couple of things which simply aren't there to add so a few transitions are a bit abrupt. But if you know the story it's not a problem at all.

Going backwards from LOTR to the Hobbit is hard. I think the biggest problem is that in LOTR the Ring is the ARTIFACT OF DOOM which is capable of manipulating its owner, messing with the owner's mind, and distorting the owner's vision whenever he puts it on -- when Frodo puts it on on Weathertop, everythign else falls away but he can see the Black Riders' faces. In The Hobbit, there's no indication that it's anything but a cool little toy which changes absolutely nothing about your mental state or vision. You could always explain this as the Ring becoming more powerful as Sauron regains power but it would still be difficult to show Bilbo treating it so casually.

[matril]

It's true; going back to the Hobbit after LOTR means that every interaction with the ring is infused with bitter irony, whereas the original tone was "Oh, look, a cool ring that makes you invisible."

[sonetka]

Definitely -- imagine that scene with Shasta in the fog in "The Horse And His Boy" if C.S. Lewis had started it off by saying "Shasta was now ascending a mountain trail with a cliff two feet to his right, although he didn't know it." The subsequent encounter and conversation would be very hard to experience the same way Shasta did.