Why Peter Jackson's The Hobbit Is Such a Monumental Let Down
The Hobbit. Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
I am an enormous fan of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. I think it embodies in many ways the height of what cinema can be. So naturally, when Jackson eventually gave into the wailing demands of studio execs to wring more money from the franchise and bring The Hobbit to the big screen, I was excited.
Everyone was excited! There is not a nerd in the world who can tell you without lying that they weren’t excited to be able to go back and hang out in that version of Middle Earth for a couple more hours. But, as with the new Harry Potter movies, an excess of ambition can poison even the best intentions.
So it was with The Hobbit, which could have been fashioned into one really good movie but was instead stretched into three bloated and unnecessary ones. And not only were they unnecessary, stuffed full of things ripped from the Silmarillion and elsewhere and cobbled together into a fever dream of better films, they were bad.
They seemed to actively reject many of the production techniques and narrative choices that made Lord of the Rings such an amazing, immersive cinematic experience. Instead The Hobbit trilogy leaned on CGI, bad writing, unnecessary fan service and the reputation of its source material to try and coast to another mutli-billion dollar payday. In the end it left us with a truly a horrible, monumentally disappinting series of films.
I get that these films had a troubled production history and Jackson only took over directing somewhat late in the game. But many great films have troubled production histories, so that doesn’t exactly hold water. You can just tell that the same care and precision and clarity of thought that went into Lord of the Rings had been more or less expended by the time they got to The Hobbit, and the level of caring about the finished product had gone way down.
In Lord of the Rings, for instance, every time the story deviated from the source material the writers thought long and hard about why such a deviation should be justified. In the book, for instance, Faramir just lets Frodo go after capturing him and Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Peter Jackson thought that didn’t really make any sense given how much they’ve been carrying on about the immense evil of the Ring. So, in the movie Faramir holds onto Frodo for a bit longer. It’s a small change, but it evidences the depth of thought they put into the structure of the narrative, especially when it deviated from the source material.
The same is true of visual choices. In the book, when the Fellowship arrives at the Mines of Moria Pippin throws a stone down the well which is what alerts the goblins to their presence. In the film, he knocks over a rusted set of armor which tumbles noisily down the well. Cinematically, this of course works much better than if he just tossed a little rock into a hole. A fairly small change, all in all, but the point is you can see that the filmmakers put a lot of thought into what would work best both narratively and cinematically.
None of that careful consideration is evident anywhere in The Hobbit. It uses loud, lazy, boring and often badly rendered CGI at every possible opportunity. Gone is the painstaking attention to detail, the careful consideration of what will work best for the narrative or in cinematic terms. Gone is the immaculate world-building using giant miniatures seamlessly blended with CGI to suck the viewer into a fully textured fantasy world. Gone are the liberal use of makeup and prosthetics.
Instead, the plot just jumps around from point to point with a joyless sense of obligation. Characters and events are plucked from other works and jammed into this one so the audience can have a flaccid sugar rush of recognition. Hey guys, here’s Legolas! the movie screams at you while building fully CGI characters for no reason whatsoever.
The fight with the Great Goblin is one of the worst offenders, being so artificial looking that it takes you right out of the film. And that is the big sin that The Hobbit commits. Instead of building an immersive world that sucks you in and makes you, as the viewer, excited to explore it the film actively repels you. It ejects you from its hastily, crappily-built world and that might be the worst thing it could do.
The Hobbit of course lives and ultimately dies in the shadow of Lord of the Ring. How could it not? It cannot escape being compared to its predecessor, and that is one of the reasons Peter Jackson didn’t want to direct it in the first place. It’s always hard to live up to and be compared to something monumental that came before, and in many ways it’s not fair. But The Hobbit didn’t just fail in comparison to Lord of the Rings, a nearly impossible bar by any standard.
It failed to produce even a passable film, with watchable characters doing interesting things. I understand why. There was a lot of pressure and internal stuff going on which lead to a lot of poor decisions. But in the end, the film cannot escape the shadow cast by its predecessors. It can’t even get out of it long enough to make something watchable. And that is just very disappointing.
