The Hobbit and Other Things

Hello again! I said over a month ago that it would probably be a week until my next post. Lame, eh? I apologize, but Christmas prep has been dragging me down, and it's also come to my attention that I'm apparently an awful writer, so I've not been much motivated of late.

I'm still clawing my way out of that particular grave, so this post might not be the cheery, chipper thing that I'd like it to be. Again, I apologize, but if I stall any longer I'll feel even more the fool.

First, I told you all that I'd let you know why Kyaza, my protagonist, has red hair. There are actually two reasons for this, and here they are:



Meet Valen Shadowbreath, from the video game Neverwinter Nights. I love this guy. I loved him when I was about ten years old, and I still just adore him. I know every line he has on that game, commenting on our surroundings, in every conversation and in reply to anything anyone says to him, by heart. I can quote huge blocks of his dialogue and descriptions. See, I'm a giant fan. He's one character I would love to meet in real life, scary as I'm sure he is. He's beautiful, isn't he, and he's saved my life too many times to count, and he's an amazing character to boot.

All right, all right, fangirling over, I promise. But really, he's amazing. He also has red hair.

The second reason why Kyaza has red hair is Dustfinger, from Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy. Again, I loved Dustfinger years ago, and I still do. At first when he appeared in Inkheart, I didn't know what to think of him--I'd love him for ten pages and then think he was creepy and weird and annoying, and then I'd love him again. He's an incredible, three-dimensional, entertaining character who I love more and more as the books progress. He also has ginger hair.

So, you see, between Valen and Dustfinger, who are both two of my favorites, Kyaza just couldn't have anything but red hair. He almost had black hair, for Sirius Black, and brown hair for Murtagh, but I settled on red because I'd loved Valen long before I'd loved anyone else--and because Dustfinger was there to reinforce the idea. Kyaza's hair is my clumsy way of paying homage to both of them.

So, now you know. I'll answer another question next time...how about this? Why is Kyaza's family made up of Ruby Dragons? This isn't a great question unless you know me, and are aware of my obsession with the color blue. Seriously, even I thought I would be the first person to write about blue dragons, but Kyaza and Company are red. I'll tell you why next blog post, I promise.

Oh, I'm not finished ranting yet. You see, I went to see The Hobbit movie yesterday, and I need to talk about that for a bit.



This is Ian McKellan, AKA Gandalf. I grew up with The Hobbit, you see--my mother read it aloud to me several times before I could read myself. I've read it more than a hundred times on my own, and I know most of it by heart. Thus, I know that Ian McKellan is a perfect Gandalf. He was in LotR, and he still is. I love him. He doesn't act like Gandalf, he just is Gandalf.

No, his actor is not my problem. My problem is that Gandalf had several lines directly from the book The Hobbit, which sounded dreadfully cheesy on-screen. There is just no way to adapt most of the dialogue from that book into a movie, but they tried anyway, and made Gandalf repeatedly look like a dunce of the highest degree. Also, he had more camera time than anyone else in the movie, by a lot. I love Gandalf, but he spent as much time out of the book as he did in it. Thus, when I see him more than I see Bilbo, I get frustrated. Nearly everything awesome that Gandalf said or did in The Hobbit movie, he'd already done or said before in LotR.



This is Martin Freeman, as the famous hobbit himself, Bilbo Baggins. I liked him. He did a good job as Bilbo, and his reactions in the movie were surprisingly believable. I think I could have loved him, if he was on-screen more. As I said before, Bilbo wasn't even the main part of the movie. I love Gandalf and Thorin, but poor Bilbo, who the movie was named after, had less camera time than either of them. He spent most of it kind of lurking in the background.



This is Thorin. He looks awesome, doesn't he, with his dwarvish costume on? The problem is, he looks like an awesome human wearing a dwarvish costume. No giant nose, no inhumanly heavy brows...he's just too humanlike. He doesn't look like the Thorin Oakenshield I've had in my head since before I could read. This is not the actor's fault, however--he's an amazing actor, and his voice is gorgeous. No, I blame whoever gave him his dialogue. He talked about Bilbo all the time, and he would say three horrible things about Bilbo, and then out of the blue he'd say something nice, and then three more horrible things, and then something nice. Rarely did he have a reason for his temper tantrums, or his sweet moods. Usually he'd just say it out of nowhere.

