No arguments here... the movie didn't end, it just stopped... I've never seen such blatant cliffhanger sequel teasing since "Sir... Finishing This Fight." way back in Halo 2.

Yeah it was good fun, but PJ's fanfic writing really got to me near the end. I even had a certain fondness for the zany antics of Smaug chasing the Dwarves around through Erebor, but every goddam time it cut back to Tauriel and Whatsisname who took an arrow to the knee mid-fight, I groaned and rolled my eyes, struggling to hold back the overwhelming urge to shout "NOBODY CAAAAARES!!! GET BACK TO THE FUCKING DRAGONN!!!!"

Since Smaug is such a key point here, he'll likely either die in the first act of the next film then be... idk, resurrected by the Necromancer or some shit, because Zombie Dragon, why not. Or he'll fuck off for ages, THEN get killed by Bard. Because if they were gonna Kill Smaug early on, they'd do it here, right?

well they been good at staying on track, IE padding it but follow it the same plot. so now i see the next movie going: 1st 2nd act is killing smaug/gandalf gettign rescued. 3rd act epic battle with the orcs

I'll be happy if they take that route, but I'm honestly sort of pessimistic since I have a sinking feeling they're gonna kill off Radagast in the whole "rescuing Gandalf" arc, just so Gandalf can get his Staff. (Gandalf's staff in the hobbit movies isn't the one he has in Fellowship. Radagast's is. They're near exactly alike.)

that's exactly what they're going to do. they kinda telegraph that in this movie. im ok with that

Yeah. Still, I guess I just like Radagast too much =/ maybe it's my inner Doctor Who fan. But I'm just rambling now, pay me no mind. Very nice comic btw.

a john hurt character being killed off? But of course!

.... That's not John Hurt. Radagast the Brown is played by Sylvester McCoy.

ah, my mistake.

No harm done. But ironically both of them have played the same role before (The title character "The Doctor" in Doctor Who. McCoy played him in the late 70's to early 80's, and Hurt guest starred as him in the show's 50th anniversary episode "The day of the Doctor" this November).

I'm a bit of a whovian, so I know. ^v^

Radagast is around in Fellowship (book, not movie) but he then disappears after that.

seen the movie on monday at the Movies, was ok but i didnt like how they made Smaug, he looks linke a dragon, between the dragon in dragon heart and like the dragons in reign of fire
that was the thing i didint like in the movie

oh and the legolas thing, he is not in the novel

i know, i read the book

THe Hobbit is a trilogy, right?
That's the problem with movies like this... The one in the middle rarely has a proper beginning or a proper ending :T

Cause most people must not have realized that when taking a book that would only make a 2.5 hour movie at the most and stretching it to about 8-9 hours worth of trilogy you gotta add some padding.

Not sure who thought they'd have killed the dragon off and SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER in the last 30 minutes since not even the old animated version was that rushed and abrupt for that sequence.

Yea, I sort of felt like that when the movie ended too. Thing is, I get that the Hobbit is so long a story to bring to film that it's more a question of where to make the breaks in the films.

on the contrary, the Hobbit is rather short. but was expanded to be a trilogy, why?= mo money

Meh, not like they ever got mine.

Short indeed. The Hobbit is a 300 page book, whereas each of the Lord of the Rings books was 400 pages. So somehow 300 pages can be made into 3 films, when the last trilogy was over 1600...

I was EXCATLY like this after watching the first one which was NOT announced that it was to be freaking continued. I mean the animated one was like 65 minutes or something, how do you screw up something like that!

Umm...we new it was going to be a trilogy months before the first one was released...

i knew about the 3 parts since the beginning, (which BTW is was supposed to be a 2 parter but got extended cause mo money) i did not however, expect the dead smaug to be moved to the 3rd film. so they had to make a filler climax to this and the audience was unsatisfied.

I really liked the movie but then I guess ive always been a fan girl. The ending didnt come so much as a shock to me because I knew it was going to be the biggest cliff hanger they could pull out for the next movie.

