The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Note: All but this note and the next paragraph contain spoilers, so if you haven’t read the book and want to find out what happens in the movie yourself or if you’re a Tolkien purist and don’t want to hear how Peter Jackson massacred J.R.R. Tolkien’s masterpiece, don’t read anything except the next paragraph.

To get it out of the way, I’m first going to say that I really liked this movie and the trilogy as a whole. Not as much as The Lord of the Rings, but I would voluntarily rewatch any and all of the three Hobbit movies. It is worth noting that I've read both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (as well as The Silmarillion, The Children of Húrin, and Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham, which has nothing to do with Middle Earth, but was surprisingly entertaining).

Because it’s all in the book, I didn't have initially have the complaints that people had about the ending of the movie lacking any sort of closure. Then I thought about it and while the ending still isn't my biggest problem, it is true that only two characters have the movie definitively state where they go after the battle. Thranduil and the elves presumably go back to Mirkwood and Gandalf does whatever Gandalf does, but that still leaves the treasure that Bilbo and the dwarves spent two movies trying to get, not to mention the dwarves and the entire remaining population of Laketown. It’s only known that Bilbo goes home to the Shire and Legolas goes to find Aragorn. And Legolas isn't actually in (the book) The Hobbit, though he could technically have been hanging around when the dwarves came to visit his father in Mirkwood.

Unlike, say, Tauriel, who is mentioned exactly zero times in all of Tolkien’s work, maybe because her character was made up? Regrettably, because without her, The Hobbit really doesn't have any major female characters*, I didn't end up liking her role in the plot. At first, I was willing to look past the elf-dwarf romance. And then Ravenhill happened. Kili was doing fine until Tauriel arrives and starts yelling around for him, at which point they both run around yelling for each other until Bolg shows up and kills Kili. Kili and Fili do both die in the book, but they’re protecting Thorin, not running around to find the elf they’re inexplicably in love with. So when all was said and done, I would have preferred less (read: no) time spent on the elf-dwarf romance, which might have allowed a more developed ending and maybe some actual lines for the dwarves. It would have been an improvement over Tauriel’s “Why does it hurt so much?” Sorry Legolas, guess she never loved you after all.

*Galadriel makes an appearance and the women of Laketown have a scene where they prepare to join the men in a last stand. This is pretty consistent with what would be expected in Middle Earth – the (human) men go and fight while the women stay back, dwarf women are never seen, and it’s technically not specified whether Thranduil’s elf army is completely male.

My main problem with the third movie is the same as it was for the first two. One word, Peter Jackson: gravity. Maybe the mountain goats the dwarves ride to Ravenhill can spring up near vertical faces, and maybe the giant bat can carry a fully grown elf (though I refuse to believe the bat was steered by a knife plunged into its brain), but that scene with Legolas leaping up a crumbling bridge? No. Just, no. And really, there can be epic fights without the participants falling twenty feet every thirty seconds.

Ignoring the lack of an ending, unrealistic romances, and the apparent disregard to physics, the conflict between the elves, men, and dwarves was done well, and overall I liked the forty-five minute long battle scene. Like I said at the beginning, I’d watch the movies again, and enjoy them.

Meet the Penguins

So when I said I’d introduce the penguins “very soon,” I really meant “more than a month later.” I blame my permanent writer’s block.

I’m not sure exactly how the idea for the penguins was born, but I know I saw these photos (there’s also a Facebook page). I liked the idea and started thinking about what I had that I could photograph. All my LEGOs were at home, so I didn’t have any minifigures. My LEGOs are still at home; I meant to bring some back with me this summer, but I forgot. Guess I should have packed more than twelve hours before leaving. Anyway, I thought (shocking, I know) some more and decided on a plastic animal figure.

The next time I was at the mall to go to Target, I stopped by AC Moore to check out their selection of plastic animals. I was looking for a penguin, because I like penguins, but the only one I could find was about three inches tall and cost four dollars. I considered a couple cheaper options, and then I saw a whole tube of penguins. They were only an inch or two tall, but there were eleven of them, and they were on sale for five dollars. They came back to campus with me.

I then decided to name them after the Fellowship of the Ring. Here they are:

Front row: Merry/Pippin. Middle row: Frodo, Gandalf, and Sam. Back row: Legolas, Boromir, Aragorn, and Gimli

The penguins occasionally travel with me and they tend to see the world from a different perspective. I plan to feature them on the blog every so often, because who doesn’t want to see life as a two inch tall penguin?

