Speaking of Movies, I Started Belatedly Watching the Hobbit Series
And it's basically a case study in why movies are dumb and bad.
While I applaud the attempt at making a movie franchise out of some of the most absolutely classic fantasy novels ever written - and I thought that the LOTR trilogy was fantastic, The Hobbit is a kids book, and giving it the whole trilogy of WHAM BAM death and violence treatment was wrong. I think that they should have stepped back and gone with actually following the story, not trying to blend it with LOTR and aiming it towards kids and not their parents. There could have been the exact same push to link the 2 franchises with scenery, actors and costuming but keeping the charm of the kids book.
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The conventions of action/adventure/fantasy moviemaking require everything to be in an ultra-high-stakes closed loop, so you can't just have the Necromancer off in the background while the dwarves go get their gold. Everything must be directly and explicitly related to the greater epic plot.
Also the desire to blow out a reasonably brisk-moving single book into a movie trilogy means that each installment must have its own freestanding bombastic arc of action and character development. And that's how you get Bilbo—Bilbo Baggins, for cripes sake—charging with his sword to attack the boss orc at the climax of the first movie. Instead of gradually developing heroic courage over the course of the whole quest, he's already suddenly braver than all his other companions put together. Corny as heck.
Still doesn't mean we couldn't have quality movies that are not pure shite - if the production staff of LOTR that purportedly so loved LOTR were honest, then they would have been willing to back a charming kids adventure movie that wasn't all blockbustered up.
Not to mention the fact that each movie requires multiple high stakes battle sequences, and yet every single member of the company makes it to the battle of the five armies which won't take place until the third movie, so you can't put any of the characters in any real peril. That results in ridiculous scenes like the barrel scene in the second movie where rather than slipping quietly down the river thanks to a bit of cleverness from Mr. Baggins, the dwarves kill a bunch of orcs from freaking barrels. And don't even get me started on the ridiculous love triangle added in...
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Yes! I haven't even proceeded to the second movie yet, but in the first one, they have all those insane high-powered battle sequences against the goblins, yet no harm can come to any of the dwarves. Except the near-death experience of Thorin, again because the slam-bang cliches demand that something "serious" happen at that point of the movie.
