Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Day 1125 - The Third Hobbit Movie

I have now seen all three Hobbit movies (albeit not in a row),and I've come away with the realization that the second one is my favorite.  The first one had a great scene between Bilbo and Gollum, the second one had giant spiders, and the third one, well the third one had lots of fighting.  And usually I'm a big fan of epic battle sequences, but in order to care about what's going on, a movie has to show us characters that we're invested in doing battle.  And that's where the third Hobbit fails.  When you have three armies battling, I'm fine with watching bad guys lose and good guys triumph, but not so much when none of the people I've been watching don't even participate.
The character that Peter Jackson created for the film - the elf Tauriel (as played by Evangeline Lily), was something that I had no problem with.  In the second movie she's given a lot to do, has a romance shoehorned in,and generally holds her own.  I enjoyed watching her character, because it was at least something different, and she kicked major butt.  But in the third movie, she's given absolutely nothing to do.  The romance is barely touched on (but it's effective when it is), and she has no major action sequences.  In the second movie, she's saving lives and killing orcs.  In the third movie, she's window dressing.  Where's that warrior we saw in an entire movie?  She really becomes the token female at that point.
It's amazing that I've distilled close to six hours worth of film down into one character, and it's not even the one the series is named after.  But if you're going to add something to an already existing piece of work, then you should at least strive to make sure that it has meaning.  And maybe Tauriel does have meaning - as in "don't do this to your characters."
And what was up with all the screen time for Alfrid?  Wow.  Never has a character so stopped a film dead in its tracks.  He's in the movie the whole time, and every time he shows up you just want to punch him in the face.
So disappointing.

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