5,254–5,256. The Hobbit Trilogy (but mostly just The Hobbit)

It’s not just that it was an utterly pointless project — taking J.R.R. Tolkien’s delightful, slim adventure and giving it the portentous, lumbering, interminable Lord of the Rings treatment, thereby somehow devaluing that earlier trilogy as well. It’s not even that ghastly high-frame-rate presentation that Peter Jackson tried to get away with, which made everything onscreen look like a washed-out making-of video. It was also just a *&^%$#@ terrible movie, with zero narrative momentum, thoroughly forgettable characters, and — since they chopped up a tight little narrative into three parts — no decent resolution. A case study in how not to make a movie.

It's mostly on the Internet that we such this kind of buffoonery.

anyone with an opinion that is not complementary towards PJ's movies is a buffoon?

And of course the vast majority of opinions on movies (and basically everything else) will be on the internet...positive or negative.

However, I have to say, most people who I have spoken to outside of the internet who had an opinion on PJ's Hobbit, were disappointed in how it turned out, for various different reasons, and some more than others

, and now that being said, I have never met a PJ Hobbit superfan out in the wild.

I get it. One of the reasons that some here dislike TH movies is that they find at least some of the big action sequences in TH movies objectionable, because for them those sequences are too big, too silly, shouldn't exist at all or all of the above. Fair enough. But did anyone expect Smaug to be on set during his conversation with Bilbo? Of course Martin Freeman had to use his imagination and acting skills – as actors do - but he did it on a vast and beautifully dressed set with Smaug’s dialogue performed by dialect coach Leith McPherson. She did a pretty good job. Elsewhere the actors were just off camera speaking their lines for their doubles or to their fellow actors. How should the film makers have created the Great Goblin? The trolls? The spiders? We can argue about stuff like people in suits versus digital Orcs forever; it is simply a matter of preference.

About the Great Goblin I'll only say that, whether he was created with practical effects or digitally, he did not need a production number to rival the show tune sung by King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar. Smaug did not need to be three to five times the size he was in the book, requiring a Black Arrow that would more accurately be described as a ballista bolt in order to slay him. The tight, claustrophobic goblin tunnels did not need to be transformed into a maze of catwalks and bridges. For me, at least, it's not the techniques used to create them, it's the way they were conceived and visualized for the films. It's the shear amount of excess that bothers me, similar to the problems I had with Jackson's King Kong.

Yes, the prequel trilogy had issues, but there were a few scenes - especially Riddles in the Dark and Thorin's death - which were just as good as anything in LOTR.

As for the epic quality of the movies, I agree that the original story is more intimate than epic and changes had to be made to it to make it bigger. That, I have always believed, was inevitable given the expectations and requirements of the LotR movie fanbase and the studios funding the production. Also, movie Hobbit had to match the Middle-earth created in its predecessors. There was no going back after the LotR films and a small, more literal adaptation of TH was never going to happen. Myself, I was happy with the larger, more complex and detailed world that we saw in TH movies.

That was precisely why the movies failed. Instead of "epic" what they got was "bloated" and "silly"- like a supermarket turkey that's 2/3 water and hormones. It didn't help that all the artificial epic-ness was concocted out of whole cloth, by writers who weren't up to the task.

IMO the movies needed to set up a reason for the animosity between the Wood Elves and the Dwarves of Erebor, not rely on ancient history known only to book fans.

Was it ever explicitly stated why Thranduil appeared with an army on the heights above Dale and Erebor as the Dwarves were fleeing Smaug?

I thought that Thranduil was coming to lay siege to Erebor, in order to retrieve his wife’s white gems. I also thought, from Thorin’s words to him, that Thranduil had refused to help the refugees. Hence the former’s extreme animosity towards all Elves, which admittedly was not entirely rational.

All of that is partly why I liked Tauriel and Kili, especially in AUJ. As I said before – two young people reaching past the bigotry and resentment of their elders to form a connection.

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That's a fair point, though Thorin's attitude was a bit extreme, extending to all Elves including Elrond's folk, who--when they lived in Eregion--had had a good relationship with the Dwarves of Khazad-dum (Thorin's ancestors).

Thorin in the book had none of the animosity toward Elrond (or even Elves in general) that movie Thorin displayed. Thorin was your basic proud old man/dwarf fallen on harder times than he’d like to admit. He took offense to Thranduil’s questioning (and compounded that with innate dwarves greed). Movie Thorin hated Elves to the point of unreasoning racism.

Just one more reason my joy at the start of AUJ with the “Good Morning” scene quickly turned to dismay and revulsion as the movies progressed.

It's definitely a darker version of Theoden's "Where was Gondor?!" speech.

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if Peter Jackson had done The Hobbit first, and then gone on to do The Lord of the Rings. Presumably The Hobbit would have turned out better, but would The Lord of the Rings turned out worse?

I have always felt that a Peter Jackson Hobbit movie, one movie, that had been made before LotR could have been very different without the expectations and constraints that being both a prequel and a follow-up to the hugely successful LotR trilogy engendered. Yet Jackson is still the same director who likes special effects, big action and juvenile humour, who made both Braindead and Heavenly Creatures before LotR. So what would that original Hobbit movie have been like? I wonder too.

The effects on the LotR films would have been profound as well, probably not in a good way, had the original plan come to fruition. . LotR would have been two films instead of three and a lot more would have been condensed or left out, affecting both plot and character. No doubt many beloved scenes would never have been filmed. I have read about the two-film treatment but can’t remember enough about it now to provide examples. Nor do I recall if a script for the Jackson/Walsh Hobbit had ever been written.

Since I love TH movies almost as much as the LotR trilogy, it all worked out for me.

Your post lines up with my distant memories concerning the abandoned project. If there are any corrections to be made, I'm sure someone will chime in with the information. If the Hobbit movie had been made under Miramax, though, and been successful, I could see the idea of the LotR as a film trilogy being revisited at that time. As was said later, by a New Line exec: There are three books, aren't there?

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Thorin in the book had none of the animosity toward Elrond (or even Elves in general) that movie Thorin displayed. Thorin was your basic proud old man/dwarf fallen on harder times than he’d like to admit. He took offense to Thranduil’s questioning (and compounded that with innate dwarves greed). Movie Thorin hated Elves to the point of unreasoning racism.

Just one more reason my joy at the start of AUJ with the “Good Morning” scene quickly turned to dismay and revulsion as the movies progressed.

Even as a Jackson ''apologist'' (for a lack of a better term), I don't get why he made certain choices in the scripting processes. Why alter Thorin's personality in such an extreme way?

Does he give any reason anywhere (say, the EE's Appendices)?

It just seems STUPID to change the book gratuitously like that. If the change has a cinematic/narrative purpose, then maybe it can be excused. But for NO REASON?

Once I saw AUJ, I realized that PJ was going in a different direction tonally and was fine with it.

What he attempted to do was bring the lightness, absurdity, and sheer fun of TH into the wider and deeper Middle-earth of LotR

But regardless, PJ’s task was to make a set of movies that would attract a large and wide ranging international audience of the 21st century, not a subset of people harkening back to the 1930’s.

PJ’s task was to make a set of movies that would attract a large and wide ranging international audience of the 21st century, not a subset of people harkening back to the 1930’s.

It’s the movie-making business.

I would guess that it is some shading between 1 and 2. I'm doubtful that it is fully No. 3, though perhaps that is my idealistic side showing through.