This time ten years ago, cinema goers internationally were treated to the final instalment of one of the fantasy genres favourite stories. That’s right, sitting with a total theatrical runtime of 7 hours and 54 minutes is The Hobbit trilogy (if you think that’s long then let’s not bother talking about the extended edition which brings it nicely to just under 9 hours total).
Met with much disdain and vitriol by The Lord of the Rings fans, this trilogy was one of my favourites growing up. Now, ten years on, I think it’s time we discuss the challenges that this film was put up against and the many ways that it actually went right as an addition to the on-screen world of Tolkien, directed by Peter Jackson.
For anyone not versed in the complicated world building of Tolkien, all you need to know about The Hobbit is that it’s one book stretched into three films in which 13 Dwarves are ambitiously hoping to reclaim their ancestral mountain kingdom of Erebor from a fire-breathing dragon named Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) who, in their first conflict with him, had easily decimated thousands of them within hours. They’re pretty confident that Smaug has got to be dead or gone by now, so they enlist the help of national shit-stirrer Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) and a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). All hobbits have stupid names like that and are considered so small and weak that taking one to slay a dragon is like bringing a cat to a rave.
There are lots of other things that happen in the story that allude to the future events that occur during Lord of the Rings, some of which are added in storylines that the film makers seem to have put in there just to remind you that this is also a Lord of the Rings film. One of the main things to remember is that the Hobbits are the main heroes of just about every Tolkien story. Their narrative transformation is often symbolic and holds such strong importance that the Amazon prequal series, The Rings of Power, created a whole storyline for the Harfoots, the early iteration of hobbits who prove to be a vital part of fighting the evil of their time (Sauron again, would you believe).
The first thing that I really need to remind people of when discussing sequels or prequels or follow-ons of any kind, is that nothing ever really compares to the original of anything. Lord of the Rings was a huge moment in film history for the genre of fantasy film. These films completely dominated awards shows for several years running and permanently transformed the landscape of New Zealand tourism forever, so it’s hard to compare the monumental, cultural effect of these films to anything else. With a follow on like The Hobbit, big surprise, people don’t care about Lord of the Rings quite as much as they did before. It’s no longer new, we’ve all read the books and it’s been ten years. Aside from a few returning cast members, it is a vastly different story from the first three films and for some reason every one is livid that it’s been stretched into three films instead of one or two. Ok, admittedly they could have pared it back a little but who hasn’t read a Tolkien book and thought holy shit, he really goes off on a tangent (it takes the hobbits in The Lord of the Rings about 200 pages to get to a town that’s about 40 miles away). The Hobbit had a whole load of things happening all of the time. They are in danger constantly and I never did feel while watching the films that the events were too spaced out. It’s a well-paced story for the film deal that the filmmakers were given, despite them asking for just two films and being given three to fill out. Could it have been done in two? Of course! Could it have been done in one? If you cut through a lot of the sequences, absolutely. Three maybe wasn’t the best option but it did give a lot of room to expand on scenes and give more background lore for bigger fans hoping to get a little more from the setting.
One of the biggest yucks that fans had with regards to this film was the excessive use of CGI throughout. Now, I am a huge practical effects fan and sit solidly on the team of SFX above all else where possible, however, this was the early 2010s. This era of film was rife with ugly CGI and unrealistic character interactions. Things that may have been considered a higher quality of CGI has, more often than not, aged like milk, into blobby, pixeley, depthless monstrosities. Though the skills used to create these are very complicated and time-consuming, they don’t always fit the film very well and it’s a struggle to really blend them into reality. No disrespect to those in that area, in my opinion a film just doesn’t work as well when it leans so heavily on CGI instead of using VFX to enhance the footage they already have.
Though this insistence on CGI is a little jarring for our modern cinema sensibilities, it ought to be taken as a quirk of the trilogy that simply puts an age on the film and there wasn’t a complete departure from practical effects anyway. The dwarves and titular hobbit utilised heavy prosthetics in their character design in order to adjust perspective and make them more proportionate. The facial prosthetics on the dwarves also serve as a fun little hint to the audience as to which dwarves you’re supposed to find hot by simply letting them keep their real faces. Purely for sex appeal the line of Durin were allowed to look completely human. I didn’t mind very much, a 12-year-old me found Richard Armitage as dwarven prince Thorin Oakenshield extremely attractive but this has pissed other people off because ugly people deserve stupid romance plotlines just as much as bare-faced Aidan Turner.
I do think the production should earn some points back for this heavy work the make-up and costume departments did, and even if you hate the physics defying barrels of the second film, you have to admit, they put in the work to have it as physically real as possible. Minus points for the fact that just about everything else was filmed with greenscreen and to such an extent that Ian McKellen famously lost his nerve one day while doing yet another scheduled day of solo filming in the studio. I will also admit that the creative decisions made with the orcs is sickening, even if it was of its time.
