A thing to note before I begin in earnest. I’m not big on Tolkien. I’ve read LOTR, and The Hobbit. I think I even have a copy of The Silmarillion around here somewhere, but I’ve never finished it. I only mention it because this conversation will not revolve around Peter Jackson’s adherence to the source material. I appreciate what Tolkien did for the genre, and I’m in awe of the world he constructed, but his style doesn’t do it for me.

Now, a rainy Sunday brought this one on. I had no deeds to do and no promises to keep, save a few loads of laundry, so I browsed around HBO Max, and settled on a re-watch of The Hobbit. Yes, all three films. Yes, I did it over the course of a day, all eight hours. No, you can’t judge me, because I know you did the same thing when Tiger King hit last Spring.

I saw An Unexpected Journey in a theater, within a few days of its release. I was unimpressed to the point that I waited for the home releases of The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies. I liked Smaug a little less and Five Armies a little more, but not enough to revisit them in recent years. As with all things related to this column, years passed, pandemics happened, and here we are.

Do I like them better than I did before?

Maybe.

There are good bits. As always, Jackson’s casting is inspired. There is no one on the planet more suited to play Bilbo at this age than Martin Freeman. Richard Armitage is wonderful as Thorin. The returning players are all in good form, though it is tough to ignore the fact that, being guys in their late-thirties, Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood don’t look like guys in their early-twenties anymore. I enjoyed the interplay between the dwarves. The music is delightful, and the production design always blows me away. A lot of it works, and works well, but a lot of it doesn’t, and there’s no getting around that.

The biggest problem, the one everyone talks about, is the length. I remember being worried when I heard they were doing three films. I was a little concerned about two, which was the original plan, but three seemed ridiculous. How in the world do you take a book that can be read in an afternoon and turn it into eight hours-worth of movie? The answer, I suppose, is that you try to guess at what was happening when the reader wasn’t looking. What exactly was Gandalf up to when he bailed? They visit the wood elves in the book, and Legolas is a wood elf. What if he showed up and brought his girlfriend? How can we get Sauron into this, to make it fit with the other movies?

I don’t mind additions, as a rule. They can be necessary beasts on occasion. Arwen, for example, is way more important in the LOTR films than she is in the books, and it’s a good touch. The changes to Faramir in The Two Towers were reasonable enough. That little shrunken head guy on the Knight’s Bus in Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban? Big fan. It’s trickier with The Hobbit though because the changes feel like they were made for the sake of expansion, rather than necessity.

Let’s look at it this way. One of the more controversial decisions that Jackson made with LOTR was pulling Tom Bombadil from The Fellowship of the Ring. This didn’t bother me in the least. I still think he’s an obnoxious character. Jackson justified it by explaining that his story’s focus was on Frodo taking the ring to Mordor and destroying it. Everything else in the films had to serve that main through-line. So, with that in mind, what impact does Bombadil have on Frodo’s goal? He doesn’t have one, so they ditched him. It may not have been popular with the purists, but it makes sense on the screen.

What’s baffling is that you can apply the same logic to Gandalf’s search for The Necromancer/Sauron in The Hobbit trilogy. If the story of The Hobbit is Bilbo joining the dwarves in their quest to take back the Lonely Mountain, then what impact does Gandalf’s side-hustle have on that story? Absolutely none. What impact do Legolas and Tauriel have? Again, absolutely none. Tauriel being the aforementioned girlfriend, who could have been an interesting addition had they not reduced her to a girlfriend and made Legolas into a bit of a dick in the process. Pull all of them out and the story plays out in the exact same fashion. The only reason they are there is to justify the existence of all three films and tie them directly to the LOTR trilogy, which makes it a purely commercial decision. For me, that’s not good enough.

I still don’t like these movies, though I may watch them again from time to time. I expect that’s more out of reminiscence than anything else. I enjoy this world. It’s fun to dive back into it now and again. Some of it works, but when everything is weighed in the balance, they are far too bloated to serve any masters beyond nostalgia.

One Last Thing – if you want a deep dive into Middle Earth, buy the Blu-ray (4K, if you’re nasty) collection of the LOTR extended editions, and chase each film with their supplemental documentaries. The biographical information on Tolkien alone is worth a look.