I found a post on /r/tolkienfans, and I thought I'd post it here. Pretty much sums up the problems I personally have with the new movies:
So, what went wrong?
The "Hobbit Plus" Lie
This trilogy was sold to us on the idea that we needed three movies to tell the story of "The Hobbit Plus" - the original novel plus appendices explaining what Gandalf was up to and how everything leads to LOTR.
Well, that just wasn't true. The extra Gandalf material in these films is actually kind of hurried and awkward (like Galadriel telepathically sending Gandalf on a side-quest). By far the most padding in these films comes from scenes PJ invented that have nothing to do with the Necromancer story, scenes that are neither "Hobbit" nor "Plus."
But why did PJ write these scenes?
The Unhealthy Aragorn Obsession
Essentially, the main problem Jackson had with The Hobbit as Tolkien wrote it, is
not that it was too long for one movie, but that it was
not action-packed enough for
three movies.
Peter Jackson has always relied on
the resonance of high fantasy to help tell Tolkien's story.
Resonance is the common ground between the film's world and the audience's expectations. It's why Gimli has a surly Scottish accent, the orcs have crossbows, the elves are lithe willowy blondes and so on.
There are sequences in LOTR where Tolkien has
a lot in common with stereotypical High Fantasy or Dungeons & Dragons. These scenes, like the Mines of Moria, typically work really well on film.
Where these movies struggle is when resonance doesn't work because
Tolkien is not bargain-bin fantasy. The biggest difference is the
protagonist. Tolkien had the sophistication to make his stories about an ordinary person who matures over the course of an adventure BUT still plays only a humble role in gigantic events.
In LOTR it's evident that Peter Jackson had to
battle the temptation to make Aragorn the hero. All sorts of scenes were added to inflate Aragorn's role and importance. This nearly turned farcical. As we all know there was originally a scene shot at the end of ROTK where Aragorn battled a physical Sauron at the Black Gate - luckily, that did not make the final cut.
In the Hobbit,
Jackson has firmly put on the Ring of hero-worship. The story is essentially about Thorin. Both movies open with a Thorin-centered prologue. The Arkenstone exists to legitimate Thorin's kingship. The orcs are after Thorin and Azog was created to give Thorin a personal antagonist. The tensions between elves and dwarves exist to embody Thorin's feelings of betrayal.
There are all kinds of flashbacks and asides in these movies to establish that the story is "about" Thorin's destiny.
This gets so out of hand, in Bilbo's scene with Smaug (which is supposed to be about Bilbo's growing courage and competence) we have Smaug prattling on about
Thorin and how
"Oakenshield's quest will fail." Then Thorin fights Smaug! Amazingly, Bilbo is reduced to a side character in his own story. This one simple line is wrong for so many reasons. The whole point of the novel is that the dwarves come to rely on Bilbo. The book is
not about "Oakenshield's quest" and book-Smaug never knows or cares that Thorin has returned to the mountain.
The (Non)Violence Problem
When you compare Tolkien to Highe Fantasye, it's evident that his books "aren't violent enough." Specifically,
Bilbo and Frodo don't slaughter enough dudes. Actually their most significant act is sparing Gollum's life.
In LOTR this was okay because PJ could balance Frodo/Sam/Gollum scenes against the ongoing War Of The Ring with its epic battles.
In The Hobbit, this doesn't work. The novel is about Bilbo's journey from mild-mannered hobbit to true adventurer and leader. But aside from the spider episode,
Bilbo often finds clever and non-violent solutions to the story's problems:
- riddling with Gollum then sparing his life
- smuggling the dwarves out of prison in barrels
- giving away the Arkenstone to end the siege
In the novel, the dwarves are hapless and Gandalf only helps as needed. That gives room for Bilbo to grow as a character. Bilbo becomes very brave by the end of the novel, but his bravery lies in his willingness to do the right thing even at high risk and cost. Not his swordsmanship. The novel ends with a serious message about the consequences of greed and short-sighted violence.
So how can PJ cram more action into these movies?
In
Unexpected Journey he did it by turning the dwarves into CGI characters that endlessly slay wolves and goblins. He also created a final boss fight so that Bilbo can finally earn Thorin's grudging respect by being
brave enough to fight Azog (notice how this completely goes against Bilbo's character in the novel).
In
Desolation, we have
Tauriel and Legolas. These characters exist purely for action scenes. We know that at an early stage in story development Viggo was asked to return as Aragorn and it's possible that he was meant to fill this role. It's evident that Bard, as well, is being turned into an action character.
As one review put it:
"Gandalf tells Galadriel that it is not great power but rather the everyday deeds of ordinary folk that defeat evil. It's a nice sentiment, but not one that the film buys into even for a moment. On the contrary, with its fixation on hyperbolic action sequences, the film has real trouble figuring out how to value the unwarlike Bilbo."
Story Butter Over Too Much Script Bread
The final, basic problem with these movies is that there's no character development. Critics have called the characterization "thin," "colorless," and have even said that it has "no momentum."
So what? The truth is that Jackson's movies have always contained wallpaper dialog with lines that are flatter than week-old Pepsi.
It's because stereotypical High Fantasy is so
pompous that the characters become inhuman. They just walk around spouting declarative statements at each other like "The enemy is preparing for war" and "There will be no dawn for men." Most of PJ's invented dialog has always had this cardboard feeling.
Yet the LOTR movies worked. That was because PJ had plenty of places in the movie for
character-establishing dialog, and he took
that straight from Tolkien. He even imaginatively repurposed a lot of the prose, for example Gandalf's "far green country" speech. And PJ seemed to understand that Sam and Frodo's friendship was at the core of LOTR, and that he was telling a human (well, hobbit) story in the midst of this great war.
In The Hobbit PJ has lost his perspective. By missing that the story is about Bilbo's growth, PJ has crammed the movie with a bunch of swashbuckling characters that don't develop. They just go from action episode to action episode.
Did you ever wonder why you liked Smaug so much in Desolation? It's because
Smaug is the only character in the movie who mostly speaks lines from Tolkien. For every other character, the
vast majority of their dialog is invented... and it
shows. The movie has been compared to "bad fan fiction" and that's because of a screenplay that lurches between action scenes with the most perfunctory, "let's move the plot" dialog imaginable.
Summary
So that's it I guess. These movies suffer from the fact that Peter Jackson didn't really want to tell the story Tolkien wrote. Jackson was always drawn more to the Thorin/Aragorn side of the story than the true story about an unassuming Hobbit, and in these prequel movies he has free creative reign to reshape the book to his whim. The result is a bloated action adventure with no heart.
. No one is wrong.