I didn't hate Thorin, though. I liked him, I thought he was awesome except for when he contradicted himself. I just wish he had been more of the Thorin from the book...but hey, we can't have everything, can we?



Does this look like a dwarf to you? No, I didn't think so. This is Kili. He, along with his brother, Fili, were the youngest two dwarves in the party. Kili, here, has such a pretty face...I'd love to see him as, say, Bard, from later in the book. Or some other Dalesman. Just...not...a dwarf. Please. He doesn't even have a beard, for goodness' sake! That's got to be, what, two days' growth? Three? Maybe he'd look like an awesome dwarf, if his makeup was better--I don't know. But he's too thin and pretty, and young, to be a dwarf. Young dwarves do not need to look like young humans--young is a relative term, Tolkien himself said it. And look, here's Fili and Kili together:



They're both too thin. They have no bulk. Yes, they're beautiful--but they're not dwarves to me.

And here's Fili:



He's a bit more dwarflike than Kili, at least he has extravagant hair and a moustache. But still, he looks like a young human. Look at how fine his eyebrows are.



Here are Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur. Except for the stupid hat, Bifur and Bofur look all right. I could live with them as dwarves. I could also live with Bombur, except that he looks like nothing more than a fat joke waiting to happen. And guess what? His only purpose in the movie was to supply a dose of fat jokes and cheap humor to it. He never did anything that didn't relate to his weight.

Please, I'm begging you, don't do this to me! Bombur was fat, yes, but he was also a living creature, a character on his own. It's so crude and lazy of the movie-makers all around to use him as a tool like they did.

The other dwarves I would waste my time talking about, but aside from the fact that half of them have pointed ears and the other half don't, I don't think they were around enough for me to talk about intelligently. Balin was all right, I'll say that. I hated the way his beard curled at the bottom, but his character was good enough and he did look suitably dwarflike. Cue applause for Balin!



Look at Uglúk, isn't he horrible? He's an Uruk-hai, yes, but still basically just an orc. One of the rabble of humanois monsters that J.R.R. Tolkien used to build the evil armies. This is what monsters look like, my friends--he's slimy and dark, wrinkly and evil and he just exudes malice.



And this is the Goblin King. He looks pretty scary and evil in this shot, doesn't he? Zoomed in on his eyes, which are quite well done, and as long as he's not moving or talking...yeah, okay, he looks like a monster worthy of J.R.R. Tolkien. But then, we also get this:



Another fat joke! Good grief, I was already embarrassed to be watching this movie because of all the terrible Bombur jokes, but then the Goblin King comes along. Full-body, he was just a big (like, twelve feet tall), flabby, disgusting mess whose jowls flapped around every time he came on camera. He moved just so that we, the audience, could be treated to an excellent shot of his jiggling belly and his rippling jowls. And the special effect of it wasn't good, either--it looked very poorly done. You can also see all of the goblins huddled behind him in a pile in that second picture--flesh-colored, skinny beasties that all look pretty much identical. Their makeup is poor and unimaginative. In LotR, every orc was unique, and stood out as being a singular monster, even if they were only on-camera for three seconds. Apparently, people care less about the goblin/Hobbit rabble than the orc/Uruk/LotR rabble.

I do hate to keep comparing The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings, but this brings up another point of mine--I can't help it, because almost everything awesome in The Hobbit was LotR! You don't believe me? Let me draw comparisons.

The scene where Theoden was making a speech about Gondor. "Where was Gondor?!"

Thorin makes almost the exact same speech about the elves. "Where were the elves?!"

No aid from either Gondor or the elves, apparently.

The scene where Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli hide behind a rock and watch the Rohirrim come wheeling around, after slaughtering the Uruks.

Thorin and Company re-enact the exact same scene, diving behind/under a rock while the good guys (elves) wheel around killing monsters. The same camera angles were used, the same scenery--yes, I know it's Middle-earth and I should expect some of the same scenery, but really? It looked like the exact same spot as from LotR.

The Council of Elrond scene in LotR is famous.

There was a second Council of Elrond in The Hobbit! Complete with Elrond and Gandalf arguing, and Saruman cracking bad jokes. I'm sorry, my friends, but Saruman, in the books and in the LotR movies, didn't have a sense of humor. He only did here because he wouldn't have fit into the movie if he didn't crack at least one bad joke. This was very, very poor taste, and a bad adaption of Saruman to boot.

