On Saturday morning, I saw The Hobbit, in the company of about a hundred Tolkien fanatics.  We discussed it before and afterwards.  If you've read the book, there are no spoilers here.

There were some new humorous touches.  (Four words: Mini goblin zipline stenographer.)  Did they throw something more dignified away in order to get laughs, like Lucas did when he had Yoda fight a comical light-sabre duel?  LotR has a grand tone that might suffer from slapstick and silliness.  But I think it's okay to have some silliness in The Hobbit.  The "crack the dishes, smash the plates" song was silly to begin with, and it was wonderfully choreographed--I wonder how many takes they did and how many dishes they went through.

The changes made were mostly difficult story trade-offs.  The way Bilbo left the Shire is an example.  In the book, Gandalf and the dwarves bullied/tricked him into leaving, by saying he looked "more like a grocer than a burglar".  He got upset and said he'd make a great burglar, and suddenly he found himself leaving with them, befuddled about why he had done so.  This was so it could have an arc at the beginning when Bilbo is very foolish, and you don't trust Gandalf, and you feel frightened that Bilbo may have fallen in with a bad crowd.  Not all of this would work in the movie, since everyone seeing it has already seen Gandalf in the LotR movies, and won't even think about distrusting him.  In the movie, Bilbo is not upset by the grocer comment but agrees with it, and makes a long, deliberate decision to have an adventure.  This highlights the Baggins / Took conflict within Bilbo better than in the book.  It also starts Bilbo's character arc further along; he is already mature and not easily manipulated.  This is all done so that we can spend less time on Bilbo, and more time on Thorin and battle scenes.

Many changes were, IMHO, an improvement.  The scene with the trolls was clever.  I think Tolkien hadn't decided how powerful Gandalf would be when he wrote that scene, so he showed Gandalf as perhaps not powerful enough to confront the trolls, and using trickery instead.  It was a great scene in and of itself, but stuck out horribly when later on Gandalf is much more powerful in battle.  The fanatics and I had already went over the 4 possible ways of handling this scene proposed by "Riddles in the Dark".  I said all of them were bad:  The original way was bad (Gandalf too weak), having a long battle would be bad because there were already too many battles, Gandalf just blasting them with magic would be boring, and the trolls just being stupid would be deus ex machina.  In the movie, they gave Bilbo the cleverness instead.  This was rushing Bilbo's character arc a little, making him too clever too soon, so that we can spend more time on Thorin and battle scenes.  But I can't think of any better way of handling the scene.

They made Radagast into an interesting character, and added a lot of movie time showing him and his animals which I found entertaining.  The riddling scene was especially well-done, introducing Gollum's split psyche earlier than Tolkien did, and in an entertaining yet frightening way.

I'd never have understood some of the details my more-fanatical friends did.  It seemed bizarre when Gandalf mentions the blue wizards, "whose names I cannot remember at the moment."  There are 4 other wizards, whom he's known for thousands of years, and he can only remember the names of two of them?  That was a dig at the Tolkien estate, who wanted to charge the movie producers considerable extra to license the material in Unfinished Tales, which is the only place where their names are mentioned.  I also wouldn't have known about Figwit, who has a slightly-larger role in this movie.

The only nonsensical big change I noticed was when they held a White Council mini-meeting in Rivendell on Gandalf's arrival.  That is a major fail in three ways:  It means Gandalf has no reason to leave the dwarves to attend the White Council; they didn't invite most of the members; and it makes no sense, since no one knew Gandalf was coming, not even Gandalf.)

Writers always tell would-be authors to read a lot, but they never tell them to watch movies.  Watching movies is important for writing!  Movie directors are better at thinking cinematically than writers are.  See enough movies that you get a sense for the cinematic, and that how something is seen, camera angles and lighting and all, pops into your head while you're writing.  There's a scene where Bilbo walks through his silent, empty home in the morning, deciding whether to go or stay.   There's a scene where he sneaks up behind Gollum, meaning to kill him, and sees the terrible misery in Gollum's face, and spares him.  There's a scene where the dwarves gather around the fireplace and sing that sad song about their home.  If you didn't have pictures in your mind, you'd have a hard time describing in words what happened and why.

The songs, BTW, were well-done.  I love the melodies in the old Rankin-Bass version, and even the songs Tolkien didn't write, like "The greatest adventure" and "Where there's a whip, there's a way".  (I know Tolkien die-hards hate them because of their modern sound.  Bite me.)  But the melodies in this one are good too, though I was disappointed that they cut "Fifteen birds in five fir trees" (due to the need to rewrite the story to change it to a battle scene that rushed Bilbo's character arc and his reconciliation with the company).

