Re: The Official "The Hobbit" movie thread
It was a little more than "a game of catch".
And I think it's a great story, I just think, film wise they could have made it better by cutting and eliminating things (even things I absolutely love) to fit the narrative and plot better.
To put things in perspective, The Hobbit has a running time of roughly, 2 hours and 40 minutes. This is the ground they cover from Bag End to just outside the Misty Mountains,
The focus juggles between the main protagonists and outside forces and not much ground is covered. They only get up to Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire, which is chapter 6 in a relatively smaller book.
With Fellowship of the Ring, it's a 2 hour and 50 minute movie and they cover much more characters and juggle between multiple protagonists (Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir) and more ground. It's a much tighter film. We go from the Shire all the way to Amon Hen - Emyn Muil. It not only covers all of book 1 and 2 of The Fellowship of the Ring, a much larger book, but we get a glimpse of the beginning of the Two Towers with the death and funeral of Boromir, the capture of Merry and Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli hunting the orcs and Frodo and Sam at Emyn Muil.
There's actually a sense of transition from location to location. From Bag End, to Brandywine, to Bree, to Rivendell, etc. etc. With this Unexpected Journey, it's all over the place.
Not saying it's terrible or anything, I loved it, but I think film wise and thematically, it could have benefited greatly from the things people are suggesting. There's more good than bad, but the bad things are a little annoying when this is the same group of people/collaborators that have worked on this stuff for years.
