The Big Picture: Is The Hobbit Too Long?

Kapol

Watch the spinning tails...
May 2, 2010
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While I did enjoy the movie, I have to admit that it did feel like it dragged on at points. The riddles in the dark scene felt like it could have ended two riddles sooner with no ill-effect. The beginning scene with older Bilbo and Frodo seemed pretty pointless for how long it lasted (though I suppose we'll see if they tie it in more with the next movies). The beginning of the troll scene was just stupidly padded in my opinion and would be the main area I'd say could have been cut down. Even the final battle felt like sections of it were unnecessary. All and all there were multiple points I felt the movie could have used some trimming to keep pace. But at the same time there weren't many points where I became bored.

Overall it'll be hard to tell what was and was not important until we see the final product (all three movies).
 

MrBaskerville

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Mar 15, 2011
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I found it waay too long, especially due to poor action sequences that doesn´t really accomplish anything. I really miss somekind of narrative structure in the action, most of the time it´s just stuff happening for a loooong time. Fellowship of the ring was just as long, but a lot more exciting because every moment has a clear stated purpose.

I really wish they hadn´t added Azog, he was imo the worst part of the movie, and he´s the catalysator of a lot of the worst scenes in the movie. Remove Azog and add more clever suspense scenes like the Riddle scene, and it would be a lot more exciting to watch, as far as i´m concerned.

I would probably also have ditched everything related to the Goblin king and focused on Bilbo instead, that´s also a lot stronger as the movies climax than whatever the dwarves are doing. They didn´t really accomplish much, we didn´t learn anything, so really there wasn´t much reason to show it, or to even have anything happen to them. Don´t they just travel alone without Bilbo in the book, in that segment? I don´t really remember the book focussing on anything outside of Bilbos meeting with Gollum (I realize i was wrong, the it just needed to be better, a lot better.), and then later he teams up and they get attacked by wolves. Oh and by removing Azog you also fix one of my other main issues with the film, the entire chase scene with Radagast and the orcs sucked and seemed rather pointless and illogical (he keeps returning to the people who he is trying to protect by leading the orcs away from them). Probably the worst action scene i´ve seen all year alongside the stuff with the Goblin King. Which is a shame, because there are soo many great things in the Hobbit.
 

Rule Britannia

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Apr 20, 2011
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Meh, I've seen it two times now, not once was I bored or fidgety during the run time of the movie. Great movie, looking forward to the next instalments :D
 

shrekfan246

Not actually a Japanese pop star
May 26, 2011
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Callate said:
I dunno... I think I could have trimmed a solid minute or two from some of the goblin-full-tilt-kinetic-CGI-o-rama without feeling I'd lost much, but perhaps I'd have felt differently if I'd gotten to see the movie in 48 FPS 3D.

Still, by and large I agree that there isn't that much "fat" to the movie, and I enjoyed it.
That wouldn't really have made the movie feel any shorter, though, because as you said and as Bob argued in this video, the film just doesn't have a lot of extra "film fluff" to it. It's got a lot of filler, sure, the book did too, but that's the entire point. The filler doesn't feel excessive or overdone, because it was mostly the entire point to begin with.

I'm actually glad it's being stretched out to three films. People say that less happens in The Hobbit comparatively to The Lord of the Rings, and yes, that's true, but a lot more happens in The Hobbit than happened in, say, The Fellowship of the Ring. I can't see how they would have shortened the narrative structure of The Hobbit in to one three-hour film and still maintained the charm and wonder that the book captured, and I appreciate seeing how much they've actually managed to adapt from the book simply because it's being stretched out over so many films.
 

MrBaskerville

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Mar 15, 2011
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OtherSideofSky said:
Also, the three consecutive openings were completely unnecessary. It would have been much better to open either with the first old Bilbo segment, fading from the illustration of young Bilbo to his actual face, or to open immediately with young Bilbo and the opening line from the book (which makes no sense in the film's context of Bilbo narrating a story he intends Frodo to read, because Frodo knows exactly what hobbits and hobbit holes are) and then play the Smaug flashback over the dwarves singing about it, with the full song instead of the out-of-place narration (the film immediately cuts to a different narrator, the first narrator never comes back, and enough people fell in love with that song and requested a longer version after seeing the first trailer to demonstrate that audiences would have sat for it).
That would have been pretty cool, that way they could also maintain the mystery a bit longer, instead of spilling the beans right away. When we watch the movie, we know why the dwarves are there, because we basically just saw why they came.
 

Blood Brain Barrier

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Nov 21, 2011
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First time I've watched a full one of these, but I don't think I will again. I don't get all these black-and-white faces MovieBob uses. Totally random and embarrassing, to be frank. What is he expecting us to do or think while watching these stupid faces flash up? Shows contempt for his audience.
 

