The Hobbit Trilogy (2012-2014) Review
4/10
Bilbo Baggins is talked into leaving his house by a wizard and thirteen dwarves, walks a very long way, meets a dragon, and comes home. That’s the book, and it’s a comedy for children told by a narrator who keeps addressing them directly. The 4 is for real achievements inside a bad structure. Martin Freeman is close to perfect casting, the riddle scene with Gollum is the best sequence Jackson has directed since the first trilogy, and Smaug is among the finest digital characters ever made.
Most of what I feel watching these films is irritation at a waste. There’s a lovely small movie buried in here, and somebody in a boardroom decided it should be sold to me three times at full length. Freeman, the riddles and the dragon are good enough that the padding around them makes me angrier, because I can see what the films could have been.
Everything wrong with it comes from one decision, and a studio made it instead of a filmmaker. Two films became three after principal photography had begun, and every structural failure follows from that.
Two Films Became Three
The project was planned as two films. In July 2012, with shooting already under way, it was announced that there would be three. Consider what that means practically. The material had been broken into two arcs, scripted, storyboarded and partly shot, and then had to be re-broken into three while the cameras were running. The additional footage was gathered in later pickups.
The consequences are visible in the shape of each film.
The first spends an hour in Bag End on a scene the book covers in a chapter, and that hour is where my patience starts to go. The second quits mid-air with a dragon flying toward a town, and I feel billed for a cliffhanger. The third is a single battle with a title that admits as much.
The book can’t support this. It’s about three hundred pages, it’s one protagonist, and its plot is a journey with episodes. Stretching it produced invented material, and the invented material is where the trilogy is weakest. Compare the arithmetic to the first trilogy. The Lord of the Rings runs to roughly half a million words and got three films. The Hobbit is under a hundred thousand and got three films of comparable length. That means the adaptation ratio is about five times looser. The padding was arithmetic.
Length should follow from the material, and a story stretched past its natural size develops padding at every seam. Readers can’t always name what’s wrong and they can feel it.
The test is whether removing a thread would cost you anything. Almost every subplot added here could be deleted with no loss. That’s the definition of padding however well it’s executed. The commercial pressure to extend is enormous and it’s always framed as generosity toward the audience. More isn’t a gift. More is the same amount of story with the tension distributed across a larger surface.
Del Toro Left and Jackson Had No Time
Guillermo del Toro was attached for about two years, developed designs and a script with Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, and departed in 2010 when studio troubles delayed the production.
Jackson stepped in and started shooting with a fraction of the preparation the first trilogy had. He’s said publicly that he felt rushed and was making decisions on set that should have been made in advance. That admission explains a great deal. The Lord of the Rings had years of design, a completed script and a shooting plan across all three films at once. This had a director inheriting somebody else’s preparation and improvising the rest.
You can see del Toro’s fingerprints in places, especially in the goblin and Erebor design, and they sit oddly against Jackson’s material. Two visions half-merged is a worse outcome than either one executed cleanly.
The other cost is in the physical detail.
The first trilogy built armor, weapons and prosthetics at Weta and photographed real objects in real New Zealand light. These films lean far harder on digital environments and digital orcs, and the difference isn’t subtle. Azog is rendered where Lurtz was a man in makeup, and one of them has weight.
The digital orcs are where the films lose me completely. Azog never looks like he’s standing on anything, and after the first trilogy put real armor in real light, a weightless villain chasing the dwarves across three films bores me stiff.
What Works
Martin Freeman is the best thing in all three films. Bilbo is a fussy, comfortable, decent man being dragged into events, and Freeman plays exasperation better than almost anybody alive. Riddles in the Dark is the trilogy’s high point and it’s nearly a two-hander. Bilbo and Gollum in a cave, playing a game, with Andy Serkis switching between two personalities in a single conversation. It’s quiet, tense and character-driven. That describes almost nothing else across eight hours.