A Message from the Penguins

[You haven’t met them yet, but my penguin friends are here to bring you a message today. They’re named after the Fellowship of the Ring from The Lord of the Rings.]

Pippin: May the Eleventh be with you!
Gandalf: Fool of a Took! It’s May the Fourth be with you. You’re seven days late.
Pippin: Seven? Eleven . . . minus four . . . hold on a second here . . .
Merry: That’s seven, Pip.
Pippin: All right then. But I did think there was a holiday today.

Aragorn: It’s Mother’s Day.
Pippin: What’s that you said?
Aragorn: It’s Mother’s Day, little halfling.
Pippin: That’s right. Happy Mother’s Day!

Letters

Dear Google,

Why is it that the newsletter from Diversity Programs in Engineering at Cornell goes to spam despite me marking it as “not spam” every single week for the past five months but an email informing me that I have won 50,000 pounds – which is 81,420 US dollars, by the way – makes it into my inbox? I guess the sender’s email address of 19378578@mail.com sounded more legitimate than @cornell.edu.

Sincerely,
No regrets for giving mlssoccer.com my email address so I could watch the Revolution on the Free Stream of the Week


Dear Minesweeper programmers,

Solve this:

Sincerely,
If I wanted 50-50 chances I would have played roulette


Dear New England Revolution,

Thank you for finally making the playoffs last season. However, in light of how last season started out, here’s a friendly reminder. On the soccer field, there are two goals. Your goal, and your opponent’s goal.

This is a soccer ball:

The ball goes into your opponent’s net.

Sincerely,
Revolution Fans Everywhere


Dear Peter Jackson,

I don’t care how sturdy dwarves are; nobody falls five hundred feet, gets up, and goes “Don’t worry. I’m fine.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but last time I checked Middle Earth wasn’t No Physics Land.

Sincerely,
F = ma

The Desolation of Smaug

I've been trying to come up with a good opening line for this post for days, and I still don’t have one, so I’m just going to start with the second sentence. On further thought, I don’t have a good second sentence either. And here’s the third sentence.

Sentence four: Within a span of three weeks I watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, rewatched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, reread The Hobbit, and read the majority of The Silmarillion. That’s about seventeen hours of Tolkien and Middle Earth (sentence five . . . I’ll stop now). My main problem with The Desolation of Smaug (alternate title: Barrel Riding, Smaug Won’t Die, and Who on [Middle] Earth Is Tauriel?) was the same one I had with An Unexpected Journey: nobody falls 500 feet/gets hit in the head nineteen times/gets set on fire and then is a) perfectly fine or b) stunned for a few minutes then makes a miraculous 2.1 second recovery.

Other than that, I thought the movie was very good. Besides the storyline and cinematography itself, I did not fall asleep and I didn’t think the movie was excessively loud. In fact, the twenty minutes of previews were louder than the actual movie because of all the gunfire they had in them. No guns in Middle Earth . . . just force-field-creating staffs and glowing swords and the like. . . . You know, much more realistic stuff.

I’d heard that the actor who plays Thranduil (Lee Pace) was good, and he was. I also found out/realized that the actor who plays Bilbo (Martin Freeman) is Watson on Sherlock. As it turns out, his other role that I recognized is Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Which fits in perfectly with the fact that he spends most of his screen time confused, ridiculed, insulted, and otherwise verbally abused. [Bilbo: dwarves consider him a burden. Watson: gets called an idiot on a regular basis by Sherlock. Arthur Dent: taken from his home planet and dragged uselessly around the universe.]

Anyway, after rereading The Hobbit I found out that the movies follow the book more closely than I thought. The stone giants from An Unexpected Journey are really in the book, and the eagles do in fact leave the dwarves/hobbit in what appears to be the stupidest place possible: a giant spire that is 1) in the middle of nowhere, 2) super high and steep, and 3) nowhere near the mountain. The dwarves do also escape Thranduil by leaving in barrels, but there is no orc/goblin fight as they’re leaving. In fact, the dwarves are not actually pursued by anything for almost all of the book.

