Or, alternatively, “WTF, Walnuts?”
To begin with, I’ve got to make it clear that I love the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I nerded out so hard at Fellowship of the Ring that when the Balrog appeared I thought I was going to explode on a molecular level and potentially reform as a gelatinous goo. I still think the Battle of Helm’s Deep is one of the coolest sequences ever filmed by anybody for any reason, and I will get a lump in my throat and cry the samurai tear at the stirring speeches delivered by Theoden King at the Pellenor Fields and by Aragorn at the Black Gate. My face always seems to fit improperly on my skull when I hear the words, “For Frodo.” So it is with great sadness that I report that I have not been enjoying The Hobbit.
The reasons are several, but I think Clayton Spinney has it right when he distills it all down to the fact that Peter Jackson has lost any semblance of restraint as a filmmaker. You can actually see that happening to him as the Lord of the Rings series unfolds; Fellowship is still the best of the three. But LOTR is such a huge story with such massive stakes (the end of the world, the rise to power of one of the devil’s captains in the world of men, the end of magic and the disappearance of God’s firstborn from the world; and the fate of mankind) and as such it earns the massive conclusion that is essentially an hour of final buildup and two hours of pure asskickery.
The trouble with the Hobbit is that Peter Jackson couldn’t just make The Hobbit. He had to try to reproduce his success of a decade ago, bulking out Tolkien’s children’s tale with backstory from the LOTR appendices and stretching a more lighthearted jaunt with Bilbo and thirteen of Durin’s folk into a bloated three-film cycle where the stakes are really just, “get the treasure back from S̶h̶e̶r̶l̶o̶c̶k̶ K̶h̶a̶n̶ J̶u̶l̶i̶a̶n̶ ̶A̶s̶s̶a̶n̶g̶e̶ a dragon” and while Benedict Cumberbatch is fantastic as Smaug, and everything Martin Freeman is doing as Bilbo is more gold than anything in Erebor, the movies are just too big for what the story, and the stakes, really amount to.
When you have thirteen dwarves I’m supposed to give a crap about, you need to do a better job making them memorable and not just in the broad strokes “Bofur’s got a silly hat” kind of way. If you’re going to make three movies that take three weeks each to sit through, you might devote some of that time to character development, and less of it to “remember when we did this, but better, ten years ago?” which is mostly what the Hobbit seems to be about.
Jackson, Walsh and Boyens can’t seem to stop themselves from lifting lines wholesale from their earlier (better) films or from referencing them every chance they get. Hell, they even recreated the beginning of Fellowship in “An Unexpected Journey” thus destroying any reason to ever attempt to watch the six films in order of the story, while simultaneously damaging the sanctity of Fellowship. I mean if you’ve never seen LOTR and never read the books…the peril in “The Hobbit” comes from whether or not Bilbo is going to survive. Something you decimate the moment you bookend the story with old man Bilbo reminiscing about the time he was Martin Freeman.
Likewise the inclusion of Legolas in this chapter seems little more than a commercial for those better movies. Remember when Legolas had one over-the-top moment per film in the LOTR cycle? Every second he’s onscreen in Desolation of Smaug is just one long sequence of Orlando Bloom’s digital stunt double doing ridiculous things for no apparent reason. Don’t get me wrong, Desolation of Smaug is a better film than “An Unexpected Journey,” in most respects. It’s bigger, more exciting, and has 100% less digitally-facelifted Ian Holm, so already we’re a leg up on the first chapter.
I don’t mind so much Jackson and company bollocksing with the source material. I mean, I do, to an extent, but some of it is necessary to make a great book into a great film. But Jackson and his team often struggle with walking that line, and while they altered Tolkien a lot in LOTR, I always felt the professor’s presence in the room. You can decide whether or not that is metaphorical. But old John Ronald is nowhere to be found with this cycle.
How thoroughly has Jackson forgotten the meaning of restraint? Let’s flash back to 2001, and find Gandalf standing down a Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dum. The bonus materials on the DVD made a point of celebrating their choice to have Gandalf’s magic be a thing of subtlety. To make the top of his staff light up in Moria, he had placed a crystal in the hand-like socket at the top and rapped the base of the staff upon the ground. It could almost be some device. Now out on the bridge he fends off the Balrog’s flaming blade with the Elven-made Glamdring, and recites a version of the famous lines from the book, “I am a servant of the secret fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor; the dark fire shall not avail you, Flame of Udun! Go back to the shadows…” When at last he finishes the ward, he smites the bridge with his staff. “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”
There is a sharp crack; there is no flash of light, no thunder or lightning, no shockwave, no flare, no marching band, no Rockettes, no Pomp and Circumstance. It isn’t until the Balrog steps out onto the center of the bridge that it crumbles beneath him, and he falls into the abyss. In “Desolation of Smaug,” Gandalf travels to Dol Guldur to investigate the rumors of the necromancer there. This is all more or less correct, we know from the Hobbit book and from the LOTR Appendices that this happened. In the movie, though, when Gandalf breaks the spell that is on that place, hiding its nasty inhabitants from prying eyes, he somehow falls into a scene from “Harry Potter and the Anything Directed by David Yates,” wherein he creates a cartoon bubble of light around himself as he struggles to repel L̶o̶r̶d̶ ̶V̶o̶l̶d̶e̶m̶o̶r̶t̶ layers of swirling black mist.
By the end of the scene Gandalf is trapped, bloodied, and pinned to the wall to watch helplessly as evil stuff is going on below him. Because remember when Christopher Lee did that to him ten years ago you guys?
Spoilers for “There and Back Again”: he lives, and gets Glamdring back too. ZOMG. My advice to Peter is to stop calling forward so much. If someone wants to watch the Hobbit before seeing LOTR, none of this stuff is going to mean anything to them and they’ll wonder why it’s there. If they’ve already seen LOTR, it’s just going to piss them off that the only way you can think of to try to make us like this crappy trilogy is to remind us of the good one it’s related to. That’s a little like hinting that an Avengers castmember is going to be at your party and then showing up with Liam Hemsworth and introducing him by saying that he’s the brother of the guy who plays Thor. It’s not fair to anybody in the room and it’s kind of embarrassing for Liam Hemsworth, who otherwise could have passed the evening entirely unnoticed.
The Hobbit was originally going to be two films and I think it would have been better if it had been. And also if it had been directed by Guillermo del Toro. And also if it had maybe only been one film.
