“Blah blah greedy blah blah stuff that isn’t in the book blah blah the book isn’t that long anyway blah”
First off… really? You’re complaining that we get to spend even MORE time in Middle Earth? Regardless of why there’s going to be a third movie… It means one more year of anticipating another awesome movie!
And the thing about the movies adding scenes that weren’t in the books… that’s kind of the point. In any given book, there are scenes and characters that do not translate well to screen. This holds true with Tolkien’s work.
For example, in Fellowship (book), Gandalf disappears for awhile and then tells everyone in Rivendell what he’d been doing the whole time. It’s not a scene, it’s exposition. It’s not showing, it’s telling. And frankly that shit isn’t going to fly in a movie. Watching Gandalf talk for 10 minutes would be fucking boring. The audience is going to be sitting there wondering why they’re only hearing about Gandalf going to Minas Tirith and Saruman imprisoning him and why they don’t get to see it. It was a similar deal with Arwen. She shows up for, like, a sentence or two. I think she even gets a line of dialogue. And that’s it. All of her backstory, her entire romance with Aragorn, is shoved into the Appendices. Arwen barely exists in the main story. And that’s fine. FOR A BOOK. But if the movies treated her the same, RotK would end with Aragorn marrying some random elf chick, because the audience would barely know who she was.
Yeah, they’re going to show Gandalf going to the Council and taking on the Necromancer. Yeah, they’re going to have Legolas in Mirkwood BECAUSE HE WAS PROBABLY THERE ANYWAY. Yeah, they’re going to turn the Battle of the Five Armies into an actual battle, because having Bilbo get knocked out was, is, and always will be just a cop-out for not actually having to write a complex battle scene. Yeah, they’re probably going to show events that lead up to LotR in the 3rd Hobbit movie.
Because, newsflash: Cinema works differently than literature. Who the hell wants to watch a movie that is EXACTLY like the book? It’s unimaginative and boring. If you want exactly what’s in the book, you could, I dunno READ THE BOOK?
And I’m talking as a person who gets VERY upset at shoddy film adaptations. But there’s a difference between taking out all the religious allegory in Golden Compass, or never explaining who Moony Wormtail Padfoot and Prongs are in Prisoner of Azkaban… and adding some scenes to The Hobbit to make it translate better to the big screen.
