Written By: Dan Geer
When Guillermo del Toro left the director’s chair on The Hobbit trilogy, Peter Jackson stepped up and took the reins once again for Middle Earth and decided to direct. This posed a huge problem for Jackson and his team of designers and writers, and put a tremendous amount of pressure on everyone because Jackson’s vision differed greatly from del Toro’s. They basically had to redesign the films all over again, essentially throwing out a year and a half’s work of pre-production time out the window. What this meant for Jackson was that he was not able to have that same amount of prep time for his version of the films, and the vast majority of the time he had to wing it on set.
Now that the Extended Edition of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies has finally been released, one of the special features on this release chronicles what it was like for the director, as well as the designers and writers to go through this trial of getting these films completed in light of what happened. A segment of the video has gone viral, with many movie sites claiming this is Jackson owning up to the reason why The Hobbit films were supposedly “a mess.”
I argue the exact opposite. Watch the video below first, and then we’ll dive in!
The Hobbit trilogy has garnered much disappointment from fans of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with critcs like FirstShowing.net‘s Alex Billington claiming that “they just don’t have that same magical feeling as the Lord of the Rings films,” and that the above documentary gives us the definitive reason why.
Number one, the vast majority of what’s being talked about here is the design of the films. Jackson does say that the lack of pre-production time also had an impact on crafting the script and story details, and improvising on the fly was something that had to be done as a result – but the main point of the above segment is dealing with the lack of time to design the films. However, in the end, can anyone truly find anything in the design that’s terrible, and doesn’t resemble the Middle Earth Jackson created in The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Even if the films aren’t as good as The Lord of the Rings, they still look and feel like the same world, just 60 years earlier. I guarantee that if Guillermo del Toro’s designs were the end result, we’d feel much more disconnected from Middle Earth with these films.
Number two, Jackson is not saying here that The Hobbit trilogy is a mess. What he’s saying is that, despite everything that happened, they were still able to pull off a successful trilogy adaptation of The Hobbit. He sites his 25 years of film-making experience as the tool that allowed him to do so, and that if he didn’t have that experience, the end result would indeed be a mess because he wouldn’t know how to handle it.
There’s another, much simpler reason why The Hobbit trilogy is not as good as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Pretend for a moment that The Lord of the Rings film trilogy never existed, and only The Hobbit trilogy did. We would never have all these hang-ups going in expecting the “same magical feeling” Lord of the Rings brought us. We’d simply be able to judge the films on their own merits, and how well they work together as a fantasy trilogy in and of themselves. The script is still coherent and engaging, the acting was great and the look and tone of the films are fantastic and magical in their own right. Granted, this is my opinion, of course. But if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who has never seen The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I’m willing to bet you’d feel the same way.
It’s this exact scenario that allowed The Hobbit novel to be judged fairly back in 1937. It was released first, over a decade before The Lord of the Rings novel. People had no knowledge of The Lord of the Rings, and thus had nothing to weigh The Hobbit against except itself. So when The Lord of the Rings was finally published years later, people had already grown quite fond of The Hobbit over the years, and therefore still appreciated it for what it is, even though The Lord of the Rings is generally considered to be a much more engaging story on a grander scale by those same fans of The Hobbit novel.
Just imagine if it was the other way around, and The Hobbit was published years later – after The Lord of the Rings. Can you imagine being given such a simpler and lesser tale over a decade later, after the publication of Rings? Can you conceive of the disappointment that would have followed? Oh wait – yes you can, because that is exactly what happened with the release of the films!
I actually agree with critics like Billington when they say that The Hobbit films don’t quite have that same magical feeling as The Lord of the Rings. But like I’ve pointed out in my reviews of these films, this could never be. The real reason that “same” magical feeling does not exist in The Hobbit trilogy is because the story was never as good to begin with. It was just the beginning of a world that Professor J.R.R. Tolkien took years and years to flesh out and perfect with The Lord of the Rings, which is really the climax to the entire story of Middle Earth. How can we in our right minds expect The Hobbit films to be just as good then, capturing that same magical feeling that the book never captures? How can we expect the beginning to be just as riveting as the end? That’s like being fed an appetizer after you’ve already had a delicious $60.00 steak dinner, and then complaining that the appetizer doesn’t taste as great. Well, of course not!
Even if Jackson had that year and a half of prep time, and Jackson was able to polish the designs and script some more, the story and “magical feeling” still would not have resonated with fans like The Lord of the Rings trilogy did. The Hobbit is just not as good, plain and simple, so the films could never be either – whether they were an exact adaptation or the version we ended up with. If anything, Jackson and his team of creatives improved on the story, making it feel more like the world he brought to the screen years earlier in The Lord of the Rings (something that could never be done with a more literal adaptation), and Jackson should be commended, not crucified for what he achieved with The Hobbit trilogy.
Take away The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hobbit films become magical in their own right. They would probably be considered the greatest on-screen fantasy epic of all time. But because we already have been given the greater story, these exact same films have become “a mess” somehow in the eyes of many fans. The logic just doesn’t make sense. They’re simply not as great because the story never was, and there’s not really much more than could be done with the films to change that. But that doesn’t make them bad films. The trilogy is exactly what it should be, in that it’s a perfectly serviceable and engaging beginning that sets up the greater climax of The Lord of the Rings.
Sure, the films may have flaws, and choices may have been made that made them not as good as they maybe could have been. But the vast majority of criticism lies in that simple statement of not having that “same magical feeling.” We wouldn’t be saying that if we viewed the films in exactly the same manner as fans of the novel viewed the book when it was first published – new and fresh, and not as something living in the shadow of something greater. It’s then, and only then that we can legitimately compare and contrast with what we have already seen.
Update:
Here’s an official press release from Wingnut films addressing this 6-minute cut of a documentary that takes things completely out of context:
The You Tube clip is a 6min cutdown of a 45min featurette (one of many) from the recent Battle of the Five Armies Extended Cut DVD, entitled “The Gathering Clouds” [sic]. Somebody has decided to create this cutdown using only the sections of “The Gathering Clouds” that discuss the difficulties faced, not the positive ways they were addressed and overcome – which are also covered in this and other featurettes.
Peter has never made a secret of the fact that he took over the Hobbit directing job with very little preparation time remaining before shooting had to begin. It was a challenge he willingly took on. His comments are an honest reflection of his own personal feelings at times during the movie’s production.
However they are not a reflection of either the actual production of these 3 movies – which was very tight, professional, happy, and finished on schedule and budget – nor do they reflect the finished result. Peter is very proud of the 3 Hobbit movies, and actually regards this period as one of his happiest film making experiences – something he has said publicly many times.
Shifting 2 months of shooting from 2012 into 2013 to allow the long and very complex battle sequence to be properly planned and shot, had no impact on the budget or release date. It is exactly what any responsible director should do, given the compressed pre-production time Peter had for these 3 technically difficult movies.
Ever since The Frighteners, Peter has tried to provide fans with honest, detailed, “warts and all” behind the scenes featurettes – compared to the usual bland Hollywood publicity material seen on most other DVDs. It’s a little sad to see desperate media outlets hijack this honesty to feed their ravenous appetite for negative sensationalism.
