Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and Sequel!

Song of the lonely mountain

But ... that's the same theme

No, Demetris is right this time. It doesn't feel like it's from Middle Earth at all. It's a terrible song.

That song (as it appears in the end credits) takes me right out of middle earth. Doesn't seem to fit in at all. I love the theme and its many variations through the rest of the film, though.

The song at the end felt like the only bit of music at the end that brought some thing new to the finale, what with all the choppy editing of tracks from lord of the rings at the climax. (The nazgul theme and gondor themes making bizarre out of context appearances.)

I couldn't agree with that. The film looks and feels as spirited as the rest of it, and there've pushed the bar further on a lot of the types of effects involved (e.g. the types of shots involving both Ian McKellan and the dwarf / hobbit actors are just one example where they've advanced things in the intervening years). I imagine they were all very dedicated and had a great time. I don't always like the choices made, but I wouldn't say their heart wasn't in it was the reason for them making those choices.

I think what a lot of people are reacting to here is that this one is quite a different story to LORD OF THE RINGS, but the similarities are strong enough for people to be reminded of a film ten years ago that felt more urgent. (The stakes are certainly higher in LOTR.)

To get back to this discussion, Doug Adams posted the following on his blog:



Source, and the whole text: http://www.musicoflotr.com

Bottom line, don't try to explain everything as a fault of the filmmakers / Howard Shore / temp tracks, but: why would this theme be here, and why did they do that, by logic of it all? It's more of a puzzle, and I can't wait to hear and see the final pieces!

Ah, the power of ex post rationalisation. The 'let's see if we can make sense of this when we have a few more datapoints.' They may not even have an answer themselves yet. But either way it's just not necessary. Sometimes ironclad thematic integrity gives way to the emotional needs of a film as determined by a director. And so Leia's theme mourns Kenobi as Luke sees the old man die at Darth Vader's hand. And the 'History of the Ring' heralds the Argonath in Fellowship of the Ring. And the Nature theme calls Theoden out to battle more than once. Sometimes it only has to feel right to make it onto the cut.

You're making this up.

Except ANY score's logic will/should be to adhere to its intended medium (and hence be as malleable as required).

I (once more) refer to that grand old anecdote from Miklos Rozsa about a great composer NOT being used to the requirements of film:

"I (Rozsa) met him (Heitor Villa-Lobos) when he arrived in Hollywood, asked him whether he had yet seen the film, and how much time the were allowing him to write the music. He was going to see the picture tomorrow, he said, and the music was already completed. They had sent him a script, he told me, translated into Portuguese, and he had followed that, just as if he had been writing a ballet or opera. I was dumbfounded; apparently nobody had bothered to explain the basic techniques to him. 'But Maestro,' I said, 'what will happen if your music doesn't match the picture exactly?" Villa-Lobos was obviously talking to a complete idiot. 'In that case, of course, they will adjust the picture,' he replied."

I saw THE HOBBIT last night in HFR 3D. Like many, my reaction is mixed. The HFR was initially jarring, but only for the first few minutes. At first it looked awful - very fake. It looked like everyone was somehow moving in fast-forward and somehow not at the same time. After a moment I just decided that it looked very real. It's hard to describe. It looked so real that it was like I was on set with the actors. I got used to it and was only reminded of the HFR a few times for the rest of the film. The rest of the visual experience was amazing! All the scenery was incredibly beautiful. The shots of the dwarf city at the beginning were some of my favorites. The slot canyon scene looked amazing. Everything looked amazing, really, except for some dodgy effects (Radagast on his bunny-pulled sleigh looked awful at times). Every tree was a marvel to behold.

As for the story, the film is bloated. One of the things that made each LoTR film so much better than the books was the streamlined story. Cutting things like Tom Bombadil (or however you spell it) and the scouring of the shire out of the films was a really good idea. I think Jackson's team did a marvelous job making those stories cinematic. By comparison, for THE HOBBIT Jackson & co. have gone out of their way to add things that weren't in the book at all. Not much really happens in THE HOBBIT. After 45 min. in Bag End I was ready for those dwarf to break into that awful n'sync song from Disney's TARZAN.

There are some battles along the way to try to make it all more exciting, but Jackson's battles haven't ever really been that exciting, imo. Goblins or orcs approach threateningly and are dispatched quickly, even by dwarves who've never seen battle. There's no sense of actual danger, and very little risk that any character will actually be killed.

Not that it would matter with this cast. There are 13 dwarves, only 3 of whom have enough character to differentiate them from the rest of the group. I had no idea who was who or why most of them mattered. That's another major difference between this film and the LoTR trilogy, where every character was distinct and important.

I loved the scene with Gollum. That scene crackled. The last battle was pretty good. [spoiler]But if those eagles are always on call to save good guys, why don't they use them all the time? Those eagles could have just carried this company all the way to the lonely mountain and saved everyone a lot of pain and hardship[/spoiler].

I also wasn't very impressed with the music in context. The new dwarf theme is definitely the most notable, though that end credits version of it still grates.

You like those books? Man. Have you ever tried reading books that were written by...writers...as opposed to linguistics professors?

I thought the appearances of the old LOTR themes were mostly very appropriate, and in almost all instances when a character appeared or a particular even happened I thought "cue ____ theme" and then it showed up. The two jarring instances however were the awful variation of A Shortcut To Mushrooms as Bilbo leaves the Shire (a terrible piece of music by any standards), and as you mentioned, the Nazgul theme in the climax - that didn't make sense at all.

I didn't however hear the Gondor theme. Where was that?

Anyway, as for the movie - the first two thirds dragged. I was bored to tears. Some guy with a bunny sled who rescues hedgehogs? Two mountains fighting it out...for some reason? And I still don't know why we went to Rivendell. It picked up in the last 45 minutes when they got captured by the orcs, but the action was so well orchestrated with so many impossible camera shots it became all too apparent it was all CGI. Gollum was alright, but nothing special.

The most unintentionally funny bit was when they are rescued by the eagles and dumped on top of a rock, with no visible way down. Brilliant. Thanks again eagles. Hey, why not this time just fly to Erebor? Kind of like the other time when you could have just flown to Mount Doom? No?

The majority of the movie is a big, bloated, 270 million dollar mess, but annoyingly, the slight glimpse of Smaug at the end has made me anxious for the second.

Actually it's a bit mislabelled in my original post. It's a theme that appears once the ring is destroyed in Return of the King, and I think Doug Adams calls it a 'Fourth Age Gondor Revived' theme or something.

It appears in the film at the end on the Eagle rock when Thorin embraces Bilbo.