Oi! Jackson! No!

Rating: 3/10 (13 February 2014)

I say this as a Tolkien fan who read The Hobbit several times as a boy and recently read it to my daughter, with much enjoyment, and has read The Lord Of The Rings several times, twice as an adult. I adore the LOTR films, where Peter Jackson and his writing collaborators (Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) worked wonders to get a coherent screenplay out of that massive, unwieldy tome. He jettisoned whole chunks of plot and characters - Tom Bombadil, the barrow wight, orcish politics - and few reasonable Tolkeinophiles could complain, as these omissions were clearly intended to streamline the story. Personally, my main regret is the absence of The Scouring Of The Shire, the riveting coda to the adventure of The Ring, in which the hobbits return to the Shire and put right the wrongs that have been perpetrated in their absence.
More controversially, Jackson made some radical changes to the story: Elves At Helm's Deep! Arwen's part beefed up! Tolkein would undoubtedly have deplored such meddlings with his text, and his son and literary executor Christopher, when breaking a lifetime's silence to give an interview in 2012 made his feelings clear. And yet, the appearance of a battalion of Elves to strengthen the beleaguered garrison at Helm's Deep somehow feels right, and is not at all implausible in the context of previous alliances between Elves and Men. And while one motive for beefing up the part of Arwen was undoubtedly to give the film more female interest, the love between Arwen and Aragorn is not an idle fancy of the writers, being detailed in the Appendices.
Ultimately, the fact remains that there is a huge wealth of material in the Lord Of The Rings, and the big questions for the writers concerned what to leave out. But then there were well over a thousand pages (in small typeface!) to draw on. It was always doubtful, on the other hand, whether wringing three films out of the Hobbit, a far slighter book, would work. After Part 1, I thought he might just pull it off. Although ludicrously overlong, it was a welcome chance for fans to re-immerse ourselves in that beautifully realised world. Some sections, particularly Bilbo's encounter with Gollum, are perfectly realised. Part 2 shows conclusively that Jackson hasn't pulled it off. With The Desolation Of Smaug, the project appears to be holed below the waterline. This is where the inadequacies are made manifest. So thin is the source material stretched here (barely five chapters!) that he's just Made Up A Whole Load Of Nonsense to buff out the time. Parts of it (such as the rolling barrels) look like video game footage, which for all the CGI jiggery pokery of LOTR was never a problem with those films. Those CGI achievements, which were so thrilling, yet spawned so many doleful imitations, have become the master rather than the servant.
Then there's the matter of the new characters. Tauriel's introduction was doubtless motivated partly by the same concerns behind the decision to make Arwen more prominent, principally a desire to increase the minimal female presence in the story. The trouble is that everything she does is newly introduced material that was not in the Hobbit, and as such its only real raison d'etre is to pad out the films, justifying the ludicrous decision to make three films out of this book - which both Jackson and original director Guillermo del Toro acknowledged is "lightweight" compared to LOTR. Indeed, the decision to expand from two films to three was only made in July 2013, as detailed in the films' Wikipedia entry. It is therefore certain that some of the material in both of the first two films would have been outtakes from a two-film project. There are other problems with the sequences in the Elven domain in Mirkwood: nearly all of the dialogue is laughably portentous, almost parodic of "Tolkein-speak"; Thranduil is played as a camp pantomime villain; and Tauriel's "love triangle" with Legolas and Kili is wholly implausible.
Throughout, the depiction of the Dwarfs is problematic. Their leader, Thorin, is handsome, noble and vainglorious, and not out of keeping with Tolkein's creation (although Richard Armitage's performance contains rather too much ham for my liking). The others seem to belong to a different film altogether: barely differentiated, mostly farcical, and some with hideous prosthetics. Then there is Radagast the Brown, a character who is mentioned once in The Hobbit and is only briefly in LOTR; while I have no beef in principle with making certain characters more prominent, what Jackson & Co have done to poor, blameless Radagast is turn him into the Trilogy's Jar Jar Binks, an absurd, crusty comic grotesque. In fact, sadly, the Hobbit films are shaping up to have more than just that in common with the Star Wars prequels. I am a little worried about the last film, based as it is on barely 60 pages of the book. In fact, I might hold out for the "compact version" of the films, perhaps one film of three hours or so containing the real meat of the original story. I won't be holding my breath