Movie: The Hobbit

[Ithekro]

There really isn't one main theme for the battles. It depends on who is fighting them. There are several that have or use the Fellowship Theme in them. There are several that use the Rohirram Theme in them, and there are several that use the Gondor Theme in them. A few use Elven themes, but they aren't uses as much as the others. Most battles use orc and uruk themes, themes of Mordor or Saruman's Army.

Probably the most known would be the Ride of the Rohirram (The Fields of Pelennor), Forth Eorlingas, and The Bridge of Khazad Dum. And any of the songs that happen to have the Fellowship Theme in it.

[ChainLegacy]

Originally Posted by Vexx

There's some great story in Sil... but its written in epic myth 'biblical' mode so it would require a LOT of adaptation. Also, a lot of the storylines heavily parallel LOTR (or rather LOTR storylines echo the legends) so the casual viewer might just think "wasn't this already done"...

I think his most rich work is in The Silmarillion. But the great aspects of the story, in my opinion, are how he interweaves different populations over different points in Middle Earth's history. As a result, I don't think any one story can be appreciated in isolation (and it's impossible to adapt a 'history' in the theatrical form). Though if I were to choose, the assault on the Two Trees of Valinor by Melkor and Ungoliant springs to mind. The battles between Melkor and the Valar would be epic as well.

Originally Posted by Xagzan

Haha, those are pretty much the same cautions I gave someone on another forum after my previous praise convinced them to try it out.

All I know is, I would love to see Ancalagon the Black, Melkor, the War of Wrath, the Akallabeth, etc done in live-action.

Loved Beren and Luthien too.

Yeah, if they did Beren and Luthien storyline, I'd love to see the Huan fights against Sauron and the great werewolf.

Originally Posted by RRW

quick question.

what is LOTR "Main Battle theme"?

This. Like Ithekro said, they use different ones depending on the battle, but I'd say this is the most common (and very epic).

[Ithekro]

There will be new battle themes come the end of The Hobbit. There will be Dwarven themes for sure.

I don't expect the Battle of Five Armies until the second film...but that will be something to see. And considering some of the other stuff they might throw in, I hope to see the full White Council taking on the Necromancer's tower. Cause who doesn't want to see Gandalf the Grey and Saruman the White fighting on the same side in battle?

I think Games Workshop's version of LoTRs miniatures game had a scenario creator for if the Fellowship was formed not all that long after the Hobbit with Bilbo carrying the One Ring to Mordor. You again could form the Fellowship of Nine, but with different Free peoples of Middle Earth. You had to have Bilbo of the Shire and Gandalf the Grey (who would be Bilbo's version of Sam for the trip). It was hoped to mix and match races instead of just reforming the dwarves to escort Bilbo Baggins. I think I had Legolas of the Wood, Gloin of the Mountains, His son Gimli, Aragorn the Ranger, Theoden of Rohan, Denethor of Gondor, and Saruman the White (he was interested in the Ring but had not yet turned - he gets the 'tempted one' roll that Boromir has in the regular Fellowship).

It would basically have to be after Aragorn comes of age (2951?), but before Theoden becomes King of Rohan (2980) and before Denethor becomes Steward of Gondor (2984). Also Theoden and Denethor need to be old enough to carry a sword like a hero...so 2971 (Denethor is 41 and Theoden is 23 and Bilbo has had the Ring 30 years)? Everyone else is viable already by the time of the Hobbit.

(Note that Boromir is about 41 in the Fellowship of the Ring and Eomer is about 28 in the Two Towers, Eowyn is about 24 years old...Aragorn is of course is 87 in the Fellowship of the Ring.)

[MrTerrorist]

Tobuscus done it again!

[Endless Soul]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

Tobuscus done it again!

Spoiler for tidiness:

"This video has been removed by the user."

Ahh bummer.

Endless "I am dissapoint" Soul

[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by ChainLegacy

Though if I were to choose, the assault on the Two Trees of Valinor by Melkor and Ungoliant springs to mind. The battles between Melkor and the Valar would be epic as well.

I don't know, I read those events as highly metaphorical and rather unsuited to live-action visual form. For example, the intervention of the Valar into the war between the elves and Morgoth was partly with an apparently massive horde of actual pointy-ears (they had a "war camp"), and partly just what I think of as big flashing lights of metaphorical divine power...things. And then there's the sinking of Beleriand... (how exactly do you sink just part of a giant continent again? What about all those elves still on ground zero?)

Either way any concrete physical interpretation will raise eyebrows from different quarters, and even the best artists would have to compromise and make concrete what was intentionally written, some argue rather pretentiously, in the sparse style of Biblical myths.

