I don’t have any hardware that supports 4k so I’ll expect to be be happy with my BRs for the foreseeable future, but I recently happened to see a trailer for one the 4k versions and it looked like somebody had installed ReShade on top of Middle Earth.
Then I saw this video with Peter Jackson explaining how he felt that the LOTR trilogy felt visually inconsistent with the Hobbit movies due to differences in filmmaking technology which gave me immense George Lucas vibes.
I’d always thought the somewhat desaturated look gave the LOTR movies a somber and stark quality that fit the tone, but I guess that was a flaw that needed to be fixed. Now LOTR looks as weirdly overly saturated as the Hobbit trilogy, yay! Okay, it doesn’t look quite as bad, but I expect this is primarily how these movies will be seen in the future.
A couple random thoughts:
The Hobbit movies look like shit, period. Like, it’s actually a little hard for me to watch. It somehow looks ultra crisp (in a bad way) and glazed-over at the same time. I feel like when the first Hobbit movie came out, people pointed this out and the general opinion was that it looked “bad”. I seem to recall Jackson just brushing aside these concerns or blaming it on theaters not having the right projectors or some shit. Either way there were a lot of complaints about how The Hobbit looked when it was released, while there were ZERO complaints about Fellowship and watching the blu-ray the other day, it still looks amazing almost 20 years later.
About Jackson wanting to visually tie the two trilogies together… yes, it seems like Jackson is obsessed with trying to make it all one six-part story rather than two separate trilogies. That’s why he crammed all the junk in there from the appendixes. I guess he knows more than Tolkien, who never felt the need to go back and re-write The Hobbit. Tolkien never even bothered to go back and change “The Necromancer” to “Sauron”, for chrissakes.
I’m just sick of Jackson now. He absolutely has Lucas Brain and while I thank him for making my favorite movies of all time (the LotR trilogy) I never want to see another one of his movies again for how he so badly butchered The Hobbit and now wants to make LotR worse…
Everything in the Hobbit just looks so fake and unnatural, even the practical effects stuff. I guess some of this was explained in their production vlogs as having to do with it being filmed in 3D and 3D cameras darkening the image so everything had to be painted extra saturated on set to compensate. Maybe Peter Jackson ended up liking the look and didn’t bother to tone the colours down in post or something.
I guess he knows more than Tolkien, who never felt the need to go back and re-write The Hobbit. Tolkien never bothered to go back and change “The Necromancer” to “Sauron”.
Wasn’t the Hobbit slightly revised around the time LOTR was published to make it more consistent with the latter? I seem to remember Tolkien also wanted to go back again to change even more things (probably to add the stuff from the appendices) but gave up and decided to let the Hobbit stand on its own.
You can read the differences here, the canon explanation is that the original 1937 version is what Bilbo wrote in his memoirs and the later versions were written by Frodo based on what Bilbo had told him in private.
I sat through all three of the Hobbit movies, hoping they would get better. They are some of the dullest, ugliest and most embarrassing movies I’ve ever seen. Like there just isn’t enough material to support three long movies. By the end I had gotten a real appreciation for the Star Wars prequels becuase they were at least bad in an interesting way and Lucas was working with cutting-edge CG and the technology actually couldn’t do what he wanted.
I’m just glad Jackson has stopped threatening us with a Silmarillion film. And I hear the new Amazon series is set entirely in the Second Age and will be original stories, so at least they aren’t desacrating Tolkin’s masterpiece.
I don’t think he/Legendary/WB ever had the rights to the Silmarillion to begin with and the Tolkien estate wasn’t willing to sell.
To be honest, the Silmarillion probably wouldn’t translate to a movie that well
There was a lot of talk around 2017 when Christopher Tolkien resigned from the Tolkien Estate, he was the one most obsessed with preserving his father’s legacy. And Jackson was talking about trying to get the rights for a Silmarillion trilogy, but I think the Hobbit movies really hurt his cred and even if they do allow a Silmarillion movie he won’t be at the helm.
