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Now We Know Why the Hobbit Movies Were So Awful (theguardian.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the legolas-river-scene-was-the-worst-thing-i've-ever-seen dept.

HughPickens.com writes: Everyone seems to agree that the key to the success of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy was years of careful planning before production ever began. Now Bryan Bishop writes at The Verge that in what can only be described as the most honest promotional video of all time, we find out why the Hobbit trilogy turned out to be such a boring mess. In the clip, Peter Jackson, Andy Serkis, and other production personnel confess that due to the director changeover — del Toro left the project after nearly two years of pre-production — Jackson hit the ground running, but was never able to hit the reset button to get time to establish his own vision. Once the new director was hired, the harried crew members had to scramble to redesign everything to suit Jackson's vision, but they could barely even keep up with the production schedule, let alone prepare anything in advance.

At some junctures in the process, Jackson found himself essentially having to improvise on set because there was nothing really prepared for his actors to do. "You're going on to a set and you're winging it, you've got these massively complicated scenes, no storyboards and you're making it up there and then on the spot," said Jackson. "I spent most of The Hobbit feeling like I was not on top of it."

But wait: "Peter has never made a secret of the fact that he took over the Hobbit directing job with very little preparation time remaining before shooting had to begin. It was a challenge he willingly took on. His comments are an honest reflection of his own personal feelings at times during the movie's production," says a spokesman for Jackson. "Somebody has decided to create this cut-down, using only the sections of The Gathering Clouds that discuss the difficulties faced, not the positive ways they were addressed and overcome – which are also covered in this and other featurettes."

32 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. it was just too long by prasadsurve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?

    1. Re:it was just too long by TWX · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Well, there were plenty of complaints about the LOTR movies, that they were too short relative to the stories, so take that as you will.

      I kind of wish that the miniseries format would become more popular again. Design the entire series in advance, figure out where the source-material will need bolstering as it changes from print to film, figure out how to time the dramatic elements so that each episode has something to look forward to, and package the thing where it makes sense.

      --
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    2. Re:it was just too long by Gr8Apes · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But the Hobbit, at best, was a 4 hour movie. Yes, the sitting around the fireside staring morosely into darkness or flashbacks add to the overall "feel" but if you add so many that they make the movie plod along like a hamstrung zombie, perhaps it's not too entertaining?

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    3. Re:it was just too long by TWX · · Score: 2

      And a four hour movie could easily become a five or six episode miniseries. If the directors/producers/studio wanted to tell the entire middle-earth saga then it could be part of a greater work too.

      --
      Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    4. Re:it was just too long by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 4, Insightful

      3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?

      Agreed. Before I even saw the first movie, I said, "I'd rather have a 9-movie series doing The Lord of the Rings rather than 3 long movies about The Hobbit." There just wasn't enough material and enough stories to fill the time.

      Anthony Lane, after alluding to Wagner's seemingly never-ending "Ring Cycle" of operas, in his review of the first Hobbit movie in The New Yorker probably summed it up best, concluding:

      As Bilbo says, nearing the end of the book, "Roads go ever ever on." Tell me about it.

    5. Re:it was just too long by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      3 movies for such a short story was what killed it. I mean did it have to take 1 whole movie just reach the damn mountain?

      That's key, but they also failed because the tone was wrong (and inconsistent). The Hobbit was a kids book back when those were allow to get scary - a fun adventure story with some dark moments for our hero. Our hero was clearly Bilbo: it was his narrative, and his character arc. The places where the tone got dark were specifically the places where he needed to grow, and find to courage to overcome the new difficulty. The mix of fun adventure and dark moments made perfect sense.

      This was a very different tone than LOTR, which was fundamentally a war story for adults. The Hobbit film just didn't understand that, and rushed production is no excuse. The film never really felt like Bilbo's journey "there and back again." Almost all the filler was dark and dramatic, so much so that the original fun parts of the book were now jarring and inconsistent in the movie. The inclusion of a kooky Radagast could have worked with the original story, but felt completely out of place in the film.

      But dammit, lose the cartoon rabbits. From the SW prequel trilogy and Jar Jar to the Hobbit and the rabbit sled, I support a Constitutional Amendment banning cartoon rabbits in prequel movies!
       

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    6. Re:it was just too long by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That's key, but they also failed because the tone was wrong (and inconsistent).

      I agree with this completely. The Hobbit was grand old fun adventuring.....there and back again. Something to be sung or told around the campfire. Like in the Norse tales when Thor and Loki traveled to the land of the giants, then came back. The movies tried to take on the mood of LOTR, which were supposed to be an epic battle between good and evil: so serious. The Hobbit book wasn't that, it was all in good fun.

      The only part of the movies where I thought they captured that was in the opening scenes of the first Hobbit, where the dwarves come in one at a time, and then start singing while they clean the kitchen. So lighthearted and fun.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    7. Re:it was just too long by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      It really didn't help that they tried to shoehorn a lot of stuff in. The female elf character because there aren't any major females in the book, for example. Maybe do a gender swap or something, but trying to tack on a badly written new character just didn't work. Fleshing out crap throwaway characters to make up the run time didn't work either.