Phuctifyno

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Jul 6, 2010
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Bravo, Bob. I completely agree. It's comforting to know at least somebody in the critic field understands.

Add to what you said the fact that huge chunks of the audience are Tolkien fans who are less concerned with the film's runtime, pacing, or structure than with the experience of being immersed in that world. Many of us wouldn't mind if the film were 30 hours longer, conventional cinema be damned, especially when you take into account the laborious and beautiful locations, cinematography, acting, sets, costumes, props, and score that accompany the journey.

It's apparent that Jackson is walking a tightrope trying to please Tolkien fans, critics, and general movie-goers alike, and he knows that the better product (for most) is the one with all the fat cut out, which makes it all the more important that he's released the Special Extended Editions for the rest of us who don't really care about that stuff (when it comes to Middle Earth, anyway; I could ***** about pacing all day if it were any other film).

I saw this pointless article feature on Rotten Tomatoes a couple of months ago where some film critics reviewed the LOTR Special Editions to see how they held up as actual films, which was hilarious and stupid because they weren't meant to (Jackson's stated that he thinks the theatrical cuts work better as films and that's why they were released that way). They kept complaining about scenes that should have been left on the cutting room floor which originally were left on the cutting room floor. Geniuses.

So if there are people out there who feel The Hobbit ran too long, maybe Jackson failed a little bit at trimming the fat. Though as you said, it's hard to imagine what would have been cut other than action scenes that ran a bit long (never been a fan of wargs). It doesn't bother me in the slightest, since I still anxiously await The Super Special Extended Radically Embiggened Longitudinally Enhanced Double-Double Panoramic 50-Hour Complete Completionist Collector's Set of the entire series...

...even if it means a stupid CGI musical number at Jabba's Palace in Return Of The King that nobody asked for.
 

Urh

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Oct 9, 2010
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Mangue Surfer said:
Is one Rivendell scene too long. Serious, the Rivendell "videodcast" really boring me.

"Look you stupid nerd fan boy, characters of the Lord of the Rings cameo, now you can masturbate!"

15 minutes wasted.
I completely agree. A lot of the Rivendell stuff is nothing more than a tie-in to the Lord of the Rings movies. While it's well-shot, interesting fan-wank, it is still pure fan-wank; it does nothing to service the plot of The Hobbit. That Morgul blade that they made such a big deal about will likely never be seen or talked about in the remaining two movies, and yet Gandalf can't seem to STFU about it. Whatever happened to Chekhov's gun? Christopher Lee and Cate Blanchett could have been cut from the movie entirely without any impact at all. I suppose Bob's defense would be "hey, people are paying to see shameless fan-wank! Gotta give people what they want!"
 

PunkRex

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Feb 19, 2010
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I freakin love the start of the movie which is odd as thats the part everyone seems to call out. Granted I didn't really feel the Ian Holms/Elijah Woods cameo's were really necessary but I sure as hell wasn't complaining.
 

Jaebird

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Aug 19, 2008
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The scene with Gollum could have be nicer without him mugging to the camera most of the time.
 

themilo504

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May 9, 2010
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I don?t agree they could have cut some stuff like the saruman scene or the radagast stuff and saved that for the extended edition I don?t mind it myself but I can see how some people would find it irritating.
One thing I?m really looking forward to in the next movie is more smaug I didn?t think they could make a dragon a credible villain but in the opening scene Where he just annihilates all the dwarfs showed me how underpowered dragons are in video games.
 

malestrithe

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Aug 18, 2008
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You are right. Length of a movie is subjective. When I watched Titanic, Avatar and Abyss, I was not bored with them even though they are marathon sits and I have to get up and walk around a few time. I was thoroughly engaged in the movies. However, Eight Crazy Nights is barely 60 minutes long and I was checking my watch every 5 minutes to see if it's over yet.

I could not get through Lord of the Rings trilogy because of the length. I thought if the party scene at the beginning of the movie was 20 minutes shorter, and they cut 25 minutes out of the rest of the movie, I could enjoy this. I feel the same thing about Hobbit. If it were an hour shorter, it would be better. We did not need all that time negotiating a contract. You could have cut some of the travel log aspect. You could have cut some of the Shire stuff, you could have removed some of the stuff Jackson added to this one.

With something like this, the simplest solution is to cut the characters. The more characters you have, the more time you need to devote to them. Sorry, but the movie did not need as many characters as it did. It is very possible to combine characters and still have a good movie. Do you need 12 dwarves, or can you get away with 6 or 8 and still do a capable job? I think yes.
 

