The Lord of the Rings - newbie questions!

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

I saw these movies back when they first came out, but I haven't seen them in some 20+ years. I have the (theatrical cuts) of the LOTR trilogy. Is the big multi-disc Blu-ray set worth getting if I end up liking the films? Are the Hobbit prequels worth seeing? Then there's several animated movies and the Amazon TV series. Big franchise that I know virtually nothing about. Which entries are the good ones?

 

[fireproof78]

The Extended Editions are amazing and offer a lot more. My wife and I regularly rewatch it because the worldbuilding is intense. Fantastic film, and probably one of the best literary adaptations out there.

The Hobbit films are less so. I think the first one is amazing, but the story gets stretched out a bit too much for the story as short as the source material is. I cannot recommend the next two of the Hobbit films.

Not seen the animated films, and am not inclined to do so.

The Rings of Power is really enjoyable to me. It's not everyone's cup of tea.

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

The Extended Editions are amazing and offer a lot more. My wife and I regularly rewatch it because the worldbuilding is intense. Fantastic film, and probably one of the best literary adaptations out there.

The Hobbit films are less so. I think the first one is amazing, but the story gets stretched out a bit too much for the story as short as the source material is. I cannot recommend the next two of the Hobbit films.

Not seen the animated films, and am not inclined to do so.

The Rings of Power is really enjoyable to me. It's not everyone's cup of tea.

The trilogy first Hobbit film, and Rings of Power get thumbs up. Skip the rest? Doesn't The Hobbit follow a trilogy structure same as TLOTR? Doesn't that mean the first film just ends abruptly with no ending?

 

[fireproof78]

The trilogy first Hobbit film, and Rings of Power get thumbs up. Skip the rest? Doesn't The Hobbit follow a trilogy structure same as TLOTR? Doesn't that mean the first film just ends abruptly with no ending?

I mean, you can watch all three. There's just one I rewatch and the other two I'm ok just skipping.

Yes, the Hobbit follows a trilogy, but the source material is thinner and they still try to stretch it out.

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

I mean, you can watch all three. There's just one I rewatch and the other two I'm ok just skipping.

Yes, the Hobbit follows a trilogy, but the source material is thinner and they still try to stretch it out.

I never read the books - just looking for fun fantasy films to watch. From that angle, stick to the two trilogies? Is anything else worth seeing as a non-fan casual viewer?

 

[fireproof78]

I never read the books - just looking for fun fantasy films to watch. From that angle, stick to the two trilogies? Is anything else worth seeing as a non-fan casual viewer?

Rings of Power is enjoyable fantasy series.

 

[Jedi Marso]

The bottom line is that if you like the source material, you should check out the other products and judge for yourself. One man's trash is another man's treasure, and so. That said, as a lifelong Tolkien nut, here's my 2 cents for what it's worth (about 2 cents).

1. Read the Hobbit, LOTR, and the Silmarillion. From there you can decide if you want to read any of the other stuff, although most of what comes later are attempts to expand on material mention in the publications above. The Hobbit is a different sort of read than the others- it's meant for kids, but it no less awesome for it.

2. LOTR Movies: The 4-hour extended versions are my preferred version. I love these movies, and the production values closely mirror Middle Earth as I imagined it reading the books as a kid and again multiple times as an adult. It is hard to overstate how much I love these movies, though never as much as the books themselves.

3. Hobbit movies: These, unfortunately, turned into a cash grab and introduced elements not even remotely seen in the book. Still, worth a watch, and even better, there are numerous fan edits out there that pare the material back down to what was in the original story, artfully cutting the extraneous stuff. Over use of CGI tends to bog this down.

5. Animated Hobbit (1970's Rankin and Bass version) and Ralph Bakshi's animated LOTR (circa 1978). Ambitious projects for their time, and beloved by those of us who grew up with them. Bakshi's version covers about half the LOTR trilogy, ending at Helm's Deep. He never made the other half, although there is a little-known animated version of The Return of the King that few know about and fewer have seen. Probably the best element from both of these was the musical score and songs from the animated version of the Hobbit. Bakshi's animation style involved rotoscoping, and some of the visual elements of his movie are both engaging and eerie to watch.

4. Rings of Power: Absolute trash. Don't go anywhere near it. Others will disagree, and that's fine. You can decide for yourself. However, I caution you against watching this before you read the Silmarillion, if Tolkien's creation interests you.

I have spoken.

 

[Admiral Jean-Luc Picard]

2. LOTR Movies: The 4-hour extended versions are my preferred version. I love these movies, and the production values closely mirror Middle Earth as I imagined it reading the books as a kid and again multiple times as an adult. It is hard to overstate how much I love these movies, though never as much as the books themselves.

