A Middle Earth where Beorn’s ponies and dogs can set a table of bread and honey for the dwarves is a Middle Earth where a wizard with a sled pulled by giant rabbits makes perfect sense. Radagast was fine, seriously.
Martin Freeman did an excellent job as Bilbo. Perfect casting. And Thranduil was good, just what an asshole elf-lord should be. And the dwarves singing “The Misty Mountains Cold” was perfect. Set design, character design, all was good. There were a lot of great parts in the Hobbit movies. Some changes made the story better, like that Thorin had a plan beyond wandering to the lonely mountain and then seeing what happened.
But there were some horrible parts too. The Tauriel-Kili-Legolas subplot? Horrible. The numerous extended cartoonish action sequences? Horrible. The extended Azog vs Thorin subplot? Horrible. Even the White Council vs the Necromancer subplot didn’t work.
Aside from the criticisms about bloat, pacing, and plotting (which I agree with), this was the real deal killer for me. The entirety of Middle Earth suffered from a very bad case of The Uncanny Valley, and as such the films could not draw me into their world.
Well, as people keep saying, the book version of the Hobbit contained a lot of light-hearted whimsey and humor. And the movie avoided humor and charm at every chance it could. Admittedly, they kept the dishwashing/cleaning up scene, but they lost the bit where Gandalf introduces the dwarves to Beorn and they completely altered the part of the movie where Bilbo bungs up the dwarves in barrels to escape the elves.
Possibly the role of the greedy guy who looked like Mr. Bean was supposed to be humorous, but they didn’t actually do anything with it or even have it lead to a satisfying come-uppance, so that was just wasted padding.
Thorin’s death, which was supposed to be noble and atoning was exchanged for some stupid boss fight from a comic book movie.
The TL;DR is that they didn’t respect and possibly didn’t even understand the material.
Say what one may about the movies, they were actually better than the book.
Take the chase in the tunnels under the mountains: at least in the movie, the dwarves fight. In the book, they only ran. The movie showed them as the deadly foes we knew they really could be.
And in the entire damn book, Nori (and I believe Ori) do nothing. At least Dori carries Bilbo a couple of times, but the other two have ZERO to do with the story. Bifur, too, has, if memory serves, only one moment of action, when he gets hauled up on ropes to the thrush’s ledge, along with Bofur.
Thranduil gets some actual dialogue and motivation. In the book, he’s just a cardboard cut-out.
Note that the three dwarves who looked more “human” (Kili, Fili, and Thorin) were the three who died in the Battle of the Five Armies. It’s been hypothesized that this was intentional – that, because they looked more human, the audience would empathize with them more, and thus be hit harder when they died.
I can’t tell what editions you’re using because those page counts seem out of whack with respect to the number of words. Maybe the Hobbit (as a children’s book) had a larger type because as has already been noted, LOTR boasts more than five times (481103 to 95356) the word count of the Hobbit. So using word count against your film run times I get:
LOTR: 862.2 words per minute
Hobbit: 201.2 words per minute
I know I’m in a minority of one, but I really didn’t like Martin Freeman in the Hobbit movies at all. I don’t think he can actually act - he does the same face and actions in everything. He doesn’t have the screen presence to drive these sort of movies. Here in the UK he was brought to the public’s attention as a simpering feeble loser in the “Office” comedy show and I think the feeling has stuck.
That may have been a problem with the book, but it is not a problem that the movies fixed.
The Hobbit has, as main characters, thirteen dwarves AND a hobbit. That is already starting with a large and unwieldy cast of main characters. Yet Jackson for some unfathomable reason thought that he needed to add more main characters - Radagast, Legolas, Tauriel, etc. And numerous subsidiary characters such as Bard’s family. AND added both the Necromancer and Azog as antagonists (when you already have Smaug! why do you need additional enemies WHEN YOU HAVE A DRAGON?)
The result is that the book’s main characters are actually shoved offscreen for much of the action in the movies. Instead of allowing the dwarves to actually do something in the Battle of the Five Armies (which, in the book, mostly passes with Bilbo conked out), we get a half-hour of Legolas’ amazing video-game adventure, running up rocks falling in midair. The dwarf who actually gets additional action added to his character, only does so to shoehorn in the coked-up Tauriel romance subplot.
Now, I’m aware that JRRT wasn’t so inclusive with women characters, and The Hobbit in particular suffers this, but jamming in a female character for a romance subplot is still problematic.
Worst of all, instead of an entire movie with Smaug as the main threat, he has to share screentime with the Necromancer and Azog subplots. The whole thing was a hot mess, because there was no one willing to edit out the cruft and keep the movies focused - they were all blinded by the $$ in their eyes, drooling over the prospect of another lucrative fantasy series.
I LOVED the LOTR films. I never saw the Hobbit movies, because I couldn’t get excited enough to sit through three long movies that apparently should have been one.
Maybe someone could edit out 2/3’s of the baloney and make a real (single) Hobbit film?
I’m pretty sure someone did exactly that. An alternate version of the hobbit where he kept only the content that originally was in the book and cut mostly everything else.
Agree. About the action sequences (I don’t like much action sequences to begin with unless they’re epic and gut-clenching) and about Radagast. I like the character, so making a bunny propelled clown out of him pretty much killed the movies for me.
Plus the litteral cliffhangers. How many times was a character about to plunge to his death in these movies? It felt like it was happening every ten minutes.
Freeman specializes in playing “everyman” characters. I dunno, maybe he really can’t do anything else… but as long as he is actually playing an everyman, what does that matter? And that’s what was called for for both Bilbo and Arthur Dent, and he delivered it well.