      It was all just so obviously tacked on to the main, original story that it didn't even feel like Middle Earth any more.

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    8. Re:it was just too long by Wraithlyn · · Score: 2

      Bingo. I always said the biggest problem with The Hobbit films was the jarring tonal shifts between "fun & silly" (like the book) and "dark & epic" (trying to be another LOTR).

      --
      "Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
    9. Re:it was just too long by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Agreed. Before I even saw the first movie, I said, "I'd rather have a 9-movie series doing The Lord of the Rings rather than 3 long movies about The Hobbit."

      I had a couple issues with LOTR - one being Aragorn's "reluctant hero" portrayal in the movie. In the books he knew his lineage and his destiny. He took 5 minutes just saying his name and rolling off his bloodline and claim to the throne. He carried around Narsil for pete's sake.

      However, my biggest gripe is totally cutting out the moral lesson LOTR teaches. That was in the form of Tom Bombadil and the Scouring of the Shire. Both teach the same lesson (especially the Scouring of the Shire), which is that we are responsible for making the world a better place. It is up to us as individuals to play that role.

      --
      Better known as 318230.
    10. Re:it was just too long by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

      Well, there were plenty of complaints about the LOTR movies, that they were too short relative to the stories, so take that as you will.

      Those complaints were correct. LotR was a much, much longer story than The Hobbit, so *of course* it should warrant a lot more screen-time. The Hobbit was one shortish book, LotR was three rather long novels (and each novel was further divided into two "books"). Doesn't it make sense that 3 long novels shouldn't get the same amount of screen-time as one short children's book?

      I always thought that each LotR movie should have been 2-3 times as long as it was.

      The Hobbit should have been one 4-hour movie at most.

    11. Re:it was just too long by skam240 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I went into the first Hobbit movie a bit worried about how it was going to be. The dwarf dish scene really got my hopes up as it was both great and straight out of the book. Of course then the rest of the movie was both terrible and not at all like the books. Everything in the book became an action scene and worse still, they were terrible action scenes. I've never experienced so many action scenes that were boring in one movie before.

      I actually walked out of the second movie part way in. Not sure why I even bothered.

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    12. Re:it was just too long by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 2

      Actually, it was written as one book. The publisher said "Hell no, Mr. Tolkien." So it was changed.

      --
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    13. Re:it was just too long by RockDoctor · · Score: 2

      God-mode Mary Sue

      You don't understand Tom, do you? He's not "God Mode" anything. He's a god (well, Ainu), though not one of the major ones. He certainly out ranks the other Ainu in the plot (Gandalf, Sarumen, Radagast, Sauron) put together, but he's not allowed to act by orders of the Boss.

      returned soldiers from WWII

      Tolkein was referring to his own return from the trenches of WW1. Remember that he started to write this in the late 1920s.

      --
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  2. Clerks II nailed this a long time ago by JoeyRox · · Score: 2

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    1. Re:Clerks II nailed this a long time ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      If I understand correctly....

      The Lord of the Rings trilogy was made using a waterfall process, whereas the Hobbit movies were made using an agile process.

      The quality of the Lord of the Rings was higher. The Hobbit project was able to turn on a dime and be salvaged rather than die, and the result made money, but it was only barely what the clients wanted.

      Sounds about right.

    2. Re:Clerks II nailed this a long time ago by bsolar · · Score: 2

      No, that's nit correct. The Lord If The Rings was actually done with an *extremely* agile process too: Fran Walsh described writing the script for the production as "laying the track down in front of a moving train". As example Aragorn was originally supposed to be played by Stuart Townsend, but during the first month of filming it was deemed too young and Viggo Mortensen became his replacement just before filming Aragorn's first scene. There are also many instances of unplanned stuff getting thrown in, like the orcs stomping their lances during the siege or Aragorn deflecting a knife with his sword.

  3. a better cut available? anybody remix this thing? by beckett · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Never bothered seeing the Hobbit movie after i fell asleep during the first one. trend for official re-releases have been to make the movie even longer than before. I've about given up on high minded talk about Vision; use what you have, and leverage the shit out of it. Don't stand on a million dollar set equipped with millions of dollars of production equipment with A listed actors and whine about a redesign. Most directors would kill to be saddled with such high quality problems.

    having said that, have there been any fan-edits floating around that have made this watchable? Fan edits like the DeZionIzed matrix, the LOST miniseries, and Phantom Edit have been stellar improvements over the official releases. the hobbit movies are breathtaking, but Jackson is too in love with his creation to edit objectively.

  4. One Book vs. Three Books by ZahrGnosis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I didn't think there was much of a question; the lord of the rings simply had a huge amount more material that was fully assembled by the original author than the Hobbit did. It was one book, with a scattering of notes and addendums, that got stitched and stretched into three epic movies.

    It's interesting that they're admitting directorial mayhem at this point, but the direction taken from the outset was overkill and greedy. I'm sure it could have been better, but still, it took a lot to make this mess.

    Of course, I'm still going to watch them again. Someday.

