Chen G.
Mithlond
Apr 24 2019, 9:57pm
Views: 19019
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The characters are far from immoral. Bard has morals. The Dwarves have moral, especialy Balin who functions as the moral center of the company. Thorin initially has morals (I like that its clear he doesn't approve of the White Gems being denied of Thranduil in the beginning) and even The Master isn't out to kill Bard outright.
As for the book, where Bard is the agressor in the negotiations, well that's because Tolkien changed the way he was writing the Elvenking half-way through The Hobbit. When he captures Thorin and the Dwarves, he's really not too far off from the movie version. He jails them for a throaway reason, really.
But it seems that as Tolkien came to write the episodes in which he reappears, he had second thoughts about presenting an Elf - a member of the race Tolkien initially wrote his entire legendarium around - in such an unflattering light, so he made him much more pacifistic. The movies simply kept the original (and more complex) iteration of Thranduil. They also kept him more closely in touch with the plot (in the book there's a sentence about him hearing of the Dwarves arriving in Laketown) by having his son Legolas actually go after the company.
Also, because we need to understand how low Thorin has fallen, his opposition needs to be made sympathetic, and so Bard's part got enlarged. If we didn't empathize with Bard, we wouldn't put as much weight on Thorin denying him during their negotiations. It wouldn't have worked as well to do so with Thranduil, because his marching on the mountain isn't driven by a genuine plight, as Bard's is.
(This post was edited by Chen G. on Apr 24 2019, 10:02pm)
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