The riddle scene is the one stretch where I forget to be annoyed. Freeman and Serkis in a cave with nothing but words is what I wanted from all eight hours, and it’s maddening to see how little the films needed to spend to get it right. Smaug is the other one. Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance and the animation are married convincingly enough that the dragon reads as a person with an ego and a grievance, and the conversation with Bilbo is written closer to the book than most of the trilogy manages.
Richard Armitage’s Thorin is also a real performance in a role the films keep undermining. The dragon-sickness arc is the one invented thread with a purpose, and Armitage plays the deterioration without any assistance from the script.
Notice which sequences survive a bad structure. All three of these are conversations in confined spaces between two characters who want opposite things. That’s not a coincidence. Scale is the easiest thing to add and the least memorable thing to watch. A cave, a riddle and two voices costs almost nothing and outlasts a hundred million dollars of battle.
For a writer: when a project grows and you’re worried about it, protect the two-handers first. They’re where the reader forms an attachment, and they’re what gets cut when a budget or a page count is under pressure.
The Invented Material
Tauriel doesn’t exist in the book. Neither does the elf and dwarf romance, the Dol Guldur investigation at that length, the barrel chase as staged, or Azog as a pursuing antagonist across three films.
Some of it is defensible. The White Council material comes from Tolkien’s appendices, and a film adapting a children’s book for an audience that saw The Lord of the Rings has a real problem connecting the two.
Most of it isn’t. Tauriel is invented to supply a woman and a romance, and the romance is with a dwarf who has almost no lines and dies. That’s a great deal of screen time for a thread that resolves in grief for a character we barely know.
The barrel sequence is where the trilogy’s aesthetic problem is clearest, and it’s the scene I’d cut first.
Bilbo escapes down a river in a barrel, which in the book is uncomfortable and undignified, and in the film becomes a video game set piece with a dwarf spinning inside a barrel killing orcs. It makes me groan. Tolkien’s joke was that the escape was miserable, and the film turned it into a theme park ride.
That inversion runs through all three films. Tolkien wrote a burglar who’s frightened, small and clever, and whose victories come from nerve instead of combat. The films keep giving him and everybody around him action beats, and every one of them makes the character less interesting than the book made him on page forty.
It Made Three Billion Dollars
Seven hundred to seven hundred and forty-five million dollars across three films, against roughly two point nine billion worldwide. By any commercial standard it worked. The domestic pattern tells the more interesting story. No Hobbit film matched the domestic total of any Lord of the Rings film, while the international performance stayed enormous. That suggests brand strength instead of affection.
The high frame rate release is the other footnote. Jackson shot at forty-eight frames per second and a portion of the audience found the result looked like video instead of film. The technology has largely not been adopted since. The lasting consequence is reputational. The Lord of the Rings is discussed as one of the great achievements in adaptation, and this trilogy is the standard example of a studio extending a property past its material. That’s a legacy nobody involved deserved to earn on this scale.
Jackson took a project he hadn’t developed, on a schedule he didn’t set, after a director left and a studio went through financial trouble, and delivered three technically accomplished films on time. The decision that ruined them was made above him and his name is on all of it.
Commercial success and creative failure coexist comfortably, and the market provides no correction. Three billion dollars is a signal to do it again.
Which means the only defense against overextension is somebody with the authority to say the story is this long. That person is usually the one with the least power in the room.
For your own work, the equivalent pressure is a publisher wanting a trilogy from a book. The question to ask is whether the second and third exist because the story continues or because the first one sold.
Should you watch The Hobbit?
Watch the first film and the Smaug conversation in the second, and treat the rest as optional. There are about three hours of good filmmaking spread across eight, and it’s a 4 because I resent the other five so much. Freeman, Serkis, Cumberbatch and Armitage deserved a film sized to the book, and a decision made by people who weren’t making the films buried their work under Tauriel, barrels and a battle that fills a whole movie.
