Stupid Kate

Hello all and Merry Christmas eve x 364.  I hope everybody had a wonderful and book filled Christmas, I know I certainly did.  I got spoiled rotten with B&N and Amazon gift card, bookends, Ikea gift cards (for more book shelves to put my new books and bookends on), book ornaments, book related toys, and of course new books!  Needless to say my little bookworm heart is full to the brim.  To top off my literary holiday Hubbin took me to see the second installment of the Hobbit movie trilogy based on the book The Hobbit by my buddy J.R.R. Tolkien.  I had seen the first one last year and loved it, still wasn't sure why this little book needed to be made into three movies, but hey it is gorgeous and well done so no real complaints on the first movie.  I loved the lighter feel of The Hobbit compared to the pretty dark and sometimes
depressing (yet awesome and EPIC) Lord of the Rings series in both book and movie form.  The Hobbit sets up the potential world ending doom and gloom events of the LotR trilogy in a more, hmmm I'm not sure how to put it without taking something away...I guess the Hobbit is a bit more personal, we see the beginnings of whats to come, but for the most part the quest to recover the Dwarven treasure is more about individual beings and families then it is about saving the WHOLE WORLD.  This gives a bit more room for some hope and fun.  The casting for the first movie was fairly spot on and kept to the book as much as any epic movie can (that is not to say it remained purely faithful by any stretch, just that I could actually tell what book the movie was made from.). And can I just say the Misty Mountains song is sublime!  All of this to say I was very much looking forward to the second movie in the series, I was especially excited to see the dragon Smaug as I LOVED him in the book (what can I say I'm a sucker for dragons).  And then I watched it...As always spoilers ahead.

I am not going to rehash the whole plot of this movie here, I will save that for when I reread the book, I am mostly writing this to vent, so apologies for the scatter shot writing :-)  Part of the reason for no real synopses is that most of the movie was just a string of action, lots of running and fighting and fighting and running and then more running and then some more fighting.  They pretty much took a couple chapters from the book and filled out the rest of the movie with fighting and running.  This is not to say it was not very entertaining fighting and running, but I don't think it was worth 161 minutes.  They did keep in my friend Beorn the skin-changer who can take the form of a great bear which was pretty cool, and reminded me what a great world and history Mr. Tolkien had built.  The great spiders of Mirkwood were pretty cool and I am pretty sure gave my baby sis nightmares for weeks, and it was nice to see Bilbo use his new found courage/ring to step up his game. I loved the elfking (even if he was a bit snotty for the book version) he came across very etheral and superior just like he was supposed to.  Then came stupid Kate.  So a bit of background on to who this stupid Kate is.  For some inexplicable reason the movie writers decided to add a character that is nowhere in any of the books, much less the Hobbit.  The reasoning was essentially to add a female to a male dominated cast and of course provide stupid love stories 'cause apparently you can't make a movie without a stupid love story.  To make it worse they cast Evangeline Lilly  who while gorgeous makes my teeth hurt every time I see her on screen.  This stems back to her time playing Kate on Lost.  The character of Kate was a
reckless, whiny, drama queen who's every decision seemed wrong and dumb (obviously this is all personal feeling and opinion, feel free to disagree).  Now anytime we (Hubbin and I) see or read or hear a person make a decision based on stupidity we call it a stupid Kate (see Lori in The Walking Dead tv show for example).  Now I was trying very hard to be open minded, they have strayed from the books before and it has been ok, so maybe this character would add some depth.  Nope, this character was stupid Kate all the way through.  And to make it worse they set her up to be part of a dwarf/stupid Kate/Legolas love triangle that was so unnecessary and distracting.  It also turned our beloved cool, calm, otherworldly (as written by Tolkein) Legolas into a mean, temperamental teenager.  I can see why they wanted to bring back Galadriel and Legolas, even if they were not technically in the Hobbit, they were at least around and could possibly be used in a way that served the story, but this stupid new character just did not fit in in any way and actually demeaned the story (in my most humble opinion). I don't know if this would have been any better if they had gotten a different actress, but I doubt it as her whole storyline seemed forced.  I enjoyed it much more when we were in the Lonely Mountain and hanging out with Smaug, who was the COOLEST THING EVER.  Seriously the CGI team should get major awards, the dragon was everything I wanted it to be, massive, sleek, red, fiery, toothy, gleaming, sarcastic, old, gold obsessed, just wonderful.  I was both terrified and entranced by him all at the same time.  Lake-town was fairly well done and the surprise addition of Stephen Fry as the Master of Lake-town made me squeal with delight. I know I am in the minority in not being overly thrilled with 2/3 of this movie, but it really felt like filler to me.  I felt like I did with several other movies and books that this does not need to be three movies long.  You could easily have cut out about 60+ minutes of the running and fighting and still have kept all the story and all of the dragon (man I love that dragon).  If you cut out the insipid love triangle you could probably give yourselves another 45+ minutes.  I guess my feelings are not as positive about this movie as compared to the first one and I bet these could have been really great if they had stuck to two movies instead of three.  I guess I will have to watch the third one next year and come back and report on the trilogy as a whole.

What did you think of the first and second movie?  Do I have unrealistic expectations of book to movie adaptions?  Am I being to hard on Kate?