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Notes -
By comparison with Rings of Power so far, the Hobbit films are looking better and better. Yeah, the studio killed the golden goose by stretching it over three movies instead of one, and yeah that meant a lot of padding and some bad original characters, but gosh. When Jackson got it right, he got it right.
And he never pissed so copiously on the established lore as this lot are doing. "Hey, let's make Galadriel hideously unpleasant. Let's invent a 'King of the Southlands' and hint hard that he's really Sauron. How many Silmarils are there and does anyone know what happened to them? Yes? Okay, we don't care, we're going to pull a 'legend' out of our asses. While we're at it, let's make Celebrimbor way too old and dress him in my granny's bathrobe!"
The costumes look so cheap and what should be epic isn't - see the mighty Númenorean fleet of three ships, and the training scene where the new recruits are being drilled on a set of stairs in a side-street. God alone knows where the alleged millions per episode went - on CGI and the egos of the showrunners, looks like.
Yeah, the Hobbit movies had moments that were so good--and you point out one of the best--but man, "uneven" profoundly understates the massive...uh...diversity...in quality.
Definitely uneven, there were visible differences in the makeup for the Dwarves, etc. And the 'comic relief' element was still there. But mostly it was scraping out the story to make three movies, because the studio wanted a second trilogy to be a money-spinner. There just isn't the material there in the source book for this.
The Kili-Tauriel romance didn't bother me, it was of course silly, but I took it more as sort of puppy love on his part, and confused 'I thought Dwarves were our deadly enemies but this Dwarf is nice' on her part, not as any serious Epic Love Story.
If they had decided to race-swap Thranduil (the way we're getting white Tar-Palantir and black Tar-Míriel in Rings of Power), make some of Thorin's company female (because movies for a modern world), invented an original legend that the reason for the enmity of the Elves and the Dwarves is that the Dwarves are the Second Children of Iluvatar and the Elves were afraid that they would be replaced because Aule liked the Dwarves better, and flipped it around so that Smaug was the rightful inhabitant of the Lonely Mountain and the Dwarves were going there on a greedy cash-grab raid to pillage his horde, this is what the Rings of Power have done.
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