My collection of Tolkien books

As for The Silmarillion, I’d been trying to read it for awhile (i.e., years). I first tried it sometime in high school, got through the horribly dry introduction and maybe twenty pages of the actual book, and stopped. At the end of last summer, I thought I’d try again, made it through about a hundred pages, and got derailed by college. Between Schrodinger, matrices, degrees of freedom, and Aristotle and all his pals, I was not in the mood to read something as dense as The Silmarillion. Because it’s dense. There is no filler material in the book. I guess when you’re trying to write several thousand years of history in 400 pages, every word counts.

Basically, The Silmarillion is a history of the elves: how they were created and came to Middle Earth, and then everything that happens to them up until the end of The Lord of the Rings. It really is dense, but it’s also interesting, if somewhat depressing. Throughout the book, there’s murder, war, treachery, breaking of oaths, anger, greed, and lust; however, there is also some love, and friendship, and the triumph of good over evil. Like I said, it’s interesting, and the book explains certain things, like where the wizards came from, and why Aragorn – the king – ends up wandering aimlessly around the wilderness, and how Sauron ended up in Mordor. While you do have to be interested in Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its history to make it through The Silmarillion, it was well worth my time. Apparently there are over a dozen other books about the history of Middle Earth . . . Summer reading?

First Day of School

As of today, I have survived moving back in to Cornell and my first day(s) of classes. It noticeably lacked the enthusiasm shown in Finding Nemo. This semester, the engineers start taking more specialized classes; the sophomore (potential) chemical engineers are enrolled in physical chemistry and mass and energy balances. A lot of us are also taking linear algebra. This means that I get to spend Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings with all the same people. We actually walk from one class to the next together.

Since moving off north campus, our walk has been considerable shortened, but now we start our mornings by walking up the slope. It’s not much fun on a good day. It’s even less fun at 8:30 in the morning with a full backpack in 80 degree weather and 90 100 percent humidity. It remains to be seen how fun it is going down the slope when it’s negative degrees out, with 40 mile per hour winds and everything covered in two inches of ice.

I started my first day of classes by hauling myself up the slope and over to the arts quad for physical chemistry. Fortunately, I did not have to bring my p-chem textbook. It is known to the publishers, who are not affiliated with Cornell, as the big red book. Let’s guess which one it is:

Why, yes, it is the one that's twice as large as any of my other books.

After p-chem, the ChemE faction of the class went on to Mass and Energy Balances and Linear Algebra (some of us). I already have homework in all three classes. There goes my weekend, not that I was actually planning to do anything.

In other news, I am completely unpacked, which means that it took me about . . . a couple less weeks that last year. Yes, weeks. I was on top of things, as you can obviously tell.

My ruler and colored pencils have made their return to Cornell, as have Hezekiah, my rocket ship cup, and my periodic table placemat. This year I also have my soccer ball (which appears to have a slow leak), climbing shoes and chalk, and Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit. Friday nights should be exciting: think chips, salsa, and a tiny metal Aragorn figurine.

The Hobbit, and Other Adventures

Like most other college students across the country, I have been kicked out of my dorm for the days surrounding Christmas.  So, at home with no classes to attend or homework to do, I have turned to other forms of entertainment.

On Christmas day, my family and I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in the theater.  To highlight exactly how momentous this occasion was, I’ll just mention that the last time I saw anything before it came out on DVD was over three years ago (Monsters vs. Aliens, in 3D, and before that, Finding Nemo in 2003).  The point of all this is that I don’t exactly frequent movie theaters with any sort of regularity, but The Hobbit was completely worth my three hours and pushing lunch to 3 o’clock (we went out for dim sum, so waiting for lunch was worth it too).

To avoid wrecking the movie for those who haven’t gotten the opportunity to see it, I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say that I enjoyed it.  The movie is slow by virtue of the fact that after 2 hours and 45 minutes, the dwarves and Bilbo haven’t even reached Mirkwood yet, but it didn't feel slow.  It’s also a lot lighter than The Lord of the Rings.

Inspired by the movie (and my general liking of anything that has to do with Tolkien’s Middle Earth), I have created some Hobbit themed bracelets in my abundant spare time.  Just go with me on this one.  Besides, it’s not too farfetched – green for the grass in the Shire and Bilbo’s door, blue for the sky, brown for the dirt and hobbit feet, yellow for the ring.

And finally, snow.  Through the entire months of November and December, Ithaca did not receive a single snowstorm.  We got occasional flurries, but no accumulation.  Back home, it appears we've been hit by about six to eight inches of snow, so I’m off to shovel.