  5. I loved all three! by cfalcon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Hobbit always struck me as a weak little brother to the power of the Lord of the Rings trilogy- a kid's book before he launched into what he really wanted to leave the world. While taking the one with the least content and turning it into a trilogy sounded silly to me (along with pretty much everyone), unlike the majority of Tolkein fans, I was *immediately* sold when I realized that the extra stuff he had added was to bring back characters I wanted to see a hell of a lot more of, and to highlight all the cool middle earth setting stuff. I knew they would probably never get rights to any other story in that universe again, and by turning the Hobbit into this trilogy- milking it for all it was worth- I got to see Orlando Bloom jump up a falling staircase of rocks. *And I loved that!*

    If I had been of the opinion that The Hobbit was some masterpiece of literature in the same way I feel about the epic trilogy, maybe I would have been really cross. But I just don't. It was fun and had good production value and had great characters, and gradually walked through the storyline.

    I know it's a minority opinion, but I just thought it was great.

  6. Scale and Flotsam by Dracos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There are two main problem with the movies:

    They tried to surpass the epic scale of the LoTR movies, while the book was nothing of the sort. Splitting it into three only made it worse.

    They added so much extra junk that was obviously filler. Tauriel should never have been created, and the love story with Legolos should never have been pasted in. While the stuff with Gandalf and the Necromancer was at least legitimate, it wasn't necessary to the story.

    The Hobbit movies would have been much better as a 6 part HBO miniseries. If any film project would have benefitted from a smaller budget, it was this.

    1. Re:Scale and Flotsam by mvdwege · · Score: 2

      While I agree that Tauriel was a Romantic Plot Tumor, I can live with that; she adds a few minutes to the movie at worst.

      No, the worst offenders were those long, drawn-out set pieces, like the chase scenes such as the one through the Goblin Kingdom in the first movie, or that muddled mess at the end of the third movie. That's just Jackson being self-indulgent, cutting that crap would have brought the movies down to two, and some judicious editing might have brought the whole down to only one movie.

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    2. Re:Scale and Flotsam by MightyMartian · · Score: 2

      The problem was that that to make it into a three film series, they had to insert a lot of stuff INTO the story. If they had stuck by and large to the actual book, they'd probably had a pretty good 2 to 2.5 hour film.

      --
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  7. What's Wrong with the Hobbit? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2

    The Hobbit books are to a great extent about race war. The races are alien and fictional, but they are races, and the identification of good or bad is on racial boundaries. This isn't all that unusual in the fantasy genre, or even some sci-fi.

    Lots of people love those books. And there's lots of good in them. To me, the race stuff stuck out.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:What's Wrong with the Hobbit? by skam240 · · Score: 2

      Interesting thought but I dont quite subscribe to it. Humans are very much the dominant race in Middle Earth and they had a very large presence on both sides of the war. That alone for me makes your point questionable but to really nerd out on you, the Similerian clearly lays out that the first orcs are corrupted Elves which muddles the waters on racial identity in that area as well.

      Also, what a depressing conclusion to come to. Some nebulous evil being of immense power creates a bunch of evil everyone else fights and it's a race war?

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  8. So, in movies as in software by idontgno · · Score: 2

    Forcing yourself to hit a release date, even though something catastrophic has exploded your schedule, remains the guaranteed recipe for shit.

    Oddly comforting to know it's not just us out here in software-land.

    --
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  9. I Don't Care by wisnoskij · · Score: 3, Funny

    I don't care if Jackson had to shoot the entire trilogy on a long weekend with an iphone as the only camera. That is still no excuse to have an Elf fall in love with a dwarf because he made a joke that implied his penis was a dangerous weapon. And it is certainly no excuse of the ridiculous CGI action sequences.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
  10. Re:a better cut available? anybody remix this thin by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 2

    > but Jackson is too in love with his creation to edit objectively.

    At least Jackson has the balls to admit he screwed up.

    In contradistinction to George Lucas who was completely oblivious to how bad his writing was for ages. He is/was surrounded by far too many "yes men" to tell him the Emperor had no Clothes. Lucas finally admitted he is the king of wooden dialogue.

  11. Re:a better cut available? anybody remix this thin by java_dev · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes! Look for The Hobbit: The Tolkein Edit. Cuts all the crap out, trims the three to a single movie, and makes it a much better film.

  12. How about the one fact..... by Lumpy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That they made a 6 hour trilogy out of a FUCKING SHORT STORY?

    Honestly.... what the hell, a single 2 hour movie is stretching it.

    --
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    1. Re:How about the one fact..... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      It's not a short story, it's a 300 page novel. They definitely went overboard doing 3 movies, but the novel can't be blamed for that. It's a good book, you should read it.

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  13. typical by bigdavex · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Many making-of documentaries emphasize the challenges to create a narrative around the miraculous production. IMHO, these movies sucked because:

    A) Lots of stuff happened but the characterizations were so weak that we stopped caring.
    B) The CGI orcs were boring and unbelievable next to the live footage.
    C) It was too long.

    --
    -Dave