I thoight the dwarven halls a little odd, this may sound weird but there was a little too much gold and treasure..I always envisioned it being a large pile but not a huge towering mountain that if released into the world at large would induce crippling hyper inflation.
Agreed, the literal lake of gold coins was a bit silly.
It's hard to be too critical of The Hobbit for ridiculous amounts of gold treasure when "National Treasure" had a similar pile of gold that was supposedly mined, smelted and crafted into statues and artifacts by, apparently, the Blackfeet tribe.
One of my constant pet peeves is the Hollywood idea of a "pile of treasure."
It's not just in this movie, although this was one of the most egregious, it's in pretty much any movie with a "pile of treasure" including National Treasure or Indiana Jones or even The Mummy.
Most people don't realize that all the gold ever mined in the history of the human race would more or less fit in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
That's ALL the gold, not just the gold in a single treasure pile.
And before someone says "well, Middle Earth isn't our earth," go check your Tolkien quotes, because he asserts very much that it is.
Don't too get carried away. Even the smallest estimates for amount of gold are more than 3 Olympic Swimming pools. A cube 20 meters on a side holds 8000 cubic meters - An Olympic swimming pool only 2500 cubic meters.
I haven't seen the movie yet. How does the treasure pile compare with Tolkien's own illustration of it?
So, the illustration shows a pile. The movie included a MOUNTAIN.
One of my constant pet peeves is the Hollywood idea of a "pile of treasure."
It's not just in this movie, although this was one of the most egregious, it's in pretty much any movie with a "pile of treasure" including National Treasure or Indiana Jones or even The Mummy.
Most people don't realize that all the gold ever mined in the history of the human race would more or less fit in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
That's ALL the gold, not just the gold in a single treasure pile.
And before someone says "well, Middle Earth isn't our earth," go check your Tolkien quotes, because he asserts very much that it is.
Don't too get carried away. Even the smallest estimates for amount of gold are more than 3 Olympic Swimming pools. A cube 20 meters on a side holds 8000 cubic meters - An Olympic swimming pool only 2500 cubic meters.
I haven't seen the movie yet. How does the treasure pile compare with Tolkien's own illustration of it?
Think Scrooge McDuck. Think Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault.
Now imagine Scrooge is the size of Smaug.
That's how it compares.
I personally really liked the movie, and thought it moved much faster than the first movie. Granted, this is because I treat the Movies as their own entity, and actually think straight up 100% faithful adaptations of books usually are worst than if the director took liberties with the source material. Film vs book and all that.
Only issues I had was the barrel scene...which was way to drawn out and a bit video-gamey (Same as the the mine scene in the first movie), and the forced love triangle, which felt random and unnecessary.
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Seems a bit excessive. But then pretty much everything Jackson does is excessive.
One of my big problems with him on the Tolkien movies. He's uninterested in subtle or understated. And that's much of what I like about Tolkien.You're right. It's actually kind of mind-blowing to me that Peter Jackson (and all of Wingnut, if I'm not mistaken) are Kiwi; his over-the-top, forceful approach vs. J.R.R.Tolkien's subtler approach made me certain that he was American. Sometimes I'm wrong, I guess.
I don't necessarily like the all of the ponderous bits of Tolkien's subtleties, though. Sometimes his characters take actual "in game" months to get moving or it'll take an entire chapter to pass a creek.
Call me American, but sometimes PJ's take seems a little easier to swallow.
I found it disappointing. When the brightest spots are the slightly weird appearances by Radagast and the visuals of Mirkwood and Erebor, and there's a whole lot of the movie left(!), you know you're facing the weakest of Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptations to date.
Actually, there were other nice bits to the movie. I like Martin Freeman as Bilbo all the way. Stephen Fry's appearance as the Master of Laketown was a nice one. Smaug and the treasure mountain looked awesome. And Balin is the best and most interesting of the dwarves and I think that really fits his sympathetic portrayal in the original book.
