The third of The Hobbit movies (review of the second) released last month, and I’m really at a loss as to what to say that I haven’t said to start with. This book, in it’s 300 or so pages, should NOT have been made into three movies. At 300 pages, it is about 1/3rd the length of the Lord of the Rings “Trilogy”, which was made into three movies quite successfully. I may even allow for The Hobbit to have been two movies, but at three, it was just pointless. The movie, while quite pretty, was just dull. It was nearly all CGI. While I have a very high tolerance for action sequences, this movie was quite literally an hour and a half of action. The Hobbit, specifically, was in maybe 15 minutes of the movie. And while I don’t mind some of Peter Jackson’s liberties with the stories he’s done, the fact he killed a few characters in this movie is just upsetting. Also, this movie suffered from the same problem as the first: not spending enough time with the standard 24FPS version. There were several CG scenes where everything got grainy… like they didn’t fully render/anti-alias the CG.
I honestly don’t want to review this movie beyond this. I’ll be quite generous and give it a a score based on how it looked. But really, you could easily take all 3 movies, cut out all the fat, and make a solid 3-3.5 hour movie (RoTK length), and it would be much more enjoyable.
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
Peter Jackson earned a fair amount of ire when it was announced he had taken a book that has all of 320 pages, and broken it up into the same number of movies as The “Lord of the Rings” which comes in at almost 3x the size (nearly 1200 pages). How could he possibly take 9 hours to tell a story? To answer, it would seem he has used the opposite of what he did with LoTR, in that he’s expanded areas previously only touched on in the book, unlike in LoTR where entire sections were cut (Tom Bombadil, for example). (Un)fortunately he’s also added characters from LoTR that were unmentioned in “The Hobbit”, which we’ll get to.