Exactly~ :D

This kinda stuff makes me really glad I didn't read the book but have a brother who did and could tell me what happened and what didn't, so I can enjoy the movie even knowing most of it's nonsense.

It is such a relief to know that I'm not the only person who had this exact reaction to seeing that film...>.>

There were a lot of beautiful and/or entertaining scenes in this film, but as a whole, it left a bad taste in my mouth. The molten gold scene was the clincher for me, and left one of my friends laughing hysterically, and me sitting with my mouth hanging open, thinking incredulously "What the FUCK did they think that was going to accomplish?"

Maybe it's just me, but it feels like Jackson's gotten a bit sloppy since the success of LotR...>.>

jackson should have had made a movie to the Silmarillion, that would have been a better trioigy

The thing that irritated me the most is that in the book, Frodo is invisible during his interactions with Smaug. This is because he tricks the dragon through cunning, flattery, and subterfuge, and because he'd be eaten in like two seconds if he were visible because he's just a fucking hobbit.

Making him visible makes that entire sequence make no sense. Also surfing on rivers of gold lolwut.

And they turned Beorn into a werewolf.

Yeah, the surfing of the gold...myself and my friends had a laugh at that. The heat transfer from that ride should have left Thorin one crispy dwarf at the end. Even forgiving the issue of iron floating on molten gold. Yikes. I'm willing to suspend my disbelief for a fantasy movie, but some of the stuff (golden shower on a red dragon) was just too ridiculous to let go.

Hehehe, I like your take on Smaug.

Seriously I dont see why they did not keep the confrontation to the one in the book, I mean it was very well written, and they did a good job of it in the R&B version from '79. But like you said, they wanted to force a big confrontation on the audience and I guess that was the only thing they could hope for. I guess the statue thing MIGHT have worked if the gold hardened up solid immediately and locked Smaug into place but other then that it was a silly way for them to try and kill him. If the goal was not to kill, but to simply drive him off while they went looking for the Arken stone to use it to gain support of the other dwarven kingdoms, then it did kind of work, at the expense of lake town.

Either way, I'm still curious about the 3rd movie, and to be honest, amused by everyone's reaction to the end of this one.

In the mean time, I think you could use one of these.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8cTdFqwdwc

Me and a bunch of my friends went to the midnight release. Near the end, when it was gettin all epic and shit the screen goes dark and I say out loud TO BE CONTINUED, not knowing that it was a trilogy (I thought there would only be two ;n;) and then the credits start rolling. Someone off to the left of us and someone behind us both said FUCK and I'm like GODAMMIT WHY and my friend stood up, holding his head in both hands and yelled out loud I'M SO FUCKING PISSED

lol thats something similar to what i heard at my theater. right before it ended, one of my friends was saying to me "are they going to kill him in the next 5 minutes or is the movie actually 3 hours" and right as she said that the movie ended. XD man, the face she made.

LOL I can quite imagine! All of my friends were like DAMMIT FUCK YOU SAL for saying TO BE CONTINUED just before the credits rolled like it was my fault like I accidentally ended the movie xD

I too saw this and was disappointed, but to be fair even with the greediness of making it 3 movies instead of one, and all the lame padding, it is INFINITELY better then the movie that shall not be named. (The last airbender.)

Also another thing, WHY MUST EVERY MOVIE BE IN 3D?!?! I am sure every now and then it's a neat feature, but it seems like they think making it 3D will boost sells when all it does is make the movie look worse and 90% of the time the 3D is poorly done.

lol Airbender.

saw it in 3D and i actually like it. it was subtle but worked. now a better question is 48FPS which i haven't try cause..meh

I expected the smaug buisness to finish in number 2 but i didn't hate the ending, i liked it. *shrug*

okay, that was hilarious xD

I could have done without the love triangle nonsense.

gotta give the fangirls some material for their fanfiction XD

I liked it, that was the ending I kinda expected so I wasn't upset with it XD

The thing I couldn't get over was the obviously low CGI quality over the course of the movie. Not sure what happened there.

yeah my friends noticed that too. thing is Weta usually cuts it close with their production. the cut for the premiere of this film in Newzeland had some more unpolished effects. i know its weird seeing as how they have a year to work on a film and the effects are still not finish but it just happend's

Well, on a project this big I can see it as being "only a year." Oh well.