But my worst fears about the movie were fulfilled. When I heard the 2 picture plan went to 3 pictures, I was concerned there would be a lot of unnecessary action sequence padding and we got it in this film in spades. And from there the pacing lurches from fast to a rocket on sleds to slow (for cross-racial love triangle) to back on the rocket on sleds. And I got pretty tired of everybody knowing what Thorin was up to and where he was. The whole relentless orc hunter/ninja thing was really starting to grate on me.
Plus, I think the movie really suffered from middle of trilogy problems. We finally get some good crescendo toward the end and get cut off without the payoff. I'm not surprised by it, but it means the third installment will be pretty heavy on the action porn between killing Smaug and the Battle of Five Armies. Not that this installment wasn't heavy on the gratuitous action porn… it was.
Saw it on Friday and I really liked most of it.
I don't get why many people are so upset over the addition of Tauriel, she makes for a great character and should inspire many a female roleplayer to make a Ranger character. I really liked her and Kili's romance plot, since it is so sweet and innocent. I had feared that the movie would go with an extended "Thranduil disapproves of the romance between Legolas and Tauriel" plot, and while that is lightly touched upon, it is only mentioned once. Since a Tauriel/Legolas plot is apparently not in the cards, the chances of Tauriel not dying are much higher for the third movie, which I approve of. As I said, she makes for a great elf character and kicks only slightly less butt than Legolas.
The first half of the movie was, IMO, superior to the second half, where I would separate the two halves by the end of the barrel sequence. IMO, the second half suffered from a dragging Laketown sequence and then in Erebor there comes the "too much spectacle to process it" problem Peter Jackson already showed in King Kong. I also would have preferred it if Smaug could have kept up his superior demeanor throughout his entire appearance, but then I guess the Dwarves would have all been dead immediately.
All in all, even with those slight criticisms, I can unabashedly recommend seeing this movie. I'd rate it a 4,5 out of 5.
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One of my constant pet peeves is the Hollywood idea of a "pile of treasure."
It's not just in this movie, although this was one of the most egregious, it's in pretty much any movie with a "pile of treasure" including National Treasure or Indiana Jones or even The Mummy.
Most people don't realize that all the gold ever mined in the history of the human race would more or less fit in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
That's ALL the gold, not just the gold in a single treasure pile.
And before someone says "well, Middle Earth isn't our earth," go check your Tolkien quotes, because he asserts very much that it is.
Writers can assert whatever they want - Middle Earth ain't earth and even it was it would have had to have happened either tens of thousands of years ago or in the future. Either way it is obvious the reason we have so little gold mined in this day and age is that the dwarves already mined it all!
Then took it home in their space ships...;)
I saw it Friday and enjoyed it. We (hubby, daughter & I) all thought it was better than 'Unexpected Journey' and it ended about where I thought it would.
Are there issues? Yes. No one will ever make a version of ANY popular series that will not have issues for some.
I liked the 'action dwarves' bits. It gave them more sympathy than I had to the 'sit on our tails and let the Hobbit do it all' originals.
As for the extended Smaug vs Dwarf battle...my hubby's comment was that these particular dwarves must have survived because they all have evasion.
I liked the -briefly- golden Smaug. Object lesson in how to enrage a dragon beyond it's natural common sense.
I'm very curious about that 'Sylvan' red-headed elf. Mainly because of this little bit from Wiki, confirming an impression I had:
Nerdanel was the daughter of Mahtan and the wife of Prince Fëanor.
She bore Fëanor seven sons: Maedhros, Maglor, Celegorm, Caranthir, Curufin, Amrod and Amras (see Sons of Fëanor). Nerdanel, unlike her husband, was of a peaceful nature and sought to moderate his fiery temper and pride with wisdom. For a time, she was the only one able to influence him. Nerdanel refused to follow her husband to Middle-earth.
Nerdanel was a noted sculptor. She is said to have made statues so lifelike that people thought them real.
Nerdanel's family are the only attested examples of Elves with red hair. Nerdanel's father Mahtan and three of her sons (Maedhros, Amrod, and Amras) are described as having reddish-brown hair, and this is described as a trait "of Nerdanel's kin" — though not of Nerdanel herself, who had brown hair and a rosy complexion.
