I forgot to remind you to post about your thoughts on the latest Hobbit movie! :O This is your reminder if you're still up for it, if not no big deal <333
okay so i realize that you sent me this over a week ago and i said i would answer this over a week ago and then forgot to do it because i'm the king of trash mountain and i also have really bad short term memory problems and i'm sorry because i do love you and don't want to make you feel like i don't!
my thoughts on the latest hobbit movie are going to come off as harsh and i am sure that everyone who reads this is going to think i'm some sort of buzzkillington who hates fun and can never just enjoy things gosh, but i really wish people would understand that the reason i am highly critical of stuff is because i do enjoy things and i do love movies and fantasy and i just wish that things could be better than they are now.
this will also be somewhat of a jumble and full of spoilers, which i will tag it for spoilers, but also consider this a warning for anyone who doesn't have 'the hobbit spoilers' tagged but also doesn't want this movie spoiled
i will start with the things that i liked. first of all i enjoyed it more than desolation of smaug simply for the fact that the pacing was not nearly as strange and disjointed and there was plenty of action so i could just switch my brain off and enjoy the ride in a way i just could not do with dos. the special effects, while still not great, were also much much better than those in desolation of smaug. also the costuming was outrageously beautiful and i could not get over how fucking beautiful thranduil's costumes were.
none of that really makes up for everything else.
the taurielxkili plot. i'm sorry. i know i have a lot of friends who ship this really hard, but i'm sorry that i cannot get behind it. it was cheesy. it was poorly written. it was shoehorned in and quite frankly i feel like it is grossly misogynistic to introduce a 'strong female character' (barf i hate this term) and then only utilize her in a way that makes all of her decisions based on the men around her. also i'm bored to tears of hetero romance, but i suppose that is more of a personal qualm than anything else.
for one thing, the characters only knew each other collectively for a single evening. even if you include the extended prison scene from desolation of smaug, they spoke while he was imprisoned for about 5 minutes and you expect me to believe that this 'strong' woman would risk her life, position as captain of the guards, and her good standing with the king of her people for a man she knew for 5 minutes? you expect me to believe that she loved him from the bottom of her heart from that small interaction? i am not discounting the idea that people can fall in love quickly, but under these circumstances it feels forced. and then they spend the evening in lake town together, while kili is mostly unconscious and the two of them are running for their lives from a dragon. in the morning they part ways and that is the grand total of their interactions. the dialogue when they leave each other is incredibly cheesy and it isn't well written at all.
and then, because peter jackson did not think at all about utilizing this character beyond this romance plotline she goes wasted throughout the rest of the movie until the finale. her only purpose is to ask legolas what he is talking about so he can finish his lines along with a dramatic swell of the music and cut-to-next scene. it's gross (side note, how do they get to gundabad and back in time for the finale at ravenhill? also why do they say ravenhill is to the north when the map at the end clearly shows that ravenhill is to the south of the lonely mountain? what is going on here?) when she returns she fights futilely to save kili, who seems to be more upset that she is there and endangering herself by trying to save him than he was when he watched his brother get stabbed and thrown from the ramparts of the watchtower? idk
but then it's like...he dies and she cries about it and thranduil shows up on ravenhill just to validate the situation after spending all this time and effort telling her that there was no substance to this relationship. which i could really see it in lee pace's face that he was not committed to those lines.
also i find it really odd that thranduil would tell legolas to head out and find aragorn. like...i get that jackson was trying to set up the tie-in to fellowship, but doesn't he know that there is like 70 years of time between the end of the hobbit and the time legolas makes it to rivendell and meets aragorn? ntm that i am pretty sure legolas came straight from mirkwood when he heads out to the council at rivendell (though my memory might be a bit hazy on this point - i am re-reading lotr right now but it's been a while since they formed the fellowship). you're telling me the unstoppable force that is legolas couldn't find one ranger (who freely gives out the name strider and is known to a lot of people by that name) for 70 YEARS, went back to mirkwood like "lol i couldn't find him can i un-exile myself?" and then was promptly sent to the council at rivendell where he just happened to bump into the guy? okay. cool. sure.
aside from that, i felt like the movie had this cast of actors who i have always been impressed with their body of work (richard armitage, lee pace, ian mckellan, aidan turner) and yet not a single one of them gave an outstanding performance. i am not sure if this was a matter of writing or direction or a combination of the two, but i just...was not feeling it. so much of it was completely over the top or the delivery was really strange. the only performance that i liked at all was martin freeman as bilbo and i haaaaaate martin freeman. maaaaybe luke evans as bard was good, but it's possible that i am being biased because bilbo and bard are my two favorite hobbit characters and i am giving the two a pass out of sentimentality.
on top of that, i felt like the "thorin being swallowed up by gold" metaphor was hamfisted and also their under-utilization of dean o'gorman as fili and the fact that they chose to focus all of kili's time on the romance with tauriel really lessened the emotional impact of their deaths. the only moment that was able to elicit an emotional response from me in this movie was when bilbo was talking about the acorn he took from beorn's garden to plant at home.
i guess overall my assessment was that i enjoyed the movie as an action movie. there were moments that just made me shake my head in this regard (legolas defying physics by running across falling stones, bard riding down the hill in the cart to save his kids, etc.) but for the most part the battle scenes were fun to watch. but i found it to be incredibly disappointing in a lot of ways as well. i realize that a lot of my complaints can come off as 'they added things and i don't like it', but i truly do not care that they added things. i care that it seemed like very little thought went into those additions and that the end result came out sloppy.
i wanted to love tauriel. the hobbit, as a story, desperately needs gender diversity and i was so excited when i heard there would be some. but i feel like what we were given, as an audience, was about as progressive as having no woman in the story at all. it felt like yet another iteration of "women lose all sort of sense when they see a handsome man and they make rash decisions and can't be trusted in important positions". i just feel like if she had been in better hands to begin with maybe we could have had something good.
