A Hour (or Two Films) Too Long
Lest you forget: The Hobbit was originally a children’s adventure novel – and it wasn’t a trilogy. The book was low on pitched battles and warg-riding Orcs. Instead, Bilbo traveled with a company of bumbling dwarves and the group’s survival hinged on cunning and luck. Some of the things that turned out to be major points in the film (The White Council meeting, Radagast the Brown, Azog the Defiler) were minor happenings or completely unmentioned in the original novel (Jackson does pull from J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium quite a bit to pad out these films). Some of these changes, like elevating Azog to a major threat, I didn’t have much of a problem with – we Americans have been raised on a steady diet of booming action films, and a palpably evil antagonist caters to our expectations.
Still, I think that this film, and this property overall, deserved a little less bombast and a little more thoughtfulness. A lot of screen time is dedicated to lackluster action scenes, overly brood-y characters, and a particularly buffoonish set of minor villains. A battle that took only a few pages in the original work lasts an entire bloody, runtime padding hour in the final film. And, being completely honest, aside from a few slap boxing matches here and there, not much of the fighting is inspiring. The Battle of Helm’s Deep, this is not – though it tries very hard at points to bring that old thing back. Had Peter Jackson & Co. leaned a little less on making this film series a dedicated Lord of the Rings prequel and stuck more to the original work’s themes of mercy and adventure, we might have gotten an entirely different – and possibly much better – film series.
Source: Troy L. Wiggins at afrofantasy.wordpress.com