Why The Hobbit Trilogy Failed To Equal Lord Of The Rings

the lord of the rings is quite simply one of the greatest movie trilogies ever committed to film a brilliant adaptation of one of the best fantasy novels ever written it's a poignant and moving exploration of the power of friendship and loyalty hope and sacrifice and the temptation and corruption of power combining it all into the most epic of adventures to decide the fate of an entire world yeah it has like five different endings but what the [ __ ] when you're this damn good you've earned every single one of them it was one of the

formative movie experiences of my teenage years and a real pleasure to see one of my favorite books so faithfully adapted but all good things come to an end and with return of the king it seemed like we'd said goodbye to the world of middle earth but the only thing more powerful than the one ring is hollywood's desire to milk a popular franchise dry so ten years later we got the announcement that peter jackson was back again to direct the film adaptation of tolkien's novel the hobbits a prequel to the lord of the rings and it

was going to be a trilogy [Laughter] are you serious now i'll be honest with you here i had misgivings about this one right off the bat it really didn't feel like there was enough story to justify an entire trilogy but truly nothing could have prepared me for the shitstorm that was coming the hobbit trilogy is basically everything the lord of the rings wasn't it was simplistic and contrived and ridiculously overdone combining the worst excesses of vapid hollywood action flicks with a thin plots and characters that make your average cw show look complex and multifaceted now

i could probably spend hours breaking down each and every movie in turn exposing all of the ridiculous creative decisions one by one but honestly there's not enough booze in the world to get me through something like that so instead i'm gonna keep things short if not particularly sweet and provide you with five key reasons why the hobbit sucks ready nah me neither anyway let's get this [ __ ] moving reason the first the plots the plot for the hobbit could best be summed up like this bilbo baggins gets recruited by gandalf to accompany a group

of dwarves to the lonely mountain where they plan to kill a dragon that drove them out of their homelands they make it to the mountain but then the dragon leaves to blow up some [ __ ] and gets himself killed so now everyone wants a piece of the treasure inside the mountain but the dwarves don't want to share it but then a bunch of orcs show up and there's a big battle and the good guys eventually win oh yeah and bilbo finds a magic ring that can turn you invisible i'm sure that one will never

come up again now if this little summary seems a bit short for a movie trilogy that's almost eight hours long then you're beginning to see the problem here the lord of the rings novel came in at nearly 1200 pages which is what i like to call a target-rich environment in fact the biggest challenge they had with the movie trilogy was deciding what to cut out of it but the hobbit barely scrapes in at 300 pages it was basically a children's book with none of the dark themes complex relationships and extensive world building of the sequel

so how the [ __ ] do you spin something like that into three entire movies well if you're a lazy screenwriter of dubious ability you pump your script full of more filler than a twitch streamer's bra such as extended flashbacks and chase sequences for a pointless side character that was barely mentioned in the book and has no impact to the larger story introducing entirely new characters and cliched romantic subplots that make no logical sense in the context of the universe singing a generic antagonist with a manufactured grudge against the story's