Why I Hate The Hobbit

So what I want to discuss this week is the ending of a worldwide cinematic phenomenon: The Lord of the Rings. As I’m sure just about everyone who hasn’t been living under the biggest of boulders is aware, just last year the last of The Hobbit trilogy was released, but I have not gotten around to actually watching the last movie until the week before last so I have refrained from talking about this franchise in a written capacity until now.

I HATE The Hobbit movies. Now before all the Hobbit fans lynch me: give me a chance to explain. The Hobbit trilogy is a series of decently written, well-acted and well directed films, but they are also almost unwatchably terrible in many other ways: first of all adapting what amounts to an average length novel into 3 movies is simply ridiculous, also there is great inconsistency in the tone and style of the elements they added, and it further represents a trend in popular filmmaking that I have developed a hatred for in recent years.

First off, and most obviously, I will tackle the issue of length. It’s no secret that The Hobbit is nowhere near as long as the Lord of the Rings. In fact my copy of The Hobbit (a nice hard cover version with full page illustrations, and about 1.5 in margins) is only 317 pages, and the book itself has a word count of 95,022 words; which is extraordinarily short for a fantasy novel. So why oh why is The Hobbit trilogy just over 8 hours long when much longer books like the later Harry Potter novels get adapted into MUCH shorter movies? The answer as I see it is money, but more on that later what I want to discuss here is why the length is a problem. Even with the added story elements The Hobbit movies are plagued with fluff: over long action scenes (the barrel ride anyone?), pointless flavor moments (cause I want ALL the details of how they are going to pay Bard for getting them into lake town), and of course barely relevant subplots (but again more on that later). The problem with adding all these pointless bits is it creates an annoyingly long movie that can be mostly slept through without missing a single thing. I saw the first Hobbit movie the night of release, and I naturally fell asleep about half way through (the first time I have ever fallen asleep at a midnight showing by the way) and woke up probably about 10-20 minutes later, and the character’s situation had barely changed. I also managed to sleep through the barrel riding action scene in the second one without ever feeling lost or confused. This offends me personally as a film lover that they are wasting my time with overlong, and pointless sequences.

Now a common reaction to my complaints of length and pointless additions is that the bulk of the scenes added to the story for the movie actually have the purpose of connecting The Hobbit movies to The Lord of the Rings. That is all well and good, but what people fail to understand is that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are COMPLETELY tonally incompatible. The Lord of the Rings is a fantasy epic, and The Hobbit is a light adventure story. Despite the fact The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings are in the same universe it’s like adding scenes from Game of Thrones into The Princess Bride. You get one scene of completely ridiculously stupid trolls contrasted with Thorin’s role in the Battle of Azanulbizar in Nanduhirion (I bet most of you who have seen The Hobbit don’t even remember that pointless bit of fluff). Now granted that particular scene doesn't do much to connect The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings, but I feel it gets my point across. There are serious tonal incompatibilities between the two stories and intermixing them as Peter Jackson has done here is REALLY a bad move.

Now this is the part where I get a bit off topic and ranty: The Hobbit trilogy is very symptomatic of a growing trend in Hollywood which may not be the worst thing ever, but seems to be taking over: Franchising EVERYTHING. The Hobbit, although part of The Lord of the Rings franchise, still had to be more connected with LotR and turned into a sub-franchise of its own, even though it could have easily been a self-contained 3 hour movie (see the numerous fan-edits already out there for download). This is happening to everything, every big movie in the past 3-4 years has been a part of an established franchise or starting a new one. Even the only big stand-alone movie in recent memory, Interstellar, is getting sequel rumors. The obvious question here is: How is this a bad thing? We are getting more and more of the themes and characters we love. This is a bad thing, because it could kill the stand alone film. The Avengers is nearly impossible to understand if you haven’t been keeping up with the other movies, and that’s not even technically a sequel. Sometime soon there may be a time when there isn't a single movie out there that can stand alone as a good movie and will just about everything will require hours of reading, watching, and listening to a massive amount of only semi-related content in order to enjoy it. Now I understand this is an almost ridiculous over the top vision of the future, but I think that even something on a smaller scale would be tragic.