The Sad Story of The Hobbit

Interesting video here. Seems like the whole production got hosed when Guillermo pulled out and Jackson had to take the reigns without a new timeline to accommodate a new director. I wonder if the films would have been better had Jackson the full amount of time to work on the trilogy. Apparently, they made these films almost on the fly. Damn.

Well at least he can admit those movies were half assed though I don't think that months long break made The Battle of Five Armies any better. Of a series of weak movies it was by far the weakest.

haha, wow, that is about as frank as it gets.

I watched them all at home and enjoyed them a lot. I do think though that the decreased expectations, from watching at home, lowered my standards a tad. But I enjoyed them in a Sunday Matinee kind of way. I can see how they aren't as literary as LOTR, but the book itself never was either so it didn't bother me. I can also see how they move a little too quickly as well, and that makes sense seeing this. To me they don't ruin the film so much as just give it a different kind of feel. The Hobbit films feel like a lower class kind of movie but one that works somehow despite itself and is still fun. Even if LOTR is better in almost every way the Hobbit movies aren't that dissimilar and they have an element of fun that is simply missing in LOTR's more stodgy narrative. They feel looser and that is a kind of strength.

I never heard if Guillermo quit or was shown the door. I regretted his departure but after seeing Crimson Peak I dunno.

Dan Lamb wrote: I never heard if Guillermo quit or was shown the door. I regretted his departure but after seeing Crimson Peak I dunno.

Crimson Peak was exactly what Guillermo intended: a gothic romance with ghosts and violence. Turns out that there wasn't much of an audience for that kind of movie. Too violent and scary for gothic romance fans, and too emo for horror movie fans.

The sad, sad story of the Hobbit, with its dozens of millions of dollars of budget, more than any director could hope for.

Project mismanagement pure and simple. I deal with this everyday on the micro scale, I have no sympathy for the people at the top of this particular food chain.

I have not watched the video, but from what I've read, I am not buying Jacksons explanation. We started to see elements of bloat in the later LotR films, and the continuation in the Hobbit movies. Call it the Wachowski syndrome. While he may not have had as much development time, it doesn't explain the bloat . This was all about milking the franchise cow.

I enjoyed them. I mean, they weren't groundbreaking like the LOTR films were but they were still good films with good storytelling.

It kind of turns out that Guillermo Del Toro is actually not really all that great a filmmaker. Sorry, he's just not. Great ideas, big heart, lots of enthusiasm...but like Tim Burton, he's almost completely dependent on production design.

As for The Hobbit films, they are watchable and mildly entertaining in small doses...but they are also somewhat excruciating and at times execrable. It really shows that Jackson and co. did not have the proper time or resources to prepare for these films, and from what I have heard anecdotally, they didn't even have some of the costumes and art elements designed when they started shooting. And the script wasn't even in a final draft state, they were doing rewrites during production.The result shows on film- everything is sloppy, slapdash and inconsistent over 9+ grueling hours. Battle of Five Armies suffers the most, because at that point what they had was (in Bilbo's words) like butter scraped over too much bread. So 3/4 of the film is something like an exaggerated Warhammer Fantasy Battles cut scene from a video game stocked full of completely asinine "hero" moments like Thranduil riding the giant moose and using it to rack up Orcs and decapitate them more efficiently.

The casting also seems rushed and ill-considered. Martin Freeman is great. Everyone is...just not. Evangeline Lily seems to be confused as to what she signed on for. Lee Pace's direction seems to have been "act slightly creepy and melodramatic". A couple of the dwarves are fine, but a couple are just not.

And then there's anything with Beorn in it...ugh.

As meticulous and detailed as the LOTR were, as prepared and measured as they were, I think what is shocking about The Hobbit series is that it was just so half-assed, mismanaged and messy. And it has that Jackson bloat in it- when these movies come up in conversation, I usually say that I wish that they were directed by LOTR Peter Jackson and not King Kong Peter Jackson. Because these movies are more like King Kong that LOTR.

Tim Burton, that is a great comparison Barnes. Spot on.

Sorry, but you're wrong about Del Toro.

Cronos is a masterpiece, as was Pan's Labyrinth. There's plenty of writers, directors, and producers who are "good" but never achieve the films that he has made. He took a shit script, a shit cast, and a half-baked vision and made it watchable (with regard to The Hobbit films).

I didn't realize how rushed and unprepared the crew were going into shooting The Hobbit. Having watched that video I'm even more impressed with what they managed to pull off.

If they were so pressed for time then perhaps cutting it down to 1 movie would have helped. Or at least made the 3 shorter and more streamlined.

Cronos remains Del Toro's best film- by far. The Devil's Backbone is actually better than Pan's Labyrinth, which would be a boring, stodgy "foreign film about the war" without the production design. Pacific Rim was big dumb fun. The Hellboy movies are worth watching one time each. Blade 2 was pretty awesome, but on a modern day "Blaxploitation" level. Haven't seen Crimson Peak. What I take away from his movies is that the qualities that everyone remembers the most are the production design, the creatures, and so forth. The actual direction and stories...are not remarkable. I think there is a reason that so many of his ideas get stuck in development. He might be better served in a medium such as video games or comics. I think The Hobbit would have been similar to his past work- decent but unremarkable direction, awesome art direction.

At some point, New Line really should have put the brakes on the production- if not completely halting it, they should have had a re-think of how they were going to get these made. It likely got to a "point of no return" and Del Toro exited, that put it into a tailspin. Suddenly you had stakeholders and money tied up in a three picture deal (with a major, majorly expensive license in the mix). Probably a situation where the best case scenario was that the movie would likely make an ROI regardless of its quality. Which is exactly what happened because it did do fairly well at the box office despite negative sentiment toward them.

The films just feel really awkward and weird to me...they almost have that sense of Prequel tone-deafness. But once I found out about how rushed everything was, how unprepared the production as a whole was...it made sense. Like those dwarf costumes...there was no way that some of those were the kinds of things you'd see as a top choice among some better-considered designs more in line with LOTR. It goes without saying too that the script just meanders around, sloppily transitioning from episode to episode (usually through some kind of falling- I'm serious, watch how many times everybody falls in the first movie) and trying to pack in a bunch of "epic" moments to fool the audience into thinking that The Hobbit is a story that has any kind of scope or grandeur. The subplots are flimsy and all too obviously bolted on, like that hilariously awful romance between elf and dwarf. I mean come on. But that is the kind of work you get when you're like "shit, we owe the studio an hour more...no wait...SIX hours more..."