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I don't know anybody in my circle of friends/aquaintances who has spoken out in favour of it, and I know people who loudly proclaimed their appreciation of Ghostbusters 2016.
I actually find the hate-watchers tedious at this point too. Is there anything shocking in Current Year about a once-respected intellectual property being driven into the ground to promote the careers of mediocre creators, who put in woke elements to either cover their asses, promote their careers, or further their socio-political agenda? It was interesting to tear that apart in 2016. In Current Year, I am happy to move on and enjoy classic entertainment from better times. You only have to go back to the Golden Age of television to enjoy countless hours of great television which are neither preachy not hamstrung by woke ideology, e.g. I don't even think about drug legislation when watching Breaking Bad, let alone Race, Class, Gender issues.
Then let me be the first. I am cautiously optimistic about how they’re telling these stories intertwining, and haven’t seen anything besides the necessarily-woke casting which has me worried. It fits the Peter Jackson / Weta interpretation of Middle Earth, and is, to me and my parents, as fun as The Hobbit Extended Edition was.
That's some grade-A Poe's Law right there.
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TBH, saying "it's as good as the Hobbit movies" is a pretty damning criticism imo. Those movies were just bad. LOTR wasn't a great adaptation of Tolkien, but they were at least great movies. The Hobbit movies were a bad adaptation and they were bad movies in their own right.
Lindsay Ellis's three part analysis of the The Hobbit movies is pretty good as a whole, but the end of the first part she points out just how lazy and bad from a production stand point they are. Reusing the Ring Wraith leitmotif for a movie original scene where Thorin charges an Orc.
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The first half of the first movie was good, as was the first bits in the planky-town with scenery-chewing villainous Stephen Fry, because they correctly adapted the source material's fundamental silliness. The Hobbit series should have been wholly pitched to the sensibilities of 7-year-olds, because that's what the book originally was - a bedtime story for little kids
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Oh, make no mistake, the deviations from canon were thoroughly derided by my family and despised. We really enjoyed the Bread and Butter cut, a Reddit fancut which only kept what actually happened in the books, and rearranged the third film to be at least somewhat reasonably canon-compliant. No dwarf/elf romance, no barrel dancing.
The Hobbit Extended Editions, however, (through their sheer volume of additional Appendix lore) are a unique delight. The bad of executive producer meddling is drowned out by extra crunchy, deep-fried lore that somehow alchemically turns shit into gold — or at least silver.
That’s how I feel about this series: it’s a theme-park romp through Appendix lore, a Cliff Notes expansion of the backstory of LOTR.
Interesting. I admit, I didn't watch the extended editions. After seeing the theatrical versions, I thought that they already were bloated with too much filler (a consequence of stretching a short book into a trilogy). So the last thing I wanted was to have versions that were even longer. Perhaps I was in error on that score.
I could easily watch one DVD (half of one movie) each day of both Extended Editions, and feel fully satisfied with the binge. The Bread and Butter cut, coming in around 4 hours, is a great treat on its own.
Other fan cuts I want to see (but haven’t) are the Passengers cut which starts with her story, not his, and the Finding Nemo “Memento” cut: only the Dory scenes, backwards. The Outside-In cut of Inside Out is an amazing dramatic short all on its own.
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