Hollywood can't handle mysterious fantasy epics

Rating: 6/10 (13 December 2014)

The most amazing thing about Tolkein, or Star Wars, was that you didn't know what happened in the middles or between the movies, or books. Tolkein's stories only loosely fit together because of how he wrote each one, but this was the most amazing thing about his writing. We were left to guess how Sauron turned to the dark, or what Gandalf, Sauron and Galadriel were doing before Lord of the Rings. One had to read the Simarilion, but even then one couldn't fit together the whole story because the world was so much bigger than its fractured records in Tolkein's prose.
This generation of movie makers, from Lucas to Jackson, have ruined the fantasy genre by seeking to tie together every storyline leaving little to mystery. There are so many repeated images and characutures of the LOTR that the Hobbit only makes Tolkein's world so much smaller. Movie magic ruined too much of the mystery of Middle Earth.
Even then, there are countless plot holes, and useless plot devices in the Hobbit. Now that three movies were created, the Arkenstone, and the Dragon's madness both are pointless next to the greed inspired by the actual horde of gold. At one point a bell breaks through a door, swinging as dwarfs exit, but disappears by the next shot. Orc commanders are not destroyed or suffocated by Arda's water, but somehow pretend to go to sleep in it. Even Legolas' story is tied into LOTR in a a dreary manner that reeks of a neurotic perfectionism that somehow misses the whole point of how big Tolkein's world really is.
If JJ Ambrams is smart, which I'm not counting on, he'll learn from Jackson's Hobbit movie, and Lucas' errors and make the Star Trek and Star Wars universes much bigger than they ever were before by purposely leaving things to mysterious developments that go unanswered- but without developing new gaping plot holes.