Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsI LOVE Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy... but find his "Hobbit" films less impressive
Reviewed in the United States on April 19, 2021
There's a huge difference between Jackson's work on "The Lord of the Rings" and his work on "The Hobbit."
The Lord of the Rings is a HUGE epic, and even with his "extended cuts," some material had to be left out. He had to pare down to the most important elements... leaving things like the Barrow Downs and Tom Bombadil and Ghan Buri Ghan out entirely. And yes, while they were lost, the story didn't suffer for their loss... just a bit of the richness of the books' worldbuilding, but not the story itself.
But for The Hobbit, the story is fairly short. And yet, he tried to retell it in the same fashion as he told "The Lord of the Rings." Meaning, instead of working from Tolkien's source material, and removing bits that could be left out, he had to create entirely new elements Tolkien never envisioned at all, and I'd argue never INTENDED. And simply stated, Peter Jackson and his team are nowhere nearly as talented as storytellers as J. R. R. Tolkien was. So, the parts which are taken from the book... work pretty well. But all the stuff they added to the story... for the most part, it falls very, very flat.
Another difference is how the Lord of the Rings was largely... with a few notable exceptions... pretty "grounded." The Uruk Hai were men in makeup, for the most part, for example. They felt REAL. But the creatures in these new movies are almost all CGI, and the CGI feels more like a bad Playstation game than it does like reality.
It doesn't help that those creating these "fantastical CGI sequences" seem to not understand, or care about, basic physics. In "The Lord of the Rings," when the army of Sauron was attacking Minas Tirith (the capital city of Gondor), the projectiles struck walls and created damage which obeyed real physics pretty closely. But in these "Hobbit" films, physics and reality goes out the window. There's a sequence in the mines of a goblin king which is just unbearably bad... LAUGHABLY so. And there's another sequence involving barrels which utterly defies all known laws of physics.
It's like the people making the effect shots invented "how we want it to look" first, and then rendered that while turning off the "physics simulation" ENTIRELY (as that would have caused their effects to look "wrong" according to their intent!).
It's terrible. And the sad part is, this was mostly stuff INVENTED FOR THE MOVIE which wasn't part of Tolkien's story in the first place.
SO... I can only recommend these films at the "three star" level. They are OK. They have redeeming qualities. But they fall far, far from the "five star" ratings that the Lord of the Rings movies appropriately deserve.
They're worth watching, but not worth watching over, and over, and over again. They're not "immersive." There's some fine acting in them, but there's also some TERRIBLE acting (Radagast, for example, made me cringe every single time, and Benedict Cumberbatch's "smaug" voice is pretty much just the same mouth-twisting voice he used to say "KHAN" in the rebooted Star Trek movie he guest-starred in!)
The 3D is worth it... if you have a good 3D set (I do) but, again, it's like watching video game sequences, not like seeing real things happening. It's a fairly poor use of 3D in that regard... visually "kewl" but the sort of thing which, especially in action sequences, reminds you that what you're seeing isn't REAL. The 3D is much better in the "non-action" parts of the movie, frankly. The main exception to this is Smaug, which looks great in 3D (until the "gold trap" they set for him later on, which was "game-cringe-worthy" as well.)
Really, Jackson could have told the "Hobbit" story in a single long movie, or could have cut it down into two regular-length movies. But there's NO WAY it justifies a three-long-movies format.
And shoveling in the dwarf-elf romance (not in the books) or bringing every teenage girl's favorite elf back (he wasn't in the book) was just... again... cringe-worthy. Apparently trying to make the story appeal to the "tween girl" set???
So... watch the films. But don't expect the same level of quality as "The Lord of the Rings" provided. These are half the quality of those films. Still perfect fine, but not magnificient...
... and that's the real shame. They could have been. They SHOULD have been.