I've just finished reading the enhanced e-book of The Hobbit. It was my first ever e-book purchase. Yay, go me!
Seriously, if you are a fan, BUY IT! It comes with recordings of Tolkien and coloured drawings. Tis a thing of beauty, people.
What hasn't changed from my 25-year-old battered paper copy is the fact that The Hobbit is actually a badly structured novel. Now don't get me wrong, I WORSHIP at the temple of the Misty Mountains and love anything Middle Earth related, but, The Hobbit is definitely not of the calibre of The Lord of the Rings.
The novel doesn't flow with the narrative. You get a chapter - something happens - chapter finishes - new chapter and repeat. A lot of the action happens off page and it is definitely written for a younger audience.
But now we have Sir Peter Jackson and his outstanding team in charge of the film adaptation, and I am very confident that we will see a far more linear, yet still action-packed, telling of the story.
Firstly, I want to see the Battle of the Five Armies. We know Jackson can kick arse with a fight - (Helm's Deep, Minas Tirith) - and I want part two to be dripping in violence!
Secondly, I want the deaths to mean something. Why oh why did Tolkien have such a problem with death scenes. We never read Boromir's final act of heroism in The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit is the same. Several main characters die in The Hobbit. I want tears dammit, not an afterthought.
Thirdly, I want the dwarfs to be heroic. The scriptwriters did a fabulous job with Gimli in The Lord of the Rings and I would like the same treatment to the dwarfs in The Hobbit. The book makes them out to be rather foolish, stumbling from one chapter to another. By all means keep the fun, but don't make them out to be morons.
Finally, I would like to see Aragorn! The story totally lends itself to a cameo from Viggo. There is Rivendell or even Mirkwood for the location. We know Legolas and Aragorn are friends before The Lord of the Rings and Aragorn was raised in Rivendell. He isn't in the book but it would not extend artistic licence to have a few scenes.
So I know Sir Peter Jackson reads this blog!!! What are you waiting for, great man? Get to it!
9 comments:
The Death of Boromir in LotR was a fantastic scene. I haven't read The Hobbit in a while, so I don't remember how the deaths play out. I do remember it as much lighter in tone than LotR. The tough part of bringing in Viggo so many years after the last movie is in making him look 100 years younger (or however many years it was; more like 80, I think)!
Dec. 2012.
Good grief, please make time fly asap!!
Take care
x
I think Jackson will deliver!
Agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed, agreed!
It's funny. The film's version of Boromir's fight to save Merry and Pippin made such an impression on me, that I totally forgot that in the first two LotR books, all of that actually happens off-screen. When you said that "we never read Boromir's final act of heroism," I had to stop and think about the fact that you were right!
What I want from the TWO Hobbit movies is to not feel like it should have just been ONE movie. Seriously, the book itself is not that long, and could certainly be done in one film. I am hoping that Jackson et al. will do their job so well, that I won't feel like the split into two is unnecessary. (I know that they are padding out the material with other things from the ancillary Tolkien works -- Galadriel is in the preview, for instance -- but it has to be seamless. We'll see.)
I did not enjoy The Hobbit at all in book form. (Love LotR, though!) But I am so excited for the movie. I watched the trailer the other day and it gave me shivers. Yay for Sir Peter!
Hehehe yeah now that you mention it, Mr. Tolkien was bad with the death scenes.
Can't wait to see what the movie does with the story. ^_^
All these comments about the death scenes has had me reaching for the book again. The deaths in The Hobbit are awful aren't they.
I think we need another trailer!
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