I have the basic theatrical trilogy I bought on Blu-ray at Wal-Mart a while back, just the basic 3-disc set. All 3 movies are pretty good, eh?

3. Hobbit movies: These, unfortunately, turned into a cash grab and introduced elements not even remotely seen in the book. Still, worth a watch, and even better, there are numerous fan edits out there that pare the material back down to what was in the original story, artfully cutting the extraneous stuff. Over use of CGI tends to bog this down.

When judged on their own merits, do the 3 films hold up? I don't do fan-edits.

5. Animated Hobbit (1970's Rankin and Bass version) and Ralph Bakshi's animated LOTR (circa 1978). Ambitious projects for their time, and beloved by those of us who grew up with them. Bakshi's version covers about half the LOTR trilogy, ending at Helm's Deep. He never made the other half, although there is a little-known animated version of The Return of the King that few know about and fewer have seen. Probably the best element from both of these was the musical score and songs from the animated version of the Hobbit. Bakshi's animation style involved rotoscoping, and some of the visual elements of his movie are both engaging and eerie to watch.

From a casual viewer POV, worth seeing?

4. Rings of Power: Absolute trash. Don't go anywhere near it. Others will disagree, and that's fine. You can decide for yourself. However, I caution you against watching this before you read the Silmarillion, if Tolkien's creation interests you.

Why is it trash?

 

[Jedi Marso]

I have the basic theatrical trilogy I bought on Blu-ray at Wal-Mart a while back, just the basic 3-disc set. All 3 movies are pretty good, eh?

When judged on their own merits, do the 3 films hold up? I don't do fan-edits.

From a casual viewer POV, worth seeing?

Why is it trash?

All three are excellent, basically one long (12 hour) movie cut into parts.

The three Hobbit movies hold up better if you've not read the source material, but there are some downright silly elements there, they drag a bit, and compared to the LOTR movies they just aren't as good. Still definitely worth seeing, though.

The animated versions are definitely worth seeing, although be prepared for them to be a much different experience than the modern movies.

As for the last, I don't want to write a book here, and there are numerous threads on this show already. The biggest pain points for me were the way it took events that spanned thousands of years in the Silmarillion and tried to compress them into essentially one or two human lifetimes, totally distorting Tolkien's storytelling, again introducing elements that never existed, and characters as well. Plus, until I gave up on it, I just thought it was freakin' boring. Again, opinions vary greatly.

 

[Turtletrekker]

The thing you have to understand about Rings of Power is that Tolkien never really wrote about the second age. He essentially just wrote down a bunch of plot points that need to be covered, and any adaptation of that era is going to have to heavily extrapolate most of the story that they're going to tell, otherwise they would be telling a very, very short story.

That means the showrunners have to make... decisions. Some of them worked, and some of them didn't. The time compression involved was absolutely necessary, otherwise they would be cycling through their human characters every other episode.

The first season was almost entirely it's own thing, establishing the characters and situations while only establishing one of those canon plot points that I mentioned, but I really enjoyed the second season and finally began to recognize the story that was being told and where it was going to go.

Honestly, if you're unburdened by reading the books, you won't even tell the difference. I treat it as an extension of the movies rather than the written works anyway, and the movies themselves took some rather large liberties, so it works for me very well on that level.

 

[FredH]

The Hobbit trilogy isn’t as bad as people made it out to be, but it’s definitely padded —it absolutely stretches things out unnecessarily, and doesn’t approach the “I am watching something pretty great” level of the LOTR trilogy. The Rings of Power does — opinions appear to vary, but I absolutely love the series. I intend to see War of the Rohirrim. (And probably the Gollum movie, though I admit I see no point in making that one.)

 

[Turtletrekker]

From the very first time I ever read The Hobbit, I had wanted to experience all of the side adventures that Gandalf went on during that story, so I was very excited when they originally announced that the movie adaptation was going to be in two parts, because that would mean finally expanding upon this part of the story that was largely left to the imagination in the book. However, when they shifted gears and turned it into a trilogy, I knew the end result was going to be on the messy side. However, I still enjoy them, I just wish the story were a little tighter.

 

[Jedi Marso]

From the very first time I ever read The Hobbit, I had wanted to experience all of the side adventures that Gandalf went on during that story, so I was very excited when they originally announced that the movie adaptation was going to be in two parts, because that would mean finally expanding upon this part of the story that was largely left the imagination in the book. However, when they shifted gears and turned it into a trilogy, I knew the end result was going to be on the messy side. However, I still enjoy them, I just wish the story were a little tighter.