The "mistakes" that I predicted were adding more battles and making the existing battles bigger and longer.  There's a long battle flashback added to provide Thorin's motivation, which I would like to have seen summarized in a few lines of dialogue, but that's because I think the movie is about Bilbo, not Thorin.  It was wrong for the tone of the first half of The Hobbit.  The book opens pastorally, and I like that.  I like some time spent travelling across the wilderness, feeling the bigness of it, slogging through the mud between sudden and dramatic fight scenes.  This movie doesn't do that.

That's a problem with this Hobbit:  Too many battle scenes, and too many characters spending too much time hanging over precipices.  It has the pacing of an action movie.  The action segments were overdone and unbelievable.  The long, LONG fight scene inside the goblin mountain was so ridiculous, I had to look away--what with each dwarf killing dozens of goblins, despite being outnumbered about a thousand to one, and falling hundreds of feet onto rock with no ill effects, not once, but twice--that's twice per dwarf--I felt I was watching the Keystone Kops.  Thorin uses a ladder as a shield against archers, and all their arrows conveniently lodge in its rungs.  Later, they're caught in five or six devastating rock slides and crushed between two mountains slamming against each other, but no one is injured.  That's the level of ridiculousness.  I can't fear for these dwarves anymore; they're obviously made of dwarfonium.

(My fanatical friends did not mind the unreal fight scenes, but were upset at the implied rate of travel possible over the Misty Mountains via bunny sled.  This probably says something about the geek psyche.)

The other problem with this Hobbit is that Bilbo peaks too soon.  We've only gotten to the end of the first movie, and he's already become heroic and finished his character arc (in an added, unrealistic fight scene).  I said this to someone else in the group, and he thought that Peter Jackson didn't think The Lord of the Rings was about Frodo; he thought it was about Aragorn.  Likewise, Jackson probably thought The Hobbit was about Thorin.

That does explain a lot about Jackson's version of LotR.  Still, I laughed at the idea that anybody would spend hundreds of millions making a film of a book called The Hobbit and put it in the hands of somebody who thought the story was not about a hobbit--until someone read out loud part of an interview with some of the development team, who said that The Hobbit was really Thorin's story.  Ugh.  Hollywood.

I kept being struck by how much Tolkien re-uses the same themes and plot elements in the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and LotR.  He plagiarizes from himself.  This didn't bother me as much in the books, which were about Bilbo and Frodo, who are strong enough characters to carry a book.  But with the movies instead being about Thorin and Aragorn, neither of whom are interesting enough to support one movie let alone three apiece, the similarities start to annoy me.  The Arkenstone, the rings, the Silmarils--they all serve similar story functions.  Bilbo and Frodo are variations on a theme, as are the company of dwarves and the Company of the Ring.  I don't even remember how many kings seeking to restore their kingdoms Tolkien has.  He has two dwarven kingdoms carved out under a mountain that the dwarves were driven from after their riches attracted enemies.

One good thing about highlighting Thorin early on is that it fixes one of the book's major failings.  The book opens with the dwarves being nasty money-grubbers who are all about the gold, and around chapter 10 it drop-shifts into being a king's quest to reclaim his kingdom.  The movie introduces the king's quest right off the bat.

At least Thorin isn't as dull a character as Aragorn becomes once he leaves the Shire.  This raises the issue of character flaws.  You might think Aragorn is dull because he has no flaws.  I've said on this blog that writers who tell you to make your characters interesting by giving them flaws are wrong, and I stick by that.   Aragorn is dull because he speaks and acts the way we expect noble warrior kings to.  Gandalf, on the other hand, also has no serious flaws--you could even accuse him of being a Mary Sue, if he weren't absent so much of the time--yet he is a very interesting character.  He just has his own way of doing things.  You don't need flaws to make a character interesting.

We discussed what it meant to the story for Thorin to be young instead of old.  Most of us thought it was just to draw women to the movie--I asked why they couldn't have made one of the dwarves into a hot babe for my sake, then--but someone turned up an interview with someone on the development team who said it was to allow Thorin to fight more energetically.  IMHO, a key consideration is how it makes you feel when Thorin presumably dies in the end.  In the book, Thorin's death was sad, but, honestly, the guy was pretty old already, and so instead of being a tragedy, it was more of a "circle of life" moment, and an "at least he saw his home again before he died" moment.  If this young Thorin dies at the end, it will change the tone of the story.