I couldn’t agree more with this comparative analysis by DBS Film Society of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit movies. It’s not just that Peter Jackson artificially broke up a children’s book into three bloated films, it’s that in doing so he emphasized the superficial over the substantial.
This is what Hollywood has always done in response to a popular, critically-acclaimed film: ape its most superficial qualities in the assumption that that was the key to its popularity. It’s a classic case of style over substance. But they’re mistaken. Samwise himself said it best: “…those are the stories that stayed with you, that meant something–even if you were too small to understand why.”
Brilliant and well worth the watch for any Tolkien fan.
As much as I liked the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, I hated how they glossed over the ending. Tolkien’s ending showed the grim reality of war and how, even if you were on the winning side, the experience was a devastating one. This whole Hobbit movie business has just rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning. It’s a grossly disproportionate caricature of the book. And that’s sad. 😦
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I liked the LOTR trilogy too, but there were also several things I didn’t like about it, one of which was also the ending. I felt that the hobbits returning to the Shire to find it unchanged, in particular, was anticlimactic and entirely missed the point.
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