Also, IIRC, only elves that had seen the light of the Undying Lands glowed. She's not Sylvan.
Also, IIRC, only elves that had seen the light of the Undying Lands glowed. She's not Sylvan.
Not sure if she was actually glowing, or her little dwarvish lover-boy was just hallucinating. Or it was the fact that all the elves have a bit of inner "light" from their relative close relationship to the Valar.
Again, just a shot in the dark, but possible.
Which scene?** spoiler omitted **
[sob] It's [sob] not [sob]!?!
oh well, it'll teach me to unfurl spoilers...
Or Jackson doesn't pay that much attention to the lore.
Also, IIRC, only elves that had seen the light of the Undying Lands glowed. She's not Sylvan.
Not sure if she was actually glowing, or her little dwarvish lover-boy was just hallucinating. Or it was the fact that all the elves have a bit of inner "light" from their relative close relationship to the Valar.
Again, just a shot in the dark, but possible.
Or maybe it was a shot as seen through Kili's eyes, where she was glowing radiantly in his mind..
Well, I'm glad I maintained low expectations 'cuz they were easily exceeded! Yay Peter Jackson!
I think Peter Jackson is a 4E dm. Over the top action stunts and minions, minions, minions.
I dare you to watch it again as a drinking game. Every time an orc dies- drink.
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It was good. Not as good as the first trilogy - it's lacking some ineffable quality. The high frame rate isn't helping, either.
We did not need to see every single room in Erebor. That was the main drag on the time in my book. otherwise, it went along at a pretty brisk pace.
PJ did a GREAT job with Bard. That character is terribly developed by Tolkien. PJ gives him actual personality. And the Black Arrow was very well done too. Although having the Master of Lake Town be from the 16th century bothered me, but then I'm rather invested in keeping Tolkien firmly in the Early Middle Ages.
I'm really looking forward to the third movie, which will center around the Battle of the Five Armies, because that's the weakest part of the book.
I taught a course on Tolkien and Medieval History this semester, and let the final discussion be about the films and how they depict both Tolkien's works (the students were required to read the core three) and medieval life (which, let's face it, is what serves as the basis for the whole endeavor). Interestingly, my students, who were at the age to first read Tolkien just as the PJ movies came out (6-9), really enjoyed having both together. It was only the ones who were a little older and had read the books several years before seeing the movies who wanted to recapture some kind of lost personal imagination of the story. The ones who saw it at the same time commented that at that age it was difficult to picture everything described, and PJ's version helped them enjoy the books much more than they felt they otherwise would have. Just an interesting observation to share. They were very smart, imaginative kids, and they didn't feel that PJ had somehow denied them personal creativity in any way - they were capable of appreciating each medium on its own. Which is more than I can say from many older people I've spoken with about it. The experience was different, but not necessarily worse in any way.
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Just saw it. Loved it but went in with low expectations. Great fantasy popcorn action flick.
One scene that kind of bugged me was with Legolas and Tauriel at the river. They start talking in elvish with subtitles, switch to English without subtitles, then go back to elvish with subtitles. Why? Why did'nt they keep it all one way through whole scene?
DO A BARREL ROLL
Of course not, that would be silly.
Does Legolas ever run out of arrows?
Nah, his bow was made by Gesen.
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Kili's incipient romance with Kate Austen gives hope to all gobbos worldwide looking for some hawt interspecies naughty time.
Goblins do it in the streets!
My biggest complaint is that Peter Jackson continues to overuse CGI in pretty much every scene. Right behind that is the related 'he can't seem to decide on tone' argument.
The first is most evident any time there is combat on the screen. I for one really enjoyed most of the combat scenes from the first trilogy, and felt they were suitably epic and impressive (Aragorn vs. the Uruk-hai leader in particular stands out) even without heavy use of CGI. I feel like the excessive use of CGI for gimmick deaths / kills in this one really drags things down and takes me out of the movie. It's obvious elsewhere too when it feels like almost every character (Legolas included) is heavily airbrushed with CGI, but is most glaring when you've got people jumping around like squirrels. Can't we just get some real choreography and makeup on the orcs instead of CGI appearances for them?
