My subject line exaggerates. The Hobbit trilogy didn’t suck, but neither was it awesome. Using Rotten Tomatoes as a gauge here to measure Peter Jackson’s renderings of Tolkien’s books, the movies in each trilogy received the following ratings:
LOTR trilogy: 91%, 96%, 95%
The Hobbit trilogy: 64%, 75%, 61%
I have to admit, I didn’t care for the movies in the Hobbit trilogy as much as I did the LOTR trilogy.
So what’s the deal? Same source author, same director, but two different end products held in very different esteem. Why? Were the books of vastly different quality to begin with? Did Peter Jackson himself change dramatically between 2001 and 2012? Did our expectations change during that same time period?
The Hobbit was about 1/3 of one of the LOTR books, so trying to expand that into a trilogy was JUST… TOO… MUCH. IMHO. It turned into just a series of action scenes for the sake of action scenes.
The LOTR was an epic trilogy of books with a serious tone spanning about a thousand pages. The Hobbit was originally written for children and was a third of the length of LOTR. LOTR lent itself easily to 3 movies, they had to really chop up the Hobbit to make it 3, including adding lots of things that the original books didn’t have.
There are about 8 million reasons, but for starters - the LOTR trilogy was based on 3 books, each running some 300-400 pages, so Jackson was, for the most part, condensing or eliminating content from the books. Whereas the Hobbit is a single, 200ish page book, so he had to invent enormous amounts of content to pad it out to 3 movies.
That’s most of it, but there was also the expectation that PJ would turn in another stunning masterpiece. Dont get me wrong, I loved the Hobbit , all three, but honestly they only get a 8 compared to the 10 (dare I say 11?) of LotR.
Now, I think adding in the backstory of what Gandalf did vs the Necromancer was a great idea. But they could have cut back some of the cray action sequences, and done it in two films.
Two things: in LOTR he condensed three fairly long books into three movies (which were long, but he still had to leave stuff out). He had to really focus on story and the important stuff in order to get as much in as he could. There’s a lot more story density and much better pace. In the Hobbit he expanded one short-ish book into three movies, so he had to add lots of stuff that simply didn’t serve the story except as filler.
Second, he went effects crazy. In LOTR, there’s really very little in the way of CGI. The orcs were mostly actors in costumes and makeup, and most of the effects were camera and staging tricks. In the Hobbit we just did everything on the computer which makes everything really sterile.
Although they did take some liberties, the making of the LOTR trilogy was a labour of love by many of the people involved, who respected the source material and tried to remain faithful to it and bring it to life on the big screen.
The attitude that they took toward making the Hobbit movies seems to me quite different: they used the source material as a starting point to try to make a fun, blockbuster series of movies. I don’t think this was necessarily a bad choice, but I have mixed feelings about the results.
A nitpick, but if you go by word count, the ratio is closer to five to one. Trying to fill all the screen time with so much less content threw off the pace of the movie. There were so many scenes that just didn’t work but Jackson couldn’t edit them out because he needed the minutes.
I agree the action scenes were poorly done. For some reason, Jackson decided to cartoon them up for the Hobbit trilogy. Actions scenes in the first trilogy looked epic; actions scenes in the second one looked like video games.
Where Jackson made changes to the LotR storyline for the movies, the changes generally made sense for the pacing of the films, and (IMO) fit with the spirit of the story.
The changes which Jackson made to the story of The Hobbit for the films often wildly diverged from the book (and even diverged from the “additional material” from the LotR appendices, like the Necromancer subplot). Things like the albino orc, the huge role of Legolas, the Legolas / Tauriel / Kili romantic triangle, leaving half of the dwarves back in Lake Town, the dwarves’ attack on Smaug (with the silly molten gold idea)…all of these were so far removed from the book story that it felt, to me, vanishingly like the original story.
Add to that the over-the-top, thrill-ride action sequences (which were almost always invented from whole cloth), and the repeated Big Dark Foreshadowing to the events of LotR (despite the fact that, in the books, those events wouldn’t happen for another 80 years or so, whereas the tone of that foreshadowing in the Hobbit movies implied “Sauron will be back, any day now”), and I felt that the movies strayed much, much too far from the original story.
The two source books were both great. But they were very different books. The Hobbit was a short light-hearted fairy tale. The Lord of the Rings was written as a serious historical epic.
Well, I thought the Hobbit films sucked, and from a storytelling perspective, a big difference is the sense of urgency in the story.
In LOTR, we’re talking about the world ending, essentially. Good vs. Evil.
In the Hobbit, some dwarves want to reclaim something and there’s lots of motivation that’s just historical backstory and Middle Earth legacies and blah blah blah blah. Yes, Bilbo is entitled to an adventure and grows as a character, but that arc is mostly lost with all the bloat. The padding is at the expense of his story.
So while everything in LOTR seems to very naturally build and develop the action to the final climax at Mordor, most of the things in the Hobbit are just incident after incident, with very little relationship to the end result. It’s more diversionary, which makes you notice how unnecessary or inconsequential things are in such a long set of films.
There was a lot of good in The Hobbit movies that really complemented the book. Working in Gandalf’s necromancer efforts, and his vision of needing to deal with Smaug before the shit really hit the fan, was a nice touch. But there was just enough filler–the ginger elf for no good reason, the bunny sled, the dwarves facing the dragon in any way at all–to offset the good. For me, there were just to many story elements, and thus too many films, for what was otherwise a fairly straightforward adventure.
In contrast, LOTR was a much more complex story that dealt with ancient fictional history as well as the timeless struggle of good v. evil, the dangers of pride balanced against the pitfall of inappropriate humility, other stuff. The more you go on about those things, the better your understanding of the central plot and the more enriching the experience is.
I loved the LOTR movie trilogy (despite some nitpicks). Far too often, though, the *Hobbit *movies were more like a videogame than a Middle-earth adventure: loud, frantic, pointless and empty. The combat scenes went on and on and on. The Elf/Dwarf romance was laughable, and Thorin running across the teeth of Smaug was unforgiveable.
I’d love to see a heavily-cut edit of the *Hobbit *movies that left out so much of the padding Peter Jackson added, and got closer to Tolkien’s original vision.
I haven;t even seen the third of the trilogy yet. But besides the bloat, besides the cartoonish, overblown, and physically impossible action sequences, the number one reason the Hobbit sucked was that we had to look at Radagast always running around with birdshit crusted on his face.