Frankly, the Hollywood school of Camera-Shaking and CGI-Abusing Battle Scene is utterly unsuited to communicate a mythical sort of "battle between the gods." See any of the horribad insults to Greek mythology that gets churned out every few years. Do you want to see the Valar, entities of vaguely ethereal sort with undefined powers, reduced to shackles of mortality the same way the Olympians had been subjugated to?

After all, even Peter Jackson had trouble with visualizing a satisfactory Sauron in The Lord of the Rings -- see insistent fan complaints regarding that fiery eye tower thing, or the rather unimpressive and utterly uninteresting Silent Big Bad in Spikes visualization of Sauron for the flashback to Elendil and Gil-Galad's campaign -- and he wisely focused, as the books themselves already did, on the more "mortal" characters and struggles instead. Fortunately The Hobbit is even more approachable than LOTR, and Jackson is free to include or ignore extra nods to LOTR as he wishes, so I do have high hopes for this one.

The more traditional Hollywood fare that can be gleaned the Silmarillion would be something like the romance of Beren and Luthien, an epic battle scene of one of those Noldor-Morgoth battles, or the tragedy of Turin Turambar. None of these are particularly worth the effort though to be honest, even if Turin's story got a recent separate publication. I'm not all that interested in seeing any of the Silmarillion, itself a messy collection of connected backstories, in film.

[Xagzan]

Don't know what you're talking about. I thought flashback Sauron from the prologue of Fellowship was awesome. I don't think it's so unreasonable to envision Melkor and the other Valar as similar to that, except much bigger.

[Ithekro]

It might be hard to get a comfortable scale in that...We are talking about a guy that used Armies of Balrogs and Dragons, with Sauron as one of his top lackeys,...along with cannon fodder orcs and trolls, against mostly Elves that were equal in power to the lesser Dragons and the Balrogs in battle (if I remember things correctly)....before you start getting the Valar involved. The Noldor and their slightly more rational elven cousins are stronger than nearly any of the elves we see in LOTR. Galadriel is the closest in power (as she is a Noldor, the last Noldor in Middle Earth).

How do you scale that when you have humans for only part of the story. Most of it is elves.

And remember...all those fancy swords and gems and things everyone uses in the Hobbit and the LOTR....the Noldor are generally the ones that made them. And most of the stuff left by the time of Frodo Baggins is the lesser goods. The good stuff was either destroyed long ago, or they took it with them when they finally left Middle Earth.

[Irenicus]

Originally Posted by Xagzan

Don't know what you're talking about. I thought flashback Sauron from the prologue of Fellowship was awesome. I don't think it's so unreasonable to envision Melkor and the other Valar as similar to that, except much bigger.

What, flashback Sauron was just...there. Being big bad armored man. It only works because it's a short sequence so you assume there was something more leading up to that point ("the story so far..."). As for LOTR proper, he only works as a villain because there's Saruman, and the Nazgul, and Gollum, and the Balrog, and giant elephants, and huge armies of evil things, as well as drama and dissension within the good side. But mostly Saruman and the Nazgul.

Giant CGI things smashing each other like it was God of War would ruin Silmarillion, utterly. The book "works" because it demands the reader treats it like myth, with respect and all, and fill in their own blanks, their own meaning. Problem is, visual medium fills those blanks -- which is bound to leave someone, probably me, unimpressed. That one Balrog in LOTR was so epic because it was perfectly timed dramatically and it was so dangerous to the little fellowship, one hundred Balrogs versus one thousand super-elves would just be...pedestrian.

But that's neither here nor there, as this is the Hobbit thread. Little hairy-foots are considerably less difficult to translate than myths.

[ChainLegacy]

Originally Posted by Irenicus

What, flashback Sauron was just...there. Being big bad armored man. It only works because it's a short sequence so you assume there was something more leading up to that point ("the story so far..."). As for LOTR proper, he only works as a villain because there's Saruman, and the Nazgul, and Gollum, and the Balrog, and giant elephants, and huge armies of evil things, as well as drama and dissension within the good side. But mostly Saruman and the Nazgul.

Giant CGI things smashing each other like it was God of War would ruin Silmarillion, utterly. The book "works" because it demands the reader treats it like myth, with respect and all, and fill in their own blanks, their own meaning. Problem is, visual medium fills those blanks -- which is bound to leave someone, probably me, unimpressed. That one Balrog in LOTR was so epic because it was perfectly timed dramatically and it was so dangerous to the little fellowship, one hundred Balrogs versus one thousand super-elves would just be...pedestrian.

