I read all the books and saw the Peter Jackson trilogy in theaters. This adaptation leaves a dull impression.
Look at "The Boys" with regards to 'closed captions' (hint 30+). It's good they translated the TV shows, and drawing conclusions about its target audience out of that is dumb.
Some of them do well others don't but they are certainly there.
Is there a similar set of movies in the US (aimed at the national/state level market) or is all the money sucked up by productions for the international market.
Maybe I'm being a bit naive, but intuitively I would think that most writers do not write a book with the explicit intention of the book being translated. The first intended audience is typically readers in the original language.
This is opposed by producing a series for Amazon, where it is mostly clear that the intended audience is world wide, talking many languages (in particular if it is about such a famous topic). And I wouldn't be surprised if this fact does impact the production of a work.
I don’t think so. I think most writers are only fluent in a very small number of languages and they choose one of those languages to write in.
Tolkien was so into languages he edited the Oxford dictionary.
And besides, this feels like English chauvinism.
If you use that more recent work as the baseline, then I can see how the episodes released so far place the series fairly in the "watchable, but forgettable" category.
I do hope Amazon releases some UHD stills of the cities though. The team who handled those did an exceptional job.
True. That could have been a 2 hour movie or at most two episodes. However, one difference is that the characters there do not seem that much at odds with the book or the first three movies. Galadriel in the Amazon show, on the other hand, just doesn't feel like the book or the movie Galadriel so it's a bit jarring. For their large budget, the dialog and characters should have been done a bit better I thought.
https://hobbitfanedits.fandom.com/wiki/Hobbit_Fanedits_Wiki :)
well, The Hobbit itself as a book is at odds with LoTR, being a children fairy tale rather than an epic.
Just compare the scene where they get away from trolls in The Hobbit with the the trolls attacking Gondor in the movie. The change of tone is insane.
OTOH, it's pretty silly to be angry about it :)
It was: check out the fan edits. So far, my favorite is the Maple Films Edit. It's about 4 hours long and it's pretty great. It cuts most of the crap and leaves all the good stuff in.
>Galadriel in the Amazon show, on the other hand, just doesn't feel like the book or the movie Galadriel so it's a bit jarring.
Galadriel here is thousands of years younger than the version you saw in Jackson's movies or the LotR books. Presumably she's matured.
I consider myself a good Tolkien fan, and I really liked the Hobbit trilogy. There is no consensus on how it was universally accepted.
As to the Rings of Power, it tooks 90 years for the elves to forge their rings. Let's see how they're going to translate that in their story.
The Hobbit is a single book that is shorter than any of the three LoTR books. There was no reason to make three movies out of it other than greed.
10 subtitles Netflix: Little Woman - https://prnt.sc/6cmW9S-As8tF
5 subtitles Disney: Going to you at the speed of 493km - https://prnt.sc/bmz2a6tFtIsb
1 subtitle Amazon Prime: Meet the malhotras - https://prnt.sc/YnQjP7zHfwdY
What Amazon is doing here is just another example of big tech censorship, and yet there are still people here who would argue that Twitter, Meta, Google and Amazon aren't censoring people, altough in Amazon's defense it's just for profits instead of politically motivated so it's at least understandable.
I got the same impression as far as the story and dialog goes (-"You have not seen what I have seen.", -"Yes, I have!", - "No, you haven't!"). I am trying to like Galadriel but she's just too different than the movie or the book version, so it's a struggle for me.
However, I do like special effects and the costumes. I like how they did the ship sailing to Valinor. It's not how I imagined it when reading, but it's still interesting.
Khazad-dûm in the second episode looked pretty epic, I thought. The wife could have used a beard :-) but, oh well, not not a big deal.
The trolls body movements in Ep1 took me out of the show, the CGI looked worse than most games. But agreed otherwise they did a good job production-wise. It didn't lean too heavily into the New Zealand Peter Jackson style while still keeping it on point.
It is important to remember that Tolkien was like a British gentleman: well-mannered with a sharp wit. All of his characters have that same coloring to them.
These lines are actually referencing things in the history of that universe, they aren't empty.
Yes -- instead of you they're focusing strictly on Earthlings.
Unfortunately, this seems to be a common issue with our current, cookie-cutter style of storytelling. I think the root cause is the rate at which streaming services are trying to produce content. I know my work suffers when I take on too much. I assume the same is true for Netflix, Apple, Amazon, etc.
These things work in cycles. New hit series breaks through, say “GoT” which is different enough, and everyone thinks they need make series X, but in the style of “GoT”, until everyone does it and it gets meh.
Or like every series doing a life flashback to build story. (I think Lost started that)
I'd read the Hobbit and found the Hobbit Trilogy to be kind of ... wack.
It's kind of enjoyable if you don't think about the book too much though.
There are larger bodies of work (The Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, etc.) which go into great detail about this era and the conflict which involved, incidentally, the crafting of the rings of power. But Amazon doesn't have the rights to those books. So they're creating a storyline out of what little scraps were provided in the appendices of Return of the King, while reusing some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings which would have been around back then--Elrond, Galadriel, etc.
And I agree. Forget about the books and watch it as high fantasy on TV, and you'll be enjoyed. It is well made, and so far is following a couple of interesting plot lines.
Because you have nothing in common with folks that aren't fluent in English? Even when they live in the same city and neighborhood as you? I really don't understand this. Lots of folks have common interests even though not all of them are fluent in English. Subtitles are so widespread and entertainment so international that even streaming sites tend to have decent subtitles. I truly don't understand how this says anything about the content of the show.
What an utterly weird concept.
Marvel movies are translated into 12-15 languages, like almost all blockbusters.
It seems global audience is not thrilled with Amazon inserting US identity politics into the movie though, which I think was quite predictable from the begging. I don't know what were they thinking or what audience they were targeting with this.