An Unexpected Disappointment

Rating: 7/10 (12 March 2015)

So what did I think of The Hobbit Trilogy? Well, disappointing to say the least. Poor character development, uneven GCI quality, bloated runtime, zero emotional investment, etc. The Hobbit had it's fair share of problems, and I think I know why.
First of all, nobody wanted to make these movies to begin with. As far back as the mid 90s Peter Jackson, director of what's now coined The Middle-Earth Saga was interested in making the LOTR films and expressed that making a movie for The Hobbit would be much more challenging due to the wealth of characters that had no development in the book and thus wouldn't translate to film very well. For those of you that don't know, The Hobbit was in development hell for years. Right after the final film in the LOTR trilogy came out in 2003, everyone was wondering if we would ever see a movie based on the prequel story, The Hobbit. The details are a bit fuzzy now but Guillermo del Toro was set to direct it in two parts but pulled out of the project just months before filming began for unknown reasons. To everyone's surprise though, Peter Jackson swooped in to save the project. Needless to say, fans of the LOTR films thought this was probably the greatest thing that could have happened, but I can't help but feel some of that past reluctance was still with Jackson. Maybe the studio had to pay him an incredible amount to come back. Just a theory mind you but consider this...
After Jackson came in, the movies changed. Though we didn't know much at this point, we did know that it was gong to be two films based on The Hobbit. Then the planned pair of Hobbit films became a proper trilogy. Yeah, this is where things got messy. So the reasoning behind the extra film is that they wanted to tell the story of the white councils (consisting of Gandalf, Saruman, Galadriel, and Elrond) actions during Bilbo's adventure with the dwarfs. It would take an entire third film to do this as all of this took place on the other side of Middle-Earth (or a few hundred miles south at least) and was not in The Hobbit but explained later in a different Tolkien book. This eventually leads to Bilbo standing in the background for the majority of the third film but that's a relatively minor gripe. Where things simply didn't mesh in all of this is when we are introduced to a brand new original character as well as the return of Legolas from the LOTR trilogy for no reason other than to pad out these already bloated movies with a love triangle that goes absolutely nowhere. We also briefly see Ian Holm and Elijah Wood as Old Bilbo, and Frodo Baggins respectively. I imagine this was the studios idea to constantly remind us of the LOTR trilogy to create buzz in an attempt to replicate the first trilogy's success. It backfires by wasting too much time on these unnecessary glorified cameos. Speaking of time management...
It's all made worse by a tight production schedule that had these movies being delivered under-cooked. I'm talking mainly about the special effects here. In LOTR the effects were pretty impressive for the time and CGI was used sparingly. All the Orcs were real people in makeup, sets were bigger with less green screen, and wide shots of miniatures were used to great effect in making all the locations look real, and grand in scale. In comparison, The Hobbit trilogy is bad with this stuff, like, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy bad when it comes not just to the abundance of CGI, but to the flux in quality. It just looks like crap at times. I mean, at least by Episode 3 the effects on Star Wars had been polished to the point of believably. It's the opposite here. While Gollum, and Smaug look great in the first two films respectively, there are points in the final Hobbit film that look about as photo-realistic to the live-action characters as an early Xbox 360 game. Not once was I fooled nor was I impressed by the third film visually.
So what The Hobbit Trilogy basically is, are three bloated films with bad GCI living in the shadow of a trilogy of equally long, but well paced and expertly crafted films in every conceivable way.
What's the worst is that I can see a pair of films worthy of the Peter Jackson pedigree here. Take out the forced love triangle, the Bowman's story and the White Counsel plot threads and you have two films worth every bit of recognition shoehorning Legolas and Frodo into these movies would have gotten them. Martin Freeman is a great Bilbo. Gandalf, and the dwarfs are more or less what you imagined from the book and the humor of the first film sits at just the right place to remind you that this story was based on a children's book, but takes place in an adults universe. The heart is there too. Themes of a people longing to return to their lost home, vengeance for fallen loved ones, and the lesson of what it means to put others before yourself in times of need are all present but never brought full circle. These films never stop to subtly point out the deeper meaning of things the way the Lord of the Rings films did, and it's disappointing.