But that's neither here nor there, as this is the Hobbit thread. Little hairy-foots are considerably less difficult to translate than myths.

Melkor and Sauron are both great candidates for portrayal if you look at certain parts of the Silmarillion. They aren't just about fighting, I would love to see some scenes of them taking up the shape of men and elves, or Melkor's interactions with Feanor. And while I take your point that the adaptation could leave one wanting more, when I read those passages my mind is conjuring an epic cinematic battle that I could perfectly envision on the silver screen, if done properly (and I'm not saying it would - this was all hypothetical anyways). I think ungoliant and her complete darkness enrapturing the two trees as she sucked the life of them, that'd be a damn cool scene animated. But yes, by and large the Silmarillion is not adaptable to film, perhaps just a few animated short films here or there, lol (which I said from the start).

[Endless Soul]

I wonder how they will handle the spiders of Mirkwood. As impressive as she was in LotR, Shelob, in my opinion, didn't really look evil enough. However, I'm guessing the Mirkwood spiders will look similar to Shelob and that horde in the second Harry Potter movie (or was it the third?).

If the attack on the Two Trees of Valinor were ever shown on the big screen, I would hope that Ungoliant would be truly terrifying. She's supposed to be massively huge, making Shelob tiny by comparison.

Endless "I hate spiders" Soul

[ChainLegacy]

The mirkwood spiders are her offspring, so hopefully they live up to their lineage. I expect them to be creepy and menacing. I'm not sure where they'll put them moviewise, perhaps at the end of movie one with the dwarves' capture as the cliffhanger leading in to part two.

[Flower]

Originally Posted by ChainLegacy

The mirkwood spiders are her offspring, so hopefully they live up to their lineage. I expect them to be creepy and menacing. I'm not sure where they'll put them moviewise, perhaps at the end of movie one with the dwarves' capture as the cliffhanger leading in to part two.

I was wondering where the "break-off" point would be between the two movies?

If the material from the trailer is any indication it would seem to be somewhere between the escape from the Misty Mountains and inside Mirkwood.

There was plenty of footage for showing their activity in the bowels of the Misty Mountains (that was where Bilbo and Gollum met after all) ... but there is a single couple-second clip that hints that the dwarves and Bilbo in Mirkwood might be in in Part 1: and that is when Gandalf introduces Fili.

Spoiler for Novel Spoilers:

Fili is shown shooting an arrow. The main times in the book I recall him doing so were in Mirkwood (remember the sequence with the River of Forgetfulness?) but it is possible that bow-shooting sequence could either be:

1. Extra material taking place in the forest before the trolls attacked them before they made it to Rivendell.

or

2. Material taken from the second part of the movie.

or

3. A part I totally forgot about!

So my guess is that the break off point would most likely be around the escape from the Misty Mountains somewhere.

[Endless Soul]

Originally Posted by Flower

... but there is a single couple-second clip that hints that the dwarves and Bilbo in Mirkwood might be in in Part 1: and that is when Gandalf introduces Fili.

I know exactly the clip you are talking about, and I was wondering if it was the spider scene as well.

Spoiler for the clip:

there is a bit of spiderish web stuff around the moustache part of his beard. ~shudder~

I think you may be right about the break being after the Misty Mountains. However, I kind of see two other places where the break might happen.

Spoiler for Just in case.:

One being the parting of ways at the edge of Mirkwood and the other being right after the Dwarves are taken by the spiders, ending in a cliffhanger.

[MrTerrorist]

Tobuscus Literal video link has been fixed!

http://forums.animesuki.com/showthre...10#post3922410

[Ithekro]

"Careful it's bound on pickup"...ha.

[Solafighter]

Found this on dumpert.nl

The Hobbit, Making-of

http://www.dumpert.nl/mediabase/1916...making_of.html

[Mr Hat and Clogs]

Spoiler for Movie break point.:

I as kind of expecting a cut off about when they go to the woodmans house, Boer or something (been a decade since I read the book) or just when they find elves in mirkwood, which is after the spiders, but before the river trip. Both scenes could be used for breaks. That would leave Dale, lonely mountain and Smaug, five armies and the return home.

[Ithekro]

Hobbiton looks nice. I wonder if one could rebuild that in Oregon.

Youtubing it.

[Amorok]

I think the first three LOTR movies were impressive enough that I'd trust the same people to make an adaptation of the Hobbit. My only concern is that they're splitting the story into two movies, which strikes me as a blatant attempt to squeeze as much revenue out of the adaption as they can.

Normally, I'd be willing to chip in the few extra bucks it'd take to watch two movies instead of one, but seriously -- the Hobbit? As two movies? There was barely enough action in the book to fit into one!