The second relates to the above, where we've got excessive beautification of every character with CGI combined with scenes like a pile of desiccated corpses. We get light-hearted barrel centered combats that go on for what feels like twenty minutes, then brutal combats like those in Laketown (I'll say no more). We get dwarves that are remarkably skilled fighters, then dwarves that can't do anything. We get this epic dragon... who then gets made mockery of for half an hour by the seven dwarves / three stooges.
I still enjoyed it overall, but I felt like this was a big step back from something like, for instance, Fellowship, which remains the strongest movie of the five he's put out.
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One of my constant pet peeves is the Hollywood idea of a "pile of treasure."
It's not just in this movie, although this was one of the most egregious, it's in pretty much any movie with a "pile of treasure" including National Treasure or Indiana Jones or even The Mummy.
Most people don't realize that all the gold ever mined in the history of the human race would more or less fit in an Olympic sized swimming pool.
That's ALL the gold, not just the gold in a single treasure pile.
And before someone says "well, Middle Earth isn't our earth," go check your Tolkien quotes, because he asserts very much that it is.
Don't too get carried away. Even the smallest estimates for amount of gold are more than 3 Olympic Swimming pools. A cube 20 meters on a side holds 8000 cubic meters - An Olympic swimming pool only 2500 cubic meters.
I haven't seen the movie yet. How does the treasure pile compare with Tolkien's own illustration of it?
Think Scrooge McDuck. Think Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault.
Now imagine Scrooge is the size of Smaug.
That's how it compares.
Well considering that Smaug ranked number one on Forbe's list of 15 richest fictional characters (conservative estimated net worth: $61 billion) last year to beat out Scrooge McDuck (who won it in 2011 with a net worth of $44 billion), I'm okay with the depiction. Especially when, according to the article, a more literal reading of Tolkien based on size, the assumption that the dragon slept on the largest portion of his hoard, and a comparison of historical persons (Bill Gates and Carlos Sims were used as the basis rather than the Rothschilds and John D. Rockefeller) causes the estimate to jump up to $870 billion. I don't know what 870 billion looks like in gold coins and gems, but the movie depiction may have actually been close.
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Well, my son and I saw it yesterday ...
Let me say first that I LOVE the LOTR movies and I did not mind the changes Jackson and company made - I understand and except that movies are a different media than books and as such, require different things. What works in a book does not necessarily work on screen and vice-verse.
In fact, I've staunchly defended the changes made in the three LOTR movies and will continue to do so. I also liked, for the most part, the first Hobbit movie. Yes, there were a few dopey, over-the-top moments (the much too long and pointless roller coaster ride / battle through Goblin Town being a prime example, but all-in-all, I felt An Unexpected Journey was a good movie with some wonderful character moments.
The Desolation of Smaug, though ... was, I'm sorry to say, just OK. After seeing it, my son (also a HUGE fan of the first trilogy and an unabashed fantasy / sci-fi fan / Pathfinder fan and player) summed it up perfectly when I asked him what he thought: "the movie really bummed me out ..."
Basically, Jackson and company went too far astray this time. The changes made this time were simply to extreme, too far from the book and seemed to have no good reason for happening. WHY did the Dwarves need to go into the mountain and try that whole inexplicable and dopey dump molten gold on the dragon thing? It was ultimately just a long, drawn out action sequence that was obviously there to make the Dwarves look more involved and, even more obvious, to stretch the movie out.
And that's my other issue with this movie - It's pretty clear that they and/or the movie studio attempted to answer those critics who said the first movie was too long and slow (something I don't agree with, by the way) by filling this one with as much big, Hollywood action as possible but much of that just felt empty. There was simply so much big, empty action, there was not enough time for much of substance. A perfect example - we meet Beorn (a very nicely realized character on-screen) but then, after only a few minutes, the company leaves and that's the last we see of him. Apparently, they had to cut much of the character and dialogue which was filmed to make room for more car chases ... sorry, extended barrel rides and drawn out dragon dragon chances through Erebor.
