[movies] a visualization I'd like to see

[cellio]

We went to see the second Hobbit movie today. Now we already knew, of course, from (a) the fact that it's a trilogy and (b) seeing the first movie, that there was going to be a lot of extra stuff. Even so, I found myself wondering if as much as a quarter of this movie was in the book, or if my memory is faulty.

A visualization I would really like to see (and see updated when the third movie comes out): a "timeline" showing elapsed film time (not plot time), with a set of (discontinuous) lines or bars representing segments that are in the book. I want to know not just how much of the movie is in the book but where and for how long those stretches run. So, for example, the first bar wouldn't start until about 25 minutes into the first movie (as I recall), because all that preamble stuff was new.

Can we get the XKCD guy to do this? This seems like it would be right up his alley.

I'm not picking on the movies (well, maybe a little, but I'll still see the third one so it can't be that bad). I'm just curious, but not nearly enough of a fan to do the data-collection myself.

(I am assuming that the movies are a superset of the book, meaning there's nothing in the book but not in the movies. Is that assumption correct?)

Comments

[dr4b]

I actually went and reread the book before seeing this movie (since last year I was just kinda like "huh... I don't remember THAT" but wasn't sure). This year I spent half the movie like "WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN". The entire dwarf-fighting-Smaug thing at the end is totally not there, Smaug basically talks to Bilbo a little and says "Hobbit, you bore me, I'm going to go eat some ponies and terrorize Laketown, see you later" and flies off. Tauriel clearly is not there, and Legolas is never mentioned by name either of course. The barrel scene is VERY different, there is no fighting on the river, the dwarves just float to a town and are let out of the barrels eventually.

And one change I really got angry about was when they meet Beorn -- in the book, Gandalf has them show up spaced out every 5 minutes as he tells the story of how they killed the orc king. Which makes you think about how the dwarves showed up every 5-10 minutes at Bilbo's door at the beginning of the entire story, and you wonder whether this is something Gandalf always does, but here yet again it was just like "HEY THERE'S THIS BEAR GUY".

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

The first movie was an adaptation, maybe, but the second was downright fanfic. I say that as someone who loves, reads, and writes fanfic.

I liked Tauriel -- there obviously had to be unnamed-in-the-book elf warriors, so why not have one be female -- but yeah, the second movie was very, very far from the book.

[cellio]

Fanfic. That's the perfect description. And, to be clear, I don't have a problem with fanfic and I did enjoy the movie for what it was (which isn't high art or anything, but was a fine way to spend a few hours). I just wasn't expecting fanfic, so it threw me.

Female elf warriors are fine. The love-interest angle was definitely new, though. :-)

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

(I am assuming that the movies are a superset of the book, meaning there's nothing in the book but not in the movies. Is that assumption correct?)

Alas, deeply incorrect. I wish I had time to make a list for you along with the timeline chart you most sensibly want.

[cellio]

Ah. Ok, then he'll need two sets of bars/lines on that chart. (Overlaying page numbers and time codes on the same axis works fine.)

[hlinspjalda.livejournal.com]

This is the least canonical of all Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies to date. As a deep-geek fan and a literary purist, I'm outraged by the liberties taken with the text. As a lover of adventure movies, there were some parts of this one I deigned to love despite their extracanonical status. *laugh*