Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-25987328-20160413230109/@comment-26322120-20160422234618

Calanon Evergreen wrote: Catfishperson wrote: Oh yeah, and I assume your rant about fight scenes excluded "The Battle of Five armies." ...your point being?

The book has the Battle of Five Armies in The Clouds Burst, but ironically, has much less content and depth, since Bilbo was "knocked unconscious" half way into it. Try pulling that kind of vagueness in a film: you're not only going to get an inconsitent movie, but an overall unfulfilling ending with little closure, to one of the most defining moments in the history of Northern Middle-earth.

“In a film, you can’t quite get away with some of the simplicity that you can in a book, especially a book written for young people…” -Peter Jackson

If you expect to show battles without fight scenes (especially the Battle of Five Armies), you have highly unrealistic expectations of how to convey that to a visual audience. The fact of the matter is, even with all the adventure and dialogue, you just can't have Middle-earth films without battles. War is a known occurence in lore, and at some point, good and evil clash. It's just the way it works.

The films are nowhere near mindless action films (as they are mostly adventure and dialogue), but yes, there are fight scenes to visually show the battles, as well as smaller skirmishes. This is by no means a bad thing; why you seem to think so is also beyond me, seeing that not only is the "action" overshadowed by adventure and dialogue, but also, war is a known occurence in lore, and there is no other way to portray that on-screen without fight scenes.

And that's the issue here, for book extremeists, and even Christopher Tolkien, it would seem. Because the only things this crowd seems to see in the films are the "action scenes", and not the actual depth of the adventure being portrayed on-screen. And again, that's not that far off from a movie casual.

 Elvenking of the Woodland Realm 

My point being that TBOFA is undeniably a massive fight scene. Yes that battle was important, yes some fight scenes are necessary, but the whole 2 and 3/4 hour movie was just a fight scene, a terrible romance, and a very weak plot riddled with holes. Better to make \ battle the finale of the previous movie then its own. The movie already had very little closure. It's true there are some things that can be done easier in a book then a movie, but that dosen't make the movie any better.