I also agree with those above - the heavier reliance on CGI characters this time only helps to add to that empty, lifeless feeling. The original trilogy used actual actors in actual costumes and make-up for orcs. This time around, Jackson's team, much like Lucas did with the prequels, though admittedly not nearly to the same extreme, went with more CGI 'actors for some reason ... and it shows.
There were good parts, certainly. Armitage is great as Thorin, and Freeman continues to be brilliant as Bilbo. Smaug looked and sounded amazing. Evangeline Lilly did a wonderful job as Turiel and I think the addition of her character was a good thing (though the whole subplot with some of the Dwarves remaining behind in Laketown to tend to the wounded Kili, whop is then healed by Turiel felt baffling and unnecessary. In fact, although having Legolas in the movie made perfect sense, I could have done with more Turiel and a LOT less of Legolas (and, especially, Super Legolas!)
The movie was not bad, it just wasn't great. It was, well, it was ... OK, and, like my son, being just OK bummed me out.
For a much more articulate review that very nicely sums up my feelings on this movie, check this out:
http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2013/12/15/84898-mithrils-review-of-the-hob bit-the-desolation-of-smaug/
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If this is really successful I hope someday they make a move based on JRR Tolkien's "The Hobbit" and not Peter Jackson's "The Hobbit". You know, the version where Thorin is an old greedy dwarf, Bilbo is invisible when he talks to the Dragon, oh, and the story is about the folly of greed and not um, uh, um, wait, what is the story of these movies about anyway?
Money. These movies are about money.
Well considering that Smaug ranked number one on Forbe's list of 15 richest fictional characters (conservative estimated net worth: $61 billion) last year to beat out Scrooge McDuck (who won it in 2011 with a net worth of $44 billion), I'm okay with the depiction. Especially when, according to the article, a more literal reading of Tolkien based on size, the assumption that the dragon slept on the largest portion of his hoard, and a comparison of historical persons (Bill Gates and Carlos Sims were used as the basis rather than the Rothschilds and John D. Rockefeller) causes the estimate to jump up to $870 billion. I don't know what 870 billion looks like in gold coins and gems, but the movie depiction may have actually been close.
Alright, well, I'm going to take a brief break here to throw some reality at a fantasy movie (A sin, I know.)
Okay, a literal ton (2000 lbs) will comprise roughly a foot and a half square block. That same ton is roughly worth $36,044,580.00. As the one person said, that mountain would comprise several hundred times what the entire human race has mined up in gold, and only small quantities of it are used with each creation. Assuming now that we base Smaug's wealth of the higher number of 870 billion, lets seee. That nets us with a total of 24,136 Tons of gold. So roughly 36205 cubic feet. Seems impressive right?
Well here's the thing. The entire human race has mined up about enough to fill an olympic swimming pool.... once. An olympic swimming pool is roughly 88,000 cubic feet. That means that even the high-end estimated wealth of Smaugh wouldn't even fill up half of what the human race has collected, and at that that's only half the pool. Half the pool gentlemen. Roughly he'd have a pile about 80 feet in diameter and about 6 feet deep... and that's it.
Pile 80 feet in Diameter, 6 feet deep. Why it seems even the good master Tolkien was a bit generous in that regard. If we take Tolkien's drawing as a closer to accurate statement, and effectively double the presumed size of the pile based on the apparent depth and size compared to the chiefest and greatest of calamities, I'd wager he'd be worth about 1.5 Trillion dollars.
And you still can't justify a literal mountain of gold.
PJ did a GREAT job with Bard. That character is terribly developed by Tolkien. PJ gives him actual personality. And the Black Arrow was very well done too. Although having the Master of Lake Town be from the 16th century bothered me, but then I'm rather invested in keeping Tolkien firmly in the Early Middle Ages.
I taught a course on Tolkien and Medieval History this semester, and let the final discussion be about the films and how they depict both Tolkien's works (the students were required to read the core three) and medieval life (which, let's face it, is what serves as the basis for the whole endeavor).
Interesting take.
I'm not so sure about "Early Middle Ages". For Laketown or for Tolkien in general. The Shire certainly isn't. I'm not sure what about Laketown in the book is supposed to be Early Medieval.
