Mark Henrikson's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-hobbit-bad-movie"
The Hobbit - One Suck Ass Movie
During the week between Christmas and New Years I got to see both wonderful and brutally awful examples in storytelling to bring back to my writing.
I finally got to see the musical Wicked on stage which was really well done. Musically it was good but not out of this world, but the story and character development it portrayed was just breathtaking. There were fun tie-ins with the original Wizard of Oz, you understood why characters turned from good to bad and bad to good, the main surprise element was foreshadowed well yet did not give it away, and it all got wrapped up into a satisfying ending.; storytelling at its very best and I shall strive to emulate it in my own writing since my stories take place inside historical events everyone is familiar with.
Then I decided to press my luck and see The Hobbit at the theater and it was just plain awful on almost every level. Fanboys flaming me to commence in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1
Honestly, if you take off your Tolkien collored lenses for two seconds you will see the story told was not any good. When the credits start rolling and you look around and ask what was the point of all that, it was a bad story. The retort I hear over and over is, “You must not have read the book to not get the movie.” If the story was told right I shouldn’t have to read the book to get it.
First problem I had was motivation. Other than the main character being a little bored with his daily life, there was no reason given for him to go on the dangerous quest or for the travelers to want him to come along. Second issue was that nothing of any lasting value happened in the three hours of screen time. Swords clashed and lines were spoken, but nothing changed: no characters died, no profound character growth occurred, and in the end they were not much closer to accomplishing their goal. Okay, they could actually see the destination mountain in the final scene as giant birds that could have flown them there in minutes dropped them off. Seriously?!?
Talk about plot gaps. If the wizard could summon giant birds to rescue the group and fly them to safety, why not call them right away and just fly to the mountain. Oh wait, we can’t do that, we can squeeze three movies out of these guys walking there instead. And don’t even get me started on the numerous instances of deus ex machina . Problems and solutions just popped up out of the blue without any foreshadow or reason other than it made for a nice action sequence to pass the time. At least The Hobbit reinforced what not to do in my writing.
I finally got to see the musical Wicked on stage which was really well done. Musically it was good but not out of this world, but the story and character development it portrayed was just breathtaking. There were fun tie-ins with the original Wizard of Oz, you understood why characters turned from good to bad and bad to good, the main surprise element was foreshadowed well yet did not give it away, and it all got wrapped up into a satisfying ending.; storytelling at its very best and I shall strive to emulate it in my own writing since my stories take place inside historical events everyone is familiar with.
Then I decided to press my luck and see The Hobbit at the theater and it was just plain awful on almost every level. Fanboys flaming me to commence in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1
Honestly, if you take off your Tolkien collored lenses for two seconds you will see the story told was not any good. When the credits start rolling and you look around and ask what was the point of all that, it was a bad story. The retort I hear over and over is, “You must not have read the book to not get the movie.” If the story was told right I shouldn’t have to read the book to get it.
First problem I had was motivation. Other than the main character being a little bored with his daily life, there was no reason given for him to go on the dangerous quest or for the travelers to want him to come along. Second issue was that nothing of any lasting value happened in the three hours of screen time. Swords clashed and lines were spoken, but nothing changed: no characters died, no profound character growth occurred, and in the end they were not much closer to accomplishing their goal. Okay, they could actually see the destination mountain in the final scene as giant birds that could have flown them there in minutes dropped them off. Seriously?!?
Talk about plot gaps. If the wizard could summon giant birds to rescue the group and fly them to safety, why not call them right away and just fly to the mountain. Oh wait, we can’t do that, we can squeeze three movies out of these guys walking there instead. And don’t even get me started on the numerous instances of deus ex machina . Problems and solutions just popped up out of the blue without any foreshadow or reason other than it made for a nice action sequence to pass the time. At least The Hobbit reinforced what not to do in my writing.
