Michael Limoncelli
Professor Simon
ENGL 217
10/20/14
The
Hobbit: Movie & Book Changes
In class there were multiple questions brought up when
discussing our novels, specifically The
Hobbit and the changes between the movie and book. As someone who has read
the book, and seen both currently released movies, there are some extremely
significant changes from the book that severely alter the characters and
actions of the movie. While I’m not saying these changes are bad, because they
do add more action among other things to the movie, they simply make you
question why? Why were these changes made or what caused the filmmakers think
such a change was necessary?
Firstly, there are two major changes that stick out to me
very much and their names are Legolas and Tauriel. In the book there is
literally no character called Tauriel and similarly Legolas is not a character
from The Hobbit either, only The Lord of the Rings. The question as
to why these characters were created and used in this movie instead of
Tolkien’s original cast can be seen in a few ways. There’s the generic answer
that the writers thought it would be cool to include a fan favorite character
like Legolas in another movie, or the more factual answer of Peter Jackson
stating “He’s [elven king] Thranduil’s
son, and Thranduil is one of the characters in ‘The Hobbit,’ and because elves
are immortal, it makes sense Legolas would be part of the sequence in the
Woodland Realm” (Moore) and from a logical standpoint that makes absolute
sense.
While Peter Jackson stated his
reasoning, I still have my opinion that since there is a major lack of
empowered female characters in Tolkien’s writings, let alone The Hobbit,
they felt the need to add a strong female character into the mix. Just like
most Hollywood movies though, if there’s a female character, there must be a
love interest or conflict somewhere in the story. This can be seen with the
character Kili who’s the love interest of Tauriel as she hunts him down to save
and or see him again in the movie, which turns out saved Kili’s life from his
injury; Kili’s injury was also not in the book. Now with Legolas being a fan
favorite and the inclusion of Tauriel, there of course has to be a love
triangle created to add some mild drama and incite motivation for Legolas to go
out on an Orc killing rampage while he tracks or assists Tauriel, which is an
obvious fan service part of the movie.
Now there was the statement that
changing Tolkien’s story is a disservice to him and was a ploy to make it more
action based and increase movie revenue. This is not wrong, the book itself, in
my opinion, seemed fairly slow paced and lacked major action sequences and if
converted entirely to the big screen as is, it would be lacking in the desired
content expected by fans. Hollywood is known for changing movie adaptions to a
point that it’s unrecognizable, movies such as Ender’s Game can be an
example of this. Given that these changes only amplified the intensity and
awesomeness of the entire adventure it can only be seen as an improvement
instead of disservice to Tolkien’s works. These changes made the story more
epic and modern in a sense. I say modern in the terms of what viewers, readers
and fans in general expect from either a movie or book in our contemporary
world. This can be seen with Michael Bay movies where things just explode and
there’s violence everywhere, viewers love it. Adding a relevant version of that
into The Hobbit to draw in more audiences and make it more exciting to
watch can only be seen as a positive. The only people that would have an issue
with these changes, since they mostly improved the story, are the purist fans
that will call it a bastardized version and want nothing but the original
content.
While there were many significant
changes to the novel and some minor ones that floated by, they were fairly
necessary and improved the overall story of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The
characters of Tauriel and Legolas being added in were a necessary plot device
to bring more action into the movie, which in my opinion, was done smoothly and
flowed nicely into the rest of the story. Overall the changes that the movie
made were positive and did not drag the movie down in any sense other than
being an unexpected surprise. Peter Jackson did a wonderful job adding some of
his own vision into the movie adaption and I couldn’t see it being any other
way now.
Works Cited
Moore, Ben. "First Look at
Legolas in ‘The Hobbit: There and Back Again’." Screen Rant. N.p.,
n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.
.
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Print.
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