Specifically, this part:
If you are someone who has never read the book, or has read it but doesn’t really care at all about the movie following it, you may find this to be a fast paced, high tech outing in the sword and sorcery genre which you really enjoy. If you are anything approaching a Tolkien purist, you’ll probably leave the theater grumbling and cursing.
I AM a Tolkien purist, and I enjoyed the heck out of the movie. Unless Jazz Shaw means something else by ‘purist’ than I do, which is entirely possible. I cut my teeth on Middle Earth Role Playing, after all. I have been comfortable with the idea of people expanding on the canon for… my goodness, it’s “decades” by now, isn’t it?
Moe Lane
PS: Dag, but some of the Iron Crown Enterprises stuff seems to be going for a decent hunk of change.
I’m a proud purist, Tolkien nerd who keeps an encyclopedia of Tolkien’s mythology in my house ( somewhere, I have to find it again, but I’ve practically memorized anyway)
I too found the movie enjoyable ( the forced romance was a bit much, but that Dang Dragon Killed IT!!!!!)
Sorry, Peter Jackson could’ve mooned the whole theater at the end and it still would’ve been a good movie because of that Dragon.
Meh. It’s Jazz Shaw. He’s nearly a charter member of the “Why Are These People Famous?” Club.
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Just saw it today. Getting upset over the differences is like getting upset over the liberties taken by EVERY production of “Hamlet”.
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I will grouse about one thing — the Suspension of Disbelief Whiplash caused by the Dire Need to Be Multiethnic. Suddenly there were Haradrim women in Laketown…If they were fans making cameos, well, good for them. But bad movie-making.
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(It’s like ninjas in the Three Musketeers. And I fully expect the upcoming “Pompei” movie to have an Iron-Eyes Cody look-alike explain in Cherokee how the Roman civil works angered Mother Earth.)
…I actually wouldn’t mind seeing some ninja in the Three Musketeers. Then again, I played both 7th Sea and L5R.
PJ got sick and tired of being called a racist from the last trilogy, so he made it blatantly obvious he cast black people.
To be fair Esgaroth ( unlike Rohan or Minas Tirith or any of the Elven realms) is a trading center so Black people making their way there isn’t exactly unheard of.
True. They could have come from Harad (or south) up the Anduin through Gondor. I hear the Osgiliath Holiday Inn is kind of a wreck, through.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, I have dire suspicions about this Tauriel character. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing it. As for part 1, there were a couple of raised-eyebrow moments for me (surprisingly, not the bunny-sleigh), but I greatly enjoyed it, as I did LotR. I consider myself a Tolkien Geek(tm), but Jackson gets a lot of slack from me.
RE: MERP material, I didn’t like the Rolemaster-lite rules all that much, but I loved their supplement and adventure material, especially the earlier stuff. And, yeah, it commands outrageous prices on eBay.
What raised your eyebrows about the first movie? Was it Azog?
Yeah, a bit. I can understand Jackson changing the Dwarf-Orc war to give Thorin a relentless enemy, but why not make it Azog’s son, Bolg? Does less violence to the canon and creates a nice feud — “Your father killed my grandfather!” Minor point, though.
I took a course in college on Lewis & Tolkien. (Getting to buy Lord of the Rings as a college textbook: major win.) I wrote a paper on the differences in the Riddle Game in The Hobbit between the original edition and the Revised Edition.
My online name is one of the major characters in The Silmarillion.
And I don’t have any problems with what Peter Jackson has done with The Hobbit, parts 1 or 2.
*fistpump*
By the way what kind of General Studies requirement would a Tolkien course fulfill? I’m thinking of taking it if I can.
Let me state, clearly and unequivocally, that I HATED what Jackson did with the LotR movies, and absolutely refuse to see how he desecrated The Hobbit. He’s done enough damage to my childhood memories, thankyouverymuch.
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The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo. NOT the “kewl” things that might possibly have happened somewhere nearby.
My fearless prediction is that the third episode is filled with eyecandy from the Battle of Five Armies, despite it being largely unimportant to the story of Bilbo. (If I hear they include dwarf tossing, shield surfing, and elephant climbing into a single scene, I might just have to vomit. Maybe the dwarves fashion a catapult to hurl Erebor itself at the goblin army.)