Good points Klaus.
Personally, I don't mind long films. The two films I've loved the most this year were both long and lingering affairs, I love the long shots of Tarkovsky and Antonioni, etc.
I do think there are several really obvious questions begged by Jackson's adaptation, though. To start with:
- Why is material not in the original work being incorporated?
- Why has the planned two film adaptation become three?
You can't help but think that the pay day is involved.
I know Tolkien's work very, very well - I've read and re-read not just The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, but the Silmarillion and all the ancillary books as well. Let's just say between the ages of about 10 and 20 I was a pretty fucking serious Tolkien enthusiast.
Really, I think The Hobbit would best be filmed as ONE 3 hour film. Two makes legitimate sense for a Hollywood adaptation, I guess.
As I said earlier, there's a natural fit for the aesthetic and structure of the Lord of the Rings (six books, three volumes, prologue, epilogue and numerous out-of-band narratives in appendices, as well as the relevance of its events to Tolkien's grander sweep of Middle Earth history) to Jackson's "kitchen sink" adaptation of the text.
In the case of The Hobbit, that's not the case. It's a problem if a novel aimed at kids, containing gentle colour plate illustrations by the author, that can be read in 3-4 hours is adapted into 8-9 hours of film, I'd say.
Sounds to me like Jackson's Hobbit will bear more resemblance to his LotR than it will to the source material, and that's a bad mistake.
