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 is the book, and it is a comedy for children told by a narrator who keeps addressing them directly.
The 4 is for genuine 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.
Everything wrong with it comes from one decision, and it was made by a studio instead of by 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. The second ends mid-air with a dragon flying toward a town, which is not an ending. The third is a single battle with a title that admits as much.
The book cannot support this. It is about three hundred pages, it has 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, which means the adaptation ratio is about five times looser. The padding was not a risk. It was arithmetic.
Length should follow from the material, and a story stretched past its natural size develops padding at every seam. Readers cannot always name what is 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, which is the definition of padding however well it is executed.
The commercial pressure to extend is enormous and it is always framed as generosity toward the audience. More is not 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 the production was delayed by studio troubles.
Jackson stepped in and started shooting with a fraction of the preparation the first trilogy had. He has 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, particularly 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 texture. 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 is not subtle. Azog is rendered where Lurtz was a man in makeup, and one of them has weight.
What Genuinely 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 is 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 is quiet, tense and character-driven, which describes almost nothing else across eight hours.
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 is 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 are worried about it, protect the two-handers first. They are where the reader forms an attachment, and they are what gets cut when a budget or a page count is under pressure.
The Invented Material
Tauriel does not 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 is not. Tauriel is invented to supply a woman and a romance, and the romance is with a dwarf who has almost no lines and dies, which is 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. Bilbo escapes down a river in a barrel, which in the book is uncomfortable and undignified, and in the film becomes a video game action set piece with a dwarf spinning inside a barrel killing orcs.
That inversion runs through all three films. Tolkien wrote a burglar who is 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, which 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, which is a legacy nobody involved deserved to earn on this scale.
Jackson took a project he had not developed, on a schedule he did not 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, not a signal that something went wrong.
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 the reason it is spread that thin was a decision made by people who were not making the films.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists