Recently The Hobbit came out in movie theaters which made me think of The Hobbit the came out a few years ago which in turn made me decide to read The Hobbit again. That last link was really hard to find, by the way, buried under tons of shit about the most recent movie.
I might not have mentioned this before, but The Hobbit, as in the book by J.R.R. Tolkien, is one of my favorite books ever written and might be my favorite fantasy novel ever. I certainly think it's the best thing that Tolkien ever wrote, before he started becoming obsessed with his own mythology and forgot he was writing books to entertain people and started using them as an excuse to make up fake languages. The Hobbit, to me, has everything needed in a fantasy novel--adventure, friendship, horror, action, and a pretty decent message about greed and people's priorities.
It has no women, of course, which I suppose will bother some people. I can't defend the fact that there are no women except to weakly offer that none of the character's masculinity is really important to the story. If Bilbo and all the dwarves had been female the story would've been the same. Yeah, I know, it's a shitty excuse. The dude wrote it in the 1930s okay? Give him a break.
There's also no romance in it. Which is spectacularly awesome, a fact that the movie people seemed to have missed.
Alright so let's talk about the movie version of The Hobbit, huh? The second part I mean, the second of three parts. We can take a moment to appreciate the irony of slicing a book that is shorter than any one of the Lord of the Rings books into three movies to increase profits when the book itself could be seen as one very long argument against greed.
And yes, the book was made into three movies for profit. Don't try to tell me the creators wanted to capture every nuance of the book and needed three movies to do it because that is obviously false. Not only do they add a ton of extra stuff, only a fraction of which is even hinted at in the book, but they still cut out shit from the book and change it to go faster. It is absolutely mind boggling that with nine hours of screen time--half of the time it takes a narrator to read the entire fucking book, they still cut out stuff from the book.
But I'm not here to pick apart every difference between the movie and the book. Plenty of people can already do that, and just because something is different than the book it is based on does not automatically mean the thing will be bad.
I want to talk about one specific part of The Hobbit, which is Flies & Spiders, the eighth chapter in the book and my favorite part of the whole thing. It is a incredibly important chapter in the book because it is the turning point for Bilbo as a character, he goes from a reluctant passenger with the dwarves to a active force in the story--he rescues the dwarves, he fights and kills the spiders, and he keeps the dwarves going long enough for them to stumble into the elves and be captured which is pretty much the best thing that could happen to them since they were poisoned and starving to death.
What I'm saying is that the real story of The Hobbit is, shockingly, about the hobbit himself. His journey isn't just across Middle-Earth to the Lonely Mountain, but through himself, across the Baggins side over to the Took side. From the contented, lazy rich man to a genuinely brave hero. Flies & Spiders is where that turn becomes most apparent. It isn't sudden, because Bilbo has already shown his willingness to act when he has too, especially under the Misty Mountains when he was going to go back in to find the dwarves and Gandalf, but also during their encounter with the trolls. But in Mirkwood he finally has the opportunity to act since all the dwarves are captured and Gandalf is gone. His killing of the first spider that tried to take him away galvanizes him and he expresses this change by naming Sting.
When he rescues the dwarves, Bilbo doesn't just cut them down and run. He sees the spiders and formulates a plan, shaky as it is, he bravely taunts the spiders and doubles back to free the dwarves, then leads them in a running battle against the spiders--fighting and killing many of them and distracting them long enough for the exhausted, poisoned dwarves to escape with their lives. Without Bilbo the dwarves would have been eaten, no doubt.
So now let's compare this excellent chapter with how it is portrayed in the movie. If you haven't seen the movie and care about spoilers you might want to stop reading because I'm going to discuss the finer points of these scenes here so, you know, look away?
So in the movie the dwarves are in Mirkwood for like three hours before they wander off the path and get confused. Bilbo climbs and tree to look around. The spiders ambush the dwarves and Bilbo goes after them. He sees them tying up the dwarves and puts on his devil ring, which allows him to understand the spiders. He frees a few of the dwarves and they take over the battle, fighting the spiders while Bilbo cries about the ring which fell off of his finger and landed on the ground. He chases after it and then KILLS A BABY to keep it.
Yes, it is a baby spider, but still. BILBO BAGGINS HACKS A BABY FROM A SENTIENT RACE TO DEATH TO KEEP HIS RING. So instead of a transformation from a passive character to a truly active and dynamic character, Bilbo is reduced to a plot device to show how bad and evil and corrupting the Ring is in the most hamfisted and obvious and bullshit way possible.
But okay, sure, they need to establish the Ring is bad because they're trying to make the movie more like a prequel to the Lord of the Rings instead of a story all its own, right? So after Bilbo finishes killing his baby then he probably snaps out of it and leads the weary dwarves to safety, right?
Well, no, in fact the dwarves are pretty much fine and kill a lot of the spiders (including all of of them grabbing one by the legs and pulling it apart which struck me as needlessly gory) but then even more spiders come and then... well then the elves show up led by Legolas and some girl elf who's there to be a love interest for the...pretty dwarf? (By the way, he dies at the end. Almost like they want you to like the dwarves who don't make it)
So what we have is a scene where Bilbo does not really demonstrate a lot of nerve. Yes, he does chase down the spiders and free the dwarves, but he doesn't really have time to consider what he's doing. In the book he has to wander around and watch the spiders from afar, in the movie he listens to the dwarves screaming all the way to the spider lair. Bilbo only has to free one or two of his companions before they take over for him, they never begin to look to him for leadership, and his brave rearguard fight against the spiders is transformed into an incredibly cheap shot to make the Ring seem sinister and foul.
Obviously, I did not like the movie much at all, and there are more reasons than this one for that, but I think this scene in particular really was a turning point for me and the real reason I dislike the movie. Taking the focus away from Bilbo's self growth so that we can watch an Orlando Bloom who seems to be straining the edges of his CG/makeup youthificiation shoot a bunch of CG spiders while he surfs really does not sit well with me. I hope you enjoy the movie more, of course, more enjoyment is always better than less enjoyment.
But maybe instead you should just read the book again?
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