The problem with the 'Hobbit' Movies

[Mr Khan]

Adinnieken said:
Well, considering the Hobbit was written after Lord of the Rings and was essentially written to tell the back story of how the Ring came to the Shire, it really isn't supposed to have the same feeling.

The problem with the movie, so far, is it's too long. They added too much to the story to extend it. However, there are some additions to the story that really do a good job of setting the stage for the LoTR movies.

And well, I guess personally I like that all the Dwarves are Scottish in this movie.

What I never really liked about The Hobbit and then the Lord of the Rings is the disconnect between the two movies. In The Hobbit the Dwarves, Elves, and Man come together to defeat the foe and it seems the three are at peace with each other and willing to work together. In Lord of the Rings, not so much. They are, essentially, reluctant allies.

The other problem is in Lord of the Rings it shows the older Bilbo obtaining the Ring and in The Hobbit, obviously the younger one is.

That said, I'm interested in seeing the characters run around the screen a lot more in "The Hobbit 2: Really? Is this a Marathon or a Movie?"

cacafina above me got it right. The Hobbit was written and published in the 1930s as a children's book (the genre would be young adult today, but that did not exist back then), and shares more in its tone and reading-difficulty with the Narnia stories, which were also aimed at younger readers while still being a bit too dense to be what we would call "children's" today. LotR was written throughout the 1940s and published in the mid '50s. It started as a mere sequel to The Hobbit, but then Tolkien decided to integrate it with his Middle Earth mythos, a just-for-fun (because publishers told him there was no way he could publish it) mythology that he devised so he could play around with linguistics and create imitations of the Norse myths that he so loved, and so had to do some minor ret-cons of The Hobbit in later editions regarding the finding of the ring and Gollum's characterization and Bilbo's reaction to Gollum.

Also in the hobbit it was portrayed that while the Wood Elves and Lake Men were longstanding allies, they absolutely did not like how the Dwarves conducted themselves after they came back, and very nearly went to war with the Dwarves before the Orcs and Wargs arrived, so it was actually a more tense portrayal than anything in LotR (although the Elf-man relationship was insanely casual compared to all the heaviness about mortality that was supposed to exist between them, but then the Sylvan Elves were supposed to be much more down-to-earth than the Noldor or even the Sindar, which could explain the disconnect without having to simply call it a ret-con)