- dahuterschuter
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- Exalted Mythic Member
-blam!- Was that actually blammed out? Or did I just type it? You'll never know.
Posted by: flamedude
Could you point anything out for us? Just curious.Tension and drama of action sequences killed by CGI: It was painfully clear that when they swung their weapons they were swinging at nothing. The goofy looking orcs and trolls were completely unconvincing. The heaviness of the CGI reminded me of the recent Marvel movies, Thor in particular. While it can still be entertaining, it gives up any investment in the scene.
It's inarguable that it would have been better from a filming and a dramatic standpoint to have extras in costume for the orcs. Of course, you can say that the point of the CGI was for it to be more cartoony since it was supposed to have a lighter tone. That's all well and good, but it doesn't change what it does to the movie as far as investment.
There's a nice line from Plinkett to explain the lack of tension, it's because of how easily you pick out what's fake on the screen. "You didn't notice, but your brain did."
Lack of focus, obvious filler to create enough run time for three movies: You can squeeze these two into one category because the latter causes the former. Azog was unnecessary and only bogged down the plot, as did Radaghast. Some would probably try to argue that the Shire intro, the Necromancer, and the White Council were harmful to it as well, and I suppose they were. I also recognize though that they were trying to unify the two trilogies with those, which doesn't seem like a bad idea.
What was the central conflict of the movie? The central conflict of the trilogy will be the company versus Smaug in regaining their home. But for this story that was told in this movie, what was the central conflict? Was it Thorin vs Azog? The Wizards vs the Necromancer? Gandalf vs Sauron? Bilbo vs Gollum? The Company vs the Orcs? The fact that all these questions have to be asked as to what the actual main agon of the story was shows how unfocused it was.
Bad character development: There are no relatable characters, and every character is flat but for Bilbo and Thorin, and their characters arcs came out more like character spikes.
Bilbo's problem - You don't get to know Bilbo at all. All that you get to know about him is that he's huffy. That's his character, and it stays that way until finally he charges into harms way to save Thorin. He stayed his neurotic self the entire way through though, there was no development, there was a flatline and then a spike at one point at the end.
He's also barely even distinguishable as a protagonist. The central conflict of the movie is, well it hardly has one as said earlier. He can barely be established as a protagonist because there's no clear conflict for him in this story.
Thorin - So does that mean Thorin is actually our protagonist despite it seeming to center around Bilbo? It seems to spend just as much, or even more time on Thorin than it does Bilbo. But then he suffers the same problem for setting him up as a protagonist.
Hes also, like Bilbo, flat until one point of change. He remains cold towards the hobbit entirely until one singular instance of change.
Not to mention the fact that simply having main characters that are foreign to the audience on its own is a way to guarantee difficulty in relating to them.
All that said, I still loved the movie. It just has problems that cant be ignored, or can. I ignored them until I decided to think critically about it, but then its not something you're really supposed to think critically about. It's a fun popcorn flick like Avengers was, and that's it. No cinematic masterpiece.