I Wish I Could Forget The Hobbit Trilogy
It’s no secret that our memory can play tricks on us. That each time we recall an image or event from the past our minds can romanticize, exaggerate, or blow them out of proportion. Our memories can be interpreted and reinterpreted until they become an internalized fiction based from truth.
We remember something being funnier than it really was. We remember an embarrassing incident being worse than it really was. We remember good times with a sense of nostalgia and longing.
That same distortion of memory also applies to our rewatching of movies. I’ve had repeated experiences where I’ve forgotten how good certain movies are, and how bad other movies can be. As the years pass our recollection of cinematic quality can be altered if we don’t revisit them from time to time — we need a refresher to confirm or reappraise our feelings towards, in our personal estimations, good and bad movies.
I recently had the chance to rewatch Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy on TV for the first time since I saw them on the big screen. I asked myself whether my feelings towards An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies might change, and whether I was being unduly unfair to them.
As it turns out, no, I wasn’t being unfair. I didn’t like them the first time I saw them, and if anything I think they’re even worse after having rewatched them.
I’m careful with the words I choose when I’m writing, and I rarely say that I ‘hate’ something — hate is a strong sentiment to express against anything or anyone. But I will say here and now that I hate The Hobbit trilogy.
When it was announced that the J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth was coming back to our screens, more than a decade after the film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings in the early 2000s, fans were brimming with anticipation and excitement. After Guillermo Del Toro’s exit as director Peter Jackson came back into the fold, promising audiences a new adventure the equal of his previous trilogy. People were ready to experience the fantasy and cinematic wonder once more.
Fast forward five years after An Unexpected Journey’s release, The Hobbit trilogy is viewed with far less reverence and adoration than The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The opinions of critics and fans regarding The Hobbit movies is much more divisive; I’m of the opinion that they are a colossal misfire unworthy of The Lord of the Rings’ legacy in popular cinematic history.
After my refresher I view The Hobbit trilogy as worse than the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Watching them on TV again was an insufferable, frustrating, embarrassing, plodding, and depressing struggle that has only solidified my animosity towards them.
Worse than Episodes I-III? Without a moment’s hesitation, yes. How, you may ask? The writers and producers and decision-makers on The Hobbit had the gift of hindsight and learning from past mistakes. After the years of abuse George Lucas’ prequel trilogy had been vaulted with The Hobbit filmmakers had a template of what not to do with their own prequel. And yet, they repeated The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith’s failures. In all the respects that Episodes I-III have been lambasted and vilified The Hobbit movies are equally — and in some cases more so — guilty of failing in their creative and technical execution.
One of The Hobbit production’s earliest announcements was that the new movies were going to be shot and exhibited in a new and unproven format: the photography, visual effects, and projection was going to be in 3D at a framerate of 48fps (frames per second), double the 24fps the film industry has been shooting as the standard for almost a century. The publicity surrounding the new 3D/48fps format promised an unprecedented level of immersiveness and hyperrealism; the problem was that the format counter-productively made everything look fake. Audiences viewing The Hobbit movies in this format commented that their suspension of disbelief was shattered, and that the smooth motion was a poor fit with a fantasy genre movie (comparisons to TV soap operas were made more than once). After the lackluster reaction to the new format in An Unexpected Journey the promotion for the second and third installments played down the trilogy’s ‘revolutionary’ achievement and few theaters projected it as intended.
The 3D/48fps shooting format was not the only misguided choice from a creative and technical point of view. The colour grading and enhanced sharpness of the digital cinematography is inconsistent with the aesthetic established in The Lord of the Rings, and all three of The Hobbit movies have a strange, distracting, artificial blooming effect that bleeds over the whole image. The virtual camera in visual effects shots all-too-often feels weightless as it sweeps above and under and through locations that would be impossible for a real camera to accomplish — further suspending our disbelief that what we’re seeing has any semblance of reality.