There is a fan edit called "The Battle of Dol Guldur" that takes just the Gandalf / Necromancer portions from the Hobbit and edits it into a very creditable 45 min 'short movie.' It's actually one of my favorite works of fan editing to date. Definitely worth checking out.

Also, you can then watch a condensed, fan-edited version of The Hobbit and not feel like you are 'missing out' on anything.

 

[Turtletrekker]

There is a fan edit called "The Battle of Dol Guldur" that takes just the Gandalf / Necromancer portions from the Hobbit and edits it into a very creditable 45 min 'short movie.' It's actually one of my favorite works of fan editing to date. Definitely worth checking out.

Also, you can then watch a condensed, fan-edited version of The Hobbit and not feel like you are 'missing out' on anything.

I've heard about the fan edit of the whole story, but not the one for the Battle of Dol Guldur. I will have to check that out.

ETA-- Well, that was much easier to find than I expected it to be.

ETA Again-- well, I only got halfway through that before reaching a limit on my "transfer quota", which required me to download an app, and I decided I had seen enough. My ideal fan-edit cut of the movie would be the barebones fan edit with this segment edited in, skipping the stuff with Legolas and Tauriel. That would literally be the version of the story that I have always wanted to see. I was impressed how they managed to tell the story without involving any sight, sound or mention of Bilbo and the dwarves and their quest, making this story here completely self-contained. I am very glad that this is a thing that exists.

 

[Set Harth]

It's important to note that the Hobbit movies are not a straight adaptation of the book, nor should they be; they are The Hobbit as seen through the lens of The Lord of the Rings. As has been said, the tale grew in the telling. Some of the elements extraneous to the book are informed by other sources such as the ROTK appendices while others were admittedly invented out of whole cloth by the filmmakers.

 

[fireproof78]

The Hobbit trilogy isn’t as bad as people made it out to be, but it’s definitely padded —it absolutely stretches things out unnecessarily, and doesn’t approach the “I am watching something pretty great” level of the LOTR trilogy. The Rings of Power does — opinions appear to vary, but I absolutely love the series. I intend to see War of the Rohirrim. (And probably the Gollum movie, though I admit I see no point in making that one.)

It's not bad; it's also not something I feel inclined to revisist. The design language is very much informed by Lord of the Rings, and it draws heavily on those films, plus adding more cultural language to the Dwarves, which I think the film is richer for that addition.

But, as you say, it's padded. It could have been a duology and still hit the major story points. But, like Rings of Power, as another @Turtletrekker notes, the Hobbit fills from a much smaller story, and there are additions to the story in the adaptation, just like Lord of the Rings did.

I think for fantasy fans they are very enjoyable as a film trilogy and overall series. I just couldn't recommend all of the Hobbit films because they are padded out. And I would say the same thing about Pirates of the Carribean as a series too.

 

[JD]

I've only read 2/3 of LOTR, and I absolutely love the movies, they do change quite a bit, but I thought they did a fantastic job of capturing the feel of the books.
As for The Hobbit, I l love the book and I really enjoy them almost as much as LOTR, but it's worth remembering that only abut 1/3 of the overall trilogy comes from the book. They took fairly simple 300ish page book, and added a ton of new side plots and characters that were either barely mentione in the books, or never happened at all. If you just want a fun fantasy trilogy you might enjoy them, but if it's very much Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit, even more that LOTR was his version of that story.
The animated versions are pretty good, the animation is not bad and The Hobbit movie does a better job of sticking to just what was in the book. Bakshi's LOTR is pretty good, but it's very condensed since they're adapting 1 1/2 books into one 2 hour movie. A lot of how you feel about the movie will also probably depend on how you feel about Ralph Bakshi's rather idiocyncratic style.
I never made it to the appendixes of Return of the King, so I can't judge how well follows them, but going in with just the basic knowledge from the body of the first two books and the movies, I've been really enjoying The Rings of Power.

 

[Smiley]

Watch Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy (either or both versions).
Read Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion.
Watch Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

Anything beyond that is gravy.

 

[Tomalak]

I agree that fan edits of The Hobbit are the way to go. I actually really enjoyed the first film, which captured the magic of both the LOTR films and the source material. Although there were some clunky bits.

The next two films fall apart under the weight of what is asked of them and don’t work very well, despite having some good moments. The realisation of Smaug is excellent.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for Jackson given the way the legal wrangling meant pre-production was a disaster and he was parachuted in at the eleventh hour, which badly impacted the second and especially third films. But there’s no denying it’s a mess.

It’s a shame the original Del Toro 2-film version didn’t get made.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Watch Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins."

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