(…) Who I thought was noting something about a detail in The Hobbit, I can't recall what. So take up this subject with 2ndBreffest, who, at least to me, appeared to be the living incarnation of that "imagined" purist.

(…) since such people do, indeed, exist, and if you don't believe me, ask my father, who will rant at you for forty minutes about Kili's hair color.

It's supposed to be a story about Bilbo and his experience of going on an adventure,.

Tauriel and Legolas had way too much screen time for characters that really didn't need to be in the story, and one that doesn't even exist at all, except in Peter-earth. Practically every scene Legolas is in is pure cringe and the love triangle is so ridiculous and unconvincing it's hard to believe this was written by award winning screenwriters.

the LotR was shot on film, this was shot digital and it shows, and its not great.

Digital is great. Skyfall was shot on digital, Apocalypto was shot on digital - both those films look friggin' amazing. So too does An Unexpected Journey: its crisp and sharp and vibrant.

In Reply To

Who told you that nonsense?

That's certainly not the impression I got from watching the film. First few minutes of watching An Unexpected Journey for the first time, and I immediately understood that it was Thorin's story I was watching, not Bilbo's, and I was with it.

that specific "problem" applies to both ways actually.Many endeavour to interpret the movie from the perspective of the book which is utterly wrong imo.Although one can argue if all the themes of the book are adequately adapted into the three films,my experience is that all layers are greatly translated with many thematic additions that enhance and not detract from the core story imo.

Like Thompson, both Verlyn Flieger and John D. Rateliff give some consideration to Tom Bombadil's absence from the movie (a point also mentioned by Paul Anthony Powell), noting that Peter Jackson said the character wasn't relevant to the story of destroying the Ring—but for that matter, neither is the entire Rohan-Saruman plot; Rateliff in fact notes that The Lord of the Rings stage musical combines Rohan and Gondor. Flieger's astute "Sometimes One Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures" (Bogstad and Kaveny 46–53) remembers that "advancing our story," which is how Jackson argued for his structure, was exactly what Tolkien said the Beowulf-poet was not doing, and that Tolkien himself may not have wished to do, since Tom was retained for thematic rather than narrative purposes, but she feels that Bombadil's omission is due to the very nature of movies, or at least of these movies (Rateliff says, "there are things prose does better than film" [66]). She also finds that Hobbiton on screen resembles "the set for Teletubbies" (47). Rateliff divides scenes from the book missing from the movies into "Two Kinds of Absence: Elision & Exclusion in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings" (Bogstad and Kaveny 54–69), focusing specifically on Crickhollow, the Barrow-downs, the Old Forest, and Tom Bombadil, and finds only the latter two can be thought of as occurring off screen, despite the claims of Jackson and his collaborators that this applies to many book elements they chose not to film. Tolkien's plot is too complex for scenes to be manipulated without repercussions that echo through the rest of the story. Regarding Bombadil specifically, Rateliff also checks against other adaptations: three for radio, four screenplays (one produced, three not), and one stage musical, and finds that Bombadil was more likely to appear in earlier adaptations, and on radio rather than onscreen. Arguing for Bombadil's importance on the grounds that Tolkien thought of the Ring-quest as part of a larger story, Rateliff doesn't consider that even highly-acclaimed movies often seriously abridge their source material: William Wyler's Wuthering Heights, for instance, adapted from only the first half of Emily Brontë's book, received critical praise on the scale of Jackson's The Return of the King. Rateliff suggests that in as much as Tolkien meant Bombadil to represent the natural world, Jackson compensated with many landscape images. In light of responses to the excision of Bombadil, a comment by Helen Conrad-O’Briain in Epics for Students is worth considering: "It is characteristic of Tolkien to place so much weight on a minor character" (336).