The overdependence on visual effects is often the greatest detriment to the trilogy’s action sequences. On top of weightless and impossible camera moves the actions they are capturing are preposterous and equally weightless. In An Unexpected Journey when Gandalf and the company of dwarfs slide miles down a rock face at high speed without so much as being knocked off balance the spectacle is rendered meaningless because there is no sense of peril associated with their action. Or what about the cartoonish barrel sequence from The Desolation of Smaug? (Words cannot begin to describe how bad that scene is for me.) Or how about when Legolas escapes certain death in The Battle of the Five Armies by defying the laws of physics and rational thought? How is it possible that The Hobbit’s visual effects are little better, and sometimes worse, than The Lord of the Rings’ computer and miniature effects 10+ years before it?
My grievances with The Hobbit trilogy are not confined only to its technical faults. The storytelling of Jackson and his co-writers is the greatest weakness of the three movies, especially when you consider they had already accomplished the herculean task of translating the longer and much denser Lord of the Rings trilogy to critical and award-winning acclaim.
The most common complaint regarding the new movies has been that, unlike their careful editing and removal of elements from The Lord of the Rings, the screenwriters chose to stretch out Tolkien’s short, standalone book into another sprawling cinematic trilogy. Final scenes taken from The Hobbit go on for far too long on screen, and simple sequences become elaborate-but-tedious set pieces that test the viewer’s patience to breaking point. Recognizing there was not enough material from the book or The Lord of the Rings’ Appendices to fit into two movies (before announcing it would be three) the writers started making things up. Rather than streamlining their story they opted to expand plots and invent unnecessary new scenes to fill three movies.
Another failure of The Hobbit trilogy is its characters. The fresh faces introduced in the story have none of the emotional depth that the Lord of the Rings’ characters possess. Despite the screenwriters and actors’ efforts Bilbo is not as compelling a character as Frodo, Thorin lacks the dimension and pathos of Aragorn, and none of the 12 other dwarfs has the charm and humour of Gimli. Even the presence of Gandalf the Grey fails to improve proceedings.
Minor characters like Bard and Radagast are given expanded roles and subplots that feel forced and redundant. Familiar faces from The Lord of the Rings, such as Galadriel and most awkwardly Legolas, are shoehorned into the story to capitalize on their popularity rather than serving a narrative purpose. (The movies also include shameless winks to the audience by name dropping Gimli and alluding to Aragorn in dialogue for no reason other than to say, ‘Remember them?’)
And then there’s Tauriel. The writers invented a female character who they wanted to be The Hobbit’s own Arwen or Eowyn; instead she wound up being the center of a clichéd and uninteresting love triangle, a deus ex machina, and a transparent storytelling device for exposition. And she dies in the end, having contributed nothing worthwhile to my viewing experience, not that I care.
The screenwriting is a tonally jumbled mess, unsure of whether it wants to be a rollicking adventure, a bumbling comedy, or a straight-faced fantasy. Where The Lord of the Rings is able to draw a fine balance between its shifting tones The Hobbit movies are lumpy and uneven. The difference between them is a matter of cohesion; The Lord of the Rings trilogy is seamless, The Hobbit trilogy is a shambles.
Despite having the budget, resources, experience, and proven talent in front of and behind the camera the filmmakers still made the wrong choices. Were they overconfident because of their previous success? Was too much faith invested in Peter Jackson and his collaborators to deliver us Tolkien’s world a second time round? Did The Hobbit ever stand a chance of being The Lord of the Rings’ equal or superior?
I know The Hobbit movies have plenty of fans who will defend them. I know some people will say that it’s unfair to compare the two trilogies, or nothing that the filmmakers did would have satisfied naysayers like me. I disagree.
Because of my love for The Lord of the Rings it pains me that The Hobbit trilogy was so poorly executed. After my most recent viewings I can safely say that I have no desire to ever watch them again, and that saddens me.
I wish that there was an undo or retry button. I wish I could forget.
Coming soon: You’re the Spitting Image