And it looks like from all the negotiations around the Amazon show that they aren’t letting anyone touch the Silmarillion for now. Like apparently the show can’t even mention anything that happened in the First Age or show anything from the book like Numenor, so they are basically reduced to doing fan fiction about the LOTR appendices. Ironically I do think a Silmarillion TV series could work but I don’t trust anyone to actually make it well.
Pedantic thing, Tolkien did actually do small rewrites of The Hobbit while writing lord of the rings to make them more consistent with those books(mostly changing the part where Bilbo meets Gollum and hinting that the ring is sinister). It’s actually much harder to find the original version, though it’s tiny changes for the most part
I remember the criticisms of the Hobbit movies’ look centering around the framerate and the surprisingly dated-on-release CG
Are the Hobbit movies even available in that much touted 48fps format anymore?
Nope. I always wanted to see it in 48fps because it sounded like an interesting experience, but none of the theaters around me had projectors that ran at 48fps, and the home releases never used it either.
Guillermo del Toro quitting the Hobbit and its consequences has been a disaster for the human race
It probably would’ve looked and felt very different and I can imagine some fanboys getting mad about it
I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing, I mean Tolkien fanboys are still amped about 70s rotoscoped balrogs. I think having a different look to the Hobbit would have been a better move than slavishly aping of the LotR without any of the practical effects or preproduction work that made those movies look so good.
Jacksonvision™ is the defining look of this property now and we have no one to blame but faceless New Line execs and another director who doesn’t know how to say no.
it should have never been expected to be the same as a different film series from 15 years before. orlando bloom had no business there either
“A Legolas cameo, that’s kind of cool”
“Oh, I guess he’s in every scene in Mirkwood. Well, he’s from there so it makes sense I suppose”
“Why is the barrel scene now a giant battle sequence with orcs and why are Legolas and this new elf character there and now they’re also in Laketown where there’s more battles against orcs and-” :deeper-sadness:
“toys”, “play with”
This shit has to stop. I understand why people are maybe bothered that their artistic vision was limited by the technology of the time but if that’s the case then why make anything? These aren’t “toys” they’re just tech that can be utilised to create anything. It just reeks of the “we can do this now, so we should”.
Also, imagine actually wanting to “update” your magnum opus to look the same as the piece-of-shit hack-job that you were basically roped into because no one else wanted to do it.
The visuals don’t even matter because, in terms of writing, the characters, themes, design, tone, etc. the Hobbit films do not even feel remotely close to the LotR trilogy anyway. It’s just a weird justification because nothing about the Hobbit films felt cohesive with LotR at all. Hell, they’re not even cohesive on their own.
It just reeks of the “we can do this now, so we should”.
Alternatively, “How do we entice Middle-Earth fanboys to buy these movies again? Now it looks slightly worse different in addition to being in a higher resolution!”
The visuals don’t even matter because, in terms of writing, the characters, themes, design, tone, etc. the Hobbit films do not even feel remotely close to the LotR trilogy anyway. It’s just a weird justification because nothing about the Hobbit films felt cohesive with LotR at all. Hell, they’re not even cohesive on their own.
The Hobbit movies just piss me off, mainly because of the few things that they did get right, buried in the avalanche of awful CGI, terrible overwrought action sequences and pointless distracting additions
I just think it’s weird how he treats these two sets of movies as some kind of single cohesive unit when they’re entirely different productions separated by over a decade. Like it makes sense from a dumb fanboy perspective, but come on Peter, you didn’t even want to make those fucking Hobbit movies
It could make sense as a cohesive unit, but you would just have to start with the Hobbit movies, and then it just gets constantly bleaker and darker until the ring is destroyed.
Also I kind of like this recoloring, it makes them look more like the adolescent fantasy movies that they are.
:joker-dancing:
It has been a long while since I read the books, but Tom Bombadil is reminding me of Jeff Bezos right now.
Still pissed that scouring of the Shire was never included in the movies, the Hobbits just go back to brunch at the end.
God that fucking sucks. If we had sensible IP laws the LOTR franchise would be in the public domain and we’d instead be arguing over which versions are the best and worst.
I mean, even if IP was free all that epic fantasy shit costs a fortune to do right.
