The Sad Story of The Hobbit

Cronos and Devils Backbone are definitely the best he's ever done. Something about being young, hungry and desperate to prove yourself really brings the best out of directors like him.

Pan's Labyrinth has some great moments and generally is a pretty damned good film, but unfortunately it doesn't hold up to repeat viewings as well as I hoped it would. I think he's the kind of director that needs a bit of direction himself.

Again, great movies aren't necessarily the ones that stand up to repeated viewings. Pan's Labyrinth is goddammit magical the first trip down the rabbit hole. Of course it will be less special on the next jump. That whole first viewing you're pulling for the girl so much and you want it to be real as bad as she does.


Thanks for posting this, White. I've always hated that I don't like the Hobbit prequels after loving the LOTR trilogy to Mt Doom and back. I was worried it was your classic cynical gamer syndrome who doesn't like stuff just for not liking stuff. I'm relieved to know there are actual reasons why the movies are as bad as I think they are.

I can't even remember how many of The Hobbit movies I saw- 1 or 2. The last one I saw was the one which had that ridiculous video-game platformer style chase sequence in the old mines- another cartoon movie that is to say. The book of The Hobbit was definitely more a children's book than The Lord of the Rings, but it deserved better than being reduced to a CGI cartoon.

I still think The Hobbit Trilogy is pretty decent. The characters in The Hobbit are more interesting than most of the primary group in The LoTR. Between watery-eyed Frodo, Angsty but not Angsty Aragorn, double-plus-heart-of-goodness Sam, good Wizard, and obviously not-so-good Wizard, I spent a lot of LoTR wishing they'd just get on with it. Thorin and Bilbo have more dimension to and chemistry between their two characters than the entire Fellowship combined.

LoTR in a lot of ways is over-developed, and sometimes it feels like Jackson is trying to push how interesting he thinks Middle Earth is onto the viewer. The Hobbit does this, and it has its fair share of not getting to the point as well, but The Hobbit has sort of a campy feel that works and provides some viewer relief. LoTR did set a really high bar for a very polished weirdly paced Middle Earth trilogy and a lot of people expected another very polished weirdly paced Middle Earth trilogy. If we had gotten that it probably would have been better than what we ended up with from a critics viewpoint, but instead we got something different.

There's a fair bit more stupidness and camp in The Hobbit than LoTR, and if I had to sit a group of adults down for nine hours of Middle Earth I'd pick LoTR every time. But if I were sitting down a bunch of kids for 9 hours of trilogy (hah!) I'd pick The Hobbit every time. I wonder if I'd be able to say that if we had gotten the full unrushed Jackson treatment of The Hobbit. I doubt it. Hell, we'd probably still be bitching about it because it was more of the same or something along that line.

The core issue is that it had to be another trilogy, but this time on a hideous schedule. The fact that they accomplished what they did within the parameters they had to work with is impressive. I'm enjoy that the result of it all was something different rather than The Hobbit: Mostly Dwarves: The Lord of the Rings Extended Opening Scene Trilogy.

When it comes to Tolkien I am very unforgiving of any effort that does not capture the experience I had reading the books as a teen. (So I will never be happy.) I can tolerate LOTR but the Hobbit is unwatchable. Could Guillermo have changed that? He could hardly do worse. Even though he is uneven I connect with his stuff and admire him. He's a great follow on Twitter.

Those citing Del Toros good movies as Labyrinth and Cronos - those were done years ago. What has he done lately ? Directors who were once good can sink into shite for long periods of time - cf Ridley Scott who went through a long period of utter crap before redeeming himself with THE MARTIAN ( I recently saw the forgettable BLACKHAT and now worry that Micheal Mann may be headed for Scott territory ) . Interestingly, on IMDB Del Toro is still credited as doing the screenplay for the movies.

Here is what the first movie grossed:
Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $303,003,568 29.7%
+ Foreign: $718,100,000 70.3%

So crap movie or not, someone got a nice return on their $300,000,000 investment.

DelToro implants gratifying subliminal images in his movies to make people think they like them.

Hex Sinister wrote: DelToro implants gratifying subliminal images in his movies to make people think they like them.

I do that with my posts too.

Both of the first two Hobbit movies improved on a rewatch, especially in the extended format, which has never made much sense to me. I have yet to rewatch Battle of the Five Armies, but that was a disappointment for me too.

I dunno, I tend to be pretty charitable with later additions to series like this. I'm generally more accepting of the Star Wars prequels and the fourth Indiana Jones movie, just because I like spending more time in a world, and I generally think such movies are not as black-and-white as people like to make them. But as much as I like parts of the Hobbit movies, they have a much stronger whiff of cash-in to me than either later Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies, all of which tried to do something different regardless of their actual merits. Parts of the Hobbit movies looked like they were put in there because battles were what people liked, and so let's put in battles! It all had a very slapdash feeling to it.

I still like them mostly, but not necessarily because they are super high-quality. I don't have to be a critic with them, so I can take that attitude.