The orcs created for The Hobbit, that replaced the physical prosthetics that had initially been used at the start of the shoot, had no consistency with the orcs fans are used to from the preceding films and the orc leader, hideously named Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett), has silky smooth, pale skin and a charming sword for a hand that is sometimes switched out for other cute accessories. Azog, who had simply been a minor character in the original book, was made the primary antagonist for the entire trilogy. Armed with a creepy obsession with ending the bloodline of Durin, he seemingly spent decades being very inefficient at hunting any of these dwarves down. Luckily for him, a bunch of them conveniently got together for this quest and he was sent after them by his boss, the Necromancer, or Sauron if anyone cares.
This plotline with the orcs can feel unnecessary and just a nod to The Lord of the Rings films, particularly since they all are only briefly mentioned in The Hobbit book itself, but what it actually does, is it allows the audience a different perspective of the story. The original text is set up as a memoir by Bilbo Baggins, and so he is our sole narrator for the entire story. Everything is from his perspective and so Gandalf disappearing for a while on his wizardly business investigating the Necromancer, is just that, a disappearance for a period of the book.
The exact same thing was done with Lord of the Rings, where we mostly hear tales recounted through the ears of Frodo Baggins. Instead, we got to see Gandalf’s fight with Saruman (Christopher Lee) in the films, and instead we get to see Gandalf actually enter Dol Guldur and be attacked there in The Hobbit. The film departs from a single narrator and lets the world open up a little wider to the audience. We get to follow characters we didn’t before, like Gandalf, and so we get a glimpse into the cinematic precursor of the most famous fantasy villain of all time. It is in this way that the film makers allowed the story to lend itself to its medium and escape from the restraints put in place by its initial format.
If we really want to talk about irrelevant plots, then we can just talk about the Kili and Tauriel romance subplot. Maybe it was a bid to add a bit more depth to the character, or maybe Aidan Turner has a clause in his contract that he gets to kiss one red headed woman per casting. Overall, this part did nothing for the story and wasn’t enjoyable enough to justify it. I liked Evangeline Lily’s character in the general sense, she could have been added in without the whole love story aspect, but I guess they thought they needed something to rival Aragorn and Arwen and this was their answer. It did nothing and was a limp addition to the trilogy.
To wrap this up I want to talk about the action sequences throughout the trilogy. The entirety of these three films was filmed in 48fps, for anyone who has no clue what that means, it is the frame rate per second of the film, the standard fps used in films is 24. Jackson’s decision to stick with 48fps has been met with a lot of hatred as people accuse it of looking too much like a video game or being too detailed to blend well with the CGI. I know I have already talked about how poorly the CGI mixed with the real actors, but I do still believe that that was a case of too much CGI being used. If anything, a higher frame rate allows the animators and developers to create a more realistic CGI as they have more detailed footage to work with. It may feel jarring for the slower scenes (if you’re a wimp) but you’d be an idiot not to admit that the action scenes in 48fps looked brilliant. It gave them a smoother feel and was so easy to follow. For comparison’s sake, let’s have a look at the 2010 victim of unnecessary rebooting, Clash of the Titans. This film is rife with CGI, just like The Hobbit, but the ending appearance of the Kraken is an action-packed scene that I just find a little headache inducing. If you put the quality of scenes from both side by side the difference can be felt, particularly when it comes to lighting. From the first Hobbit film, an Unexpected Journey, they escape from an army of goblins in a cave. The transitions are smooth and there is a satisfying flow to the action that I found Clash of the Titans lacking, yet that quality was the standard.
This creative decision may not be popular, but I certainly appreciate the way it looks and the individuality that it added to the trilogy. Experimenting with unconventional techniques is what making film sometimes requires anyway and there are plenty of ugly parts of the original trilogy that truly age the film for modern viewers. Yet we accept them because we understand that these are films from a time where techniques differed, and we still love them for the story anyway. Could Peter Jackson have ditched the nasty few seconds of GoPro footage used in the barrel scene? Yes and he should have, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film and, once again, is just another small detail about the film that is reminiscent of the time it was made in.
A lot of the hate that the trilogy received seems nit-picky to me. It is the role of the audience to approach films with an open mind, something that people ruin their own enjoyment by not doing. Bad film or TV versions of beloved stories do exist (The Witcher) but the film makers behind The Hobbit are the same people behind Lord of the Rings, it would make no sense for them to bomb something that holds so much for them. It does make sense that they adapted the story to a more modern format of film making, something that upset viewers who maybe were expecting more of the same.
For me, this trilogy was a major draw to the art of film making. I had gotten to see my favourite book played out on the screen and I had loved every second of it. It’s not for everyone, but a retrospective glance back could be in order for a lot of people who decidedly hated it before it even hit cinemas. Finally, I need to answer the biggest question everyone has about Tolkien’s stories. Why didn’t the eagles just drop them at the mountain? In both cases you must remember, the enemy had incredibly powerful anti-air weapons in the form of either Nazgul or Smaug himself. If you were a huge, talking, all seeing eagle would you really want to get involved? Best to let everyone climb their own mountains.