Or frankly pretty much anywhere else, really.
Fair enough on the Shire, although I generally just ignore that because really the shire is a fantasy of rural England c1900, and not medieval at all.
Laketown is mostly Venice, on the edge of the East and the West, a major trade hub, all on the water for protection. Not a perfect match, but you can't think "city on the water" and not in some sense mean Venice.
Most of the rest of Tolkien is thoroughly early medieval, I'd say c1000. For one thing, no plate mail. Ever. In any of the books. I checked, thoroughly. The social, political and particularly economic institutions also most closely analogue to Carolingian Europe.
PJ did a GREAT job with Bard. That character is terribly developed by Tolkien. PJ gives him actual personality. And the Black Arrow was very well done too. Although having the Master of Lake Town be from the 16th century bothered me, but then I'm rather invested in keeping Tolkien firmly in the Early Middle Ages.
I taught a course on Tolkien and Medieval History this semester, and let the final discussion be about the films and how they depict both Tolkien's works (the students were required to read the core three) and medieval life (which, let's face it, is what serves as the basis for the whole endeavor).
Interesting take.
I'm not so sure about "Early Middle Ages". For Laketown or for Tolkien in general. The Shire certainly isn't. I'm not sure what about Laketown in the book is supposed to be Early Medieval.
Or frankly pretty much anywhere else, really.
Fair enough on the Shire, although I generally just ignore that because really the shire is a fantasy of rural England c1900, and not medieval at all.
Laketown is mostly Venice, on the edge of the East and the West, a major trade hub, all on the water for protection. Not a perfect match, but you can't think "city on the water" and not in some sense mean Venice.
Most of the rest of Tolkien is thoroughly early medieval, I'd say c1000. For one thing, no plate mail. Ever. In any of the books. I checked, thoroughly. The social, political and particularly economic institutions also most closely analogue to Carolingian Europe.
Well, if you're just going to ignore everything that doesn't fit your preconceptions, then yes, you're exactly right about Tolkien's writing. :P
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I enjoyed the scenes that didn't include fighting. The CGI acrobatics are just too much for me. Also, felling 4-1/2 orcs per second is a little too much for me.
My biggest complaint is that Peter Jackson continues to overuse CGI in pretty much every scene
I'm actually bemused why Jackson went in this direction. FELLOWSHIP and TWO TOWERS worked so well because so much of it was genuinely filmed on amazing locations in New Zealand. Where CGI was used, it was generally to combine different locations into the same shot to make the geography look more like Middle-earth. At a stretch, the overlaid elements weren't CG but 'bigatures' like the Argonath or Isengard.
RotK was where PJ started losing the plot, with lots of shots that just looked fake: the Pelennor Fields outside Minas Tirith being almost completely featureless instead of the fortified network of fields and defences as in the book was particularly bizarre. The HOBBIT movies have continued this problem, with even ordinary walking scenes featuring CG backgrounds or cloudscapes or other things that are completely unnecessary. There is also more reliance on pure CGI than 'bigatures', despite the CGI looking much faker.
I sometimes think if this is related to something mentioned in the audio commentaries for LotR: that filming on location was often cold, miserable, expensive and extremely time-consuming. When filming reshoots for the movies, Jackson discovered that they could often erect a bare-bones set and a greenscreen in the studio car park and get something that looked okay, with the actors able to sleep in a hotel or their house in Wellington that night and be much happier. I think for THE HOBBIT movies they took this to a rather insane extreme. Despite the amazing New Zealand landscape being a primary selling point of these films, THE HOBBIT movies don't do it much justice at all. They could have pretty much filmed all of the material so far on a backlot (and probably did).
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This. Legolas being Jackson's Drizzt got tiring after a while; a while being when he showed up on-screen.
After the movie, I referred to Legolas as getting George Lucas's Anakin Skywalker treatment. In the Fellowship, Legolas is clearly formidable, but he gets more outrageous stunts with each movie. Surfing down the steps on a shield in Two Towers, the whole oliphaunt scene in Return of the King, and now his antics in Desolation of Smaug. It's always bigger, faster, more.