... are you kidding? This is the trillogy formula. Just like Spiderman.

First movie - Gauge fan interest.
Second movie - cliff hanger ending
Third movie - shit all over everyone. You've already got all their money.

it be accurate IF on Spiderman 2 the movie ends when Dr octopus kidnapss mary jane

Why why WHY did they add in a forced love storyline with Fili(or is it Kili I can never tell) and the elf chick? it just...it served no purpose. I could or probably of forgiven the dwarves pointless game of cat and mouse with Smaug if I didn't have to sit through a 20 minute love fanfic earlier. It just...added absolutely nothing but time to a movie. It was a 2 1/2 hour movie that had maybe 90 minutes of actual story advancement.

they have to sell those hobbit pillows somehow XD

http://www.deviantart.com/art/The-H.....sign-359602690

The lack of a Bombor pillow both relieves and saddens me...

no fatttys rule in action

Thats funny because my experience was the opposite to your situation. Everyone clapped in approval of this cliffhanger than the last. Even my sister and I were amazed by how well it ended for the 2 parter! Don't get why people complained with books being made into movies. Nothing can be shown well unless it is long and divided up so it can tell a more immersive story.

the hobbit is the only book i say that can be told in a single 3 hour movie with no issues . the original idea was to make 2 but they opted to make a trilogy to make some bigger bucks. these movies have been padded for that purpose. biggest complain is the padding, which has a varying degree of success. and too me it adds very little

The number 3 must be a illuminati thing. Not enough evidence to be 100% sure. But yeah, it can be get very varied on the concept of how much detail must be implemented in any novel turned film franchise.

Jackson wanted to make the book into one movie; however the studio that funded him gave him $5 billion for a trilogy, marketing, travel, etc. The catch is that he would have to make that money back or the studio would go bankrupt. Honestly how many of us would pass on that kind of offer? Include some of your own fan-fiction in a beloved franchise and get paid enough money to actually re-create Smaug's lair with jewels and all. All in all, I think it turned out the best it could have in all honesty. Tolkien was one mind and he wrote the books; though these films are worked on by hundreds of people, things are going to change due to the divergent nature of human thinking. People want to instill a small mark of their own legacy on their work, and this is one reason why films with a high budget will almost always be significantly different from the book.

All of my friends agree that the Smaug was very well done, from the demonstration of scale to the hoard of treasure. The voice acting was very good as well. But the idea of combatting a fiery colossal red dragon by melting a golden statue of a dwarf at it? Everyone I saw the movie with was shaking their heads.

This is just one example of ridiculousness, though...what made me jaw-drop was the fight in Laketown. It's the middle of the night, orcs have invaded and are terrorizing townsfolk, fighting with dwarves and elves, swords clashing on swords, lots of yelling and grunting...and where are the guards? Weren't the dwarves concerned about the security in getting in to Laketown? Where are the concerned neighbors? NOT ONCE did anyone wake up and look out the window to see what was going on or raise an alarm. And then Legolas chases after the big bad orc boss across the bridge on a white horse. Prior to that, he had been on foot the entire time.

This was literally the reaction we had at that moment:
Myself (turning to friend): "Where were the guards?"
Friend: "Where did he get the horse?!?"

I admit there was a lot of "anime" action to the effects but its kind of needed as to break away from the the books. Tolkein was a older guy when he wrote it and it was knda written with a older guys perception.

Dwarves visit hobbit have a party
hobbit and dwaves visit elves have a party
dwarves visit gobblins less of a party so they leave
Time to have a party with bear guy....
....to hold us over till we party at lake town.

Lots of rest stops...