Movie Extra – Hobbit Issues

I am a huge fan of the original books for “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings”.  The LOTR movies were pretty good.  Spare me the cries about what was cut.  There’s simply no way to put all the action in the movie.  Things had to be cut and mostly I’m okay with the decisions.  There are a couple of things that really bug me, but overall, it’s fine.

The movies of “The Hobbit” impressed me a whole lot less.  First, expanding a very short book into three full length films was just an invitation to get it wrong.  I found myself much less comfortable with the decisions made.  The two cornerstones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy are very different with very different story telling approaches.  One is a story intended for children, the other for adults.  Once all the decisions were made, the final result was just not a particularly happy experience for me.

Turns out that there is a pretty good reason why at least the final movie was so uneven.  Because of a variety of issues, the planning for “The Battle of the Five Armies” was basically done on the fly.  For a movie of this kind the norm would be some eighteen months of careful planning and preparation.  On the blu-ray release of the movie there is an amazingly honest video extra that talks about those issues.

In the end it doesn’t relieve any of my disappointment.  At the same time I love seeing filmmakers being this open about how movies get made.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});