But my worst fears about the movie were fulfilled. When I heard the 2 picture plan went to 3 pictures, I was concerned there would be a lot of unnecessary action sequence padding and we got it in this film in spades. And from there the pacing lurches from fast to a rocket on sleds to slow (for cross-racial love triangle) to back on the rocket on sleds.
Ugh. I was afraid of this. Even the first movie went far too fast - and people are saying it goes faster? Big load of meh.
The whole relentless orc hunter/ninja thing was really starting to grate on me.
And they're still dragging that bit of nonsense on? It sucked in the first one. ("Starting to grate on me" occurred mid-way through Part 1.)
(I do really hope it's better than a number of people make it out to be - and yes, that includes some of you praising this movie... but I'll safely go in with pretty low expectations, so that should help - since after a couple viewings, I realized that Part 1 was pretty lousy.)
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Well, with Gandalf he had to use a lot of CGI because Ian Mckellen is too old to film outdoors.
As for the amount of gold. Who gives a damn how much gold has humanity mined during history? What kind of idiotic reference is that?
That is not earth, that is middle-earth. And dwarves mine a lot. And maybe Erebor has some really really really rich gold veins. Plus not all those coins were gold if i recall.
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Yeah, a lot of picking nits going on here. It was a great movie.
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I want to know what Peter Jackson has against dwarfs. He has Gilmi getting to be the butt of the jokes in LOTR. Upstaged by the flashy pretty boy elf. Then he has the elf outdrink the dwarf in Return of the King extended. It is going to be a cold day in hell before a elf outdrinks a dwarf at my game table.
Then in the first Hobbit movie, Gamdalf has to bail them out more then once. In this second Hobbit movie Peter Jackson has the dwarfs climb out of a toilet.
As for the amount of gold. Who gives a damn how much gold has humanity mined during history? What kind of idiotic reference is that?That is not earth, that is middle-earth. And dwarves mine a lot. And maybe Erebor has some really really really rich gold veins. Plus not all those coins were gold if i recall.
The point of reference is because this is MIDDLE-EARTH. Tolkien himself referenced it as comparison to earth itself, just as a "historical re-imagining." And the main point is that Tolkien didn't put such absurd amounts of gold into the story like PJ did, his amount of gold was still vast, but far more reasonable. In all of human history, humans have only collected so much gold. In essentially only a few HUNDRED YEARS, the duration of the kingdom known as Erebor, PJ seems to have claimed that the dwarves some how mined up several hundred (if not thousand) times what we believe the Earth actually CARRIES in the element known as gold.
For me, it's a 2-part slap in the face. Firstly, yes, I'm probably a little bit more a purist, and breaking that far from the book in terms of wealth is slightly irritating. And then two, it's a problem with suspension of disbelief. When I saw that there was enough gold in there to probably swamp every street of New York City and still have plenty left over, I had a break of "wait, what?" from the movie, and it was really hard for me to focus on anything else but how absurd that amount of gold was.
I understand that the dwarves are supposed to be the lords of mining, and that the dragon was supposed to be wealthy beyond imagining, but I don't think even THAT much wealth was necessary. There is a distinct difference between fantasy and insanity.
I'd love to see the structural design specifications for the floor that could hold that weight in gold + dragon.
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I saw it. I tried not to think about it too hard. I liked the part where there were elves and dwarves and a hobbit fighting orcs and a dragon. I liked the pretty lady elf who killed things. I liked all the pretty scenery.
While my nerd self is chomping at the bit to nitpick things to the last detail, I think I'm going to leave my inner child in charge and just say it was a lot of fun and leave it at that.
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"And the Dragon is...a piniata and it's full of candy" - DeeDee
I didn't mind the orcs when they were hunting the dwarves in the first move, as long as they were led by Azog. I actually like that compared to LOTR, the main bad guy was motivated by something simple as revenge, not just marching to the orders of an evil darklord.
Of course...this movie got rid of that element, and most of the hunting was done by a Azog flunky. Which was disappointing.