The entire Galadriel scene in LotR, with Frodo and Aragorn talking to her a few minutes apart?

We get to see it all again in The Hobbit, with Gandalf acting like a humble, forlorn little boy as Galadriel encourages him. Again, we get almost exactly the same dialogue. Galadriel even touches Gandalf's hands and face.

The Hobbit scene in the goblin "tunnels", (the tunnels that looks suspiciously like the scene from the old PS2 video game The Hobbit) where Gandalf, Thorin and Company fall three thousand feet down the cavern on a double-decker wooden bridge? (A bridge that doesn't splinter or break, despite crashing off rocks all the way down. Less than a minute earlier in the movie, Bombur walks on one of these bridges and falls through--but with over a dozen party members on this piece of bridge, and a three-thousand-foot drop, the bridge doesn't break. Even assuming Gandalf magicked it to make it stay together--which seems like the kind of convenient magic that Tolkien never, ever indulged in--none of the dwarves lost their grip, or went flying off into the darkness? Also, none of them were killed upon landing...and none of them were killed when the corpse of the two-thousand-pound Goblin King landed right on top of them a moment later...)

The bridge scene, in Moria, was almost exactly the same as the escape-from-the-goblin-tunnels scene.

The scene where Gandalf goes over the edge, sayd, "Fly, you fools!" and Frodo screams, "Gandalf! Noooo!" in slow motion? If you look. I bet you'll find a strikingly similar scene in The Hobbit...

It goes on and on and on. Ninty-eight percent of what was awesome in The Hobbit had already been done!

Also, Radagast...ugh. When Gandalf mentioned him at first, I smiled, because that line was funny, and it made the geek in me very happy. But then Radagast appeared, soaking up a good half hour of the movie, and he was such a lame character. He wasn't funny, he wasn't cute, he wasn't entertaining or heroic, and he thought he was all of the above.

Also, the Witch King makes a surprise appearance in The Hobbit--he tries to stab Radagast, who just puts his staff up, and the Morgul Blade that the ghostie Witch King was using clangs off and hits the ground...and turns corporeal when it lands. What?! Why?! Why?! And the Necromancer...agh, I won't even get into that bit.

So, my rant is already overlong. Let me just say that I was sorely disappointed, and pretty much everything I was afraid of, happened in this movie. I was afraid that the charming mood of the book would be translated into cheap, crude humor, and it was (the trolls and Bombur come to mind...). I was afraid that they would try to give the characters the exact dialogue from the book, and they did--which is a commendable effort, but please realize that a lot of the dialogue from The Hobbit book just can't be translated smoothly to a television screen. I wish it could, but it can't. And it wasn't.

The humor and the light, cheery bits of the movie clashed dreadfully with the disgusting, dark parts. Gollum was awesome, of course, but we'd already seen him...although, I will say that I felt dreadfully bad for him there, at the end (even though he ruined it ten seconds later by shouting out, conveniently, that he would hate Bilbo forever. Naturally, he would, we already knew that, it was unnecessary and lame). Honestly, I'm having trouble deciding whether this movie was made for seven-year-olds or older teens, because it has the elements of both in it that don't mesh well together.

Also, I was disappointed by the soundtrack. I absolutely love everything about LotR's soundtrack, and I was hoping for more of the same type of thing in The Hobbit. Instead, they used exactly the same soundtrack. Rivendell appears, cue Rivendell music, the One Ring appears, cue the One Ring music, someone is marching/advancing in slow motion, cue the advancing in slow motion music. I can never get enough of those musics, but I was expecting more imagination than just recycling LotR's masterpieces.

Ah, yes. And I need to say that I absolutely loved Elrond's character in this one, he was beautifully done. I am in awe of how Elrond-like he was, and how elflike as well. Perfect.

Orkrist was another high point of the movie--it may very well be the coolest sword I've ever seen, and I want one just like it. If I was going to kill orcs, I'd do it with that sword. It's got to be my favorite.

I did like it, overall. I thought it was okay, and once the disappointment wears off, I'll probably look much more favorably on it...but not right now, I just can't, I'm afraid. I'd say it's about a six out of ten, when I was so hoping for a ten.

Anyway, now that my annoying ramble is over, I'm feeling somewhat better and I'm signing out. So, goodbye, and good luck with whatever you're doing! I'll cross my fingers and hope for the best on all fronts, especially The Hobbit #2!