RJ Dalton

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Aug 13, 2009
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Yeah, except I'm NOT intending to pay to watch action scenes. The Hobbit was not about action scenes and fighting. Frankly, you're not helping me want to see this movie. It sounds like I'm going to have the same complaint about this as I had with the Narnia movies - namely, the director is trying to turn the film into something the story was never meant to be.
 

karamazovnew

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Apr 4, 2011
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Hobbit 1 beats LotR 1 (my favorite of the bunch), 2 and 3 as a Tolkien film adaptation. 10 years ago I really disliked Peter Jackson's take on Middle-Earth, as it lacked that personal touch of the book. The world seemed fake and the people seemed fake too. All those extra scenes were boringly Hollywood-ish and too much emphasis was laid on battle scenes which in the book where chaotic and blurry, the focus in the book being the journey and the terror of the situation.

The Hobbit however, hits the spot better than I could've hoped for, especially since the book lacks the magnitude of the later trilogy. The extra scenes are superbly done and feature the gloomy secrets of the book. The characters are splendid, the actors perfectly cast, the action scenes (as few as they were) are a wonder to behold. Middle Earth seems more real than before. 3 hours passed by me without noticing (and I'm a heavy smoker so you can imagine what an achievement that was) and I left the cinema hall with a huge smile on my face and the regret that I have to wait for one year to see the rest. When one of my friends later told me that he didn't like the movie because he found it boring, I almost punched him in the face. Granted, he has never read a book in his entire life (not joking here) so...

Thus, when I saw Bob's title, I almost felt rage. How could anyone (not Bob) think that the Hobbit is "too long"? Guys, the Hobbit is a geek movie. LotR was not. As a geek, I say screw the rest. If they feel that the movie is too long, boo hoo to them. I only hope that Jackson continues in this line. My only regret is that I won't see Gollum again. And yeah, this Gollum freakin rocked! :D
 

Sniper Team 4

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Apr 28, 2010
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I have seen this movie four times already, because all my friends asked me to go see it, but they all went on different days. First two times was amazing, third time was good, fourth time I was getting a bit bored. Of course, this is because I saw the movie four times in a span of a week, so I was just burned out.

However, seeing this four times has allowed me to memorize pretty much every scene, and I noticed something in this video Bob. There were a LOT of scenes in this video that were not in the movie. Mainly involving the ones with Gandalf. So, I have some questions for you:

How did you get your hands on the Extended Edition already, and can I borrow it or can you at least tell me where to pick it up? Please? :)
 

MrBaskerville

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Mar 15, 2011
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RJ Dalton said:
Yeah, except I'm NOT intending to pay to watch action scenes. The Hobbit was not about action scenes and fighting. Frankly, you're not helping me want to see this movie. It sounds like I'm going to have the same complaint about this as I had with the Narnia movies - namely, the director is trying to turn the film into something the story was never meant to be.
Personally i would compare the movie to King Kong or Tintin. It´s defineately an action movie at heart, an extreme action movie where shit happens constantly, extreme shit! You can´t just have a sword fight, it´s a supercharged sword fight with ladders and moving platforms and whatever else you can think of. I guess there´s also a bit of Pirate of The Carribean thrown in there for good meassure.

But yeah, it´s also a geek movie, and when you make geek movies (or should we say, an immersive experience), quality doesn´t matter. It just needs to match your average video game cutscene, to be satisfyingly awesome. :D
 

Twilight_guy

Sight, Sound, and Mind
Nov 24, 2008
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Well the obvious answer is to cut out the framing various other items that were added to build the overall franchise rather the movie. The morgul knife, Radagast the brown, Gandalf's meeting with the big wigs of Middle Earth in Rivendale, etc. They all build the world but don't advance the story and its likely they never will since they pertain to events in the Lord of the Rings and not the Hobbit. They could easily be cut, though its obvious the film makers wanted to include that world building. It's really more relevant to people who have already seen the Lord of Rings though as to someone who knows nothing, these scenes would be pointless and confusing.
 

Cpt. Slow

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Dec 9, 2012
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But the real question is: Is Bob going to title every video from now on with a question?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMXRxNbPvGI
 

Verlander

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Apr 22, 2010
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Funny you should mention run time, I watched Fellowship of the Ring the other day, for almost the first time since the cinema, and the whole story (particularly with Gandalf and Saruman) feels really badly paced and rushed. I know the pace of Return of the King is somewhat of an ongoing joke (haven't seen that one since cinema either), so it made me wonder if a better policy with these epic trilogy type things to film the whole damn thing, then edit it to where it feels comfortable? I know LOTR was supposedly filmed almost simultaneously... but I don't know toss about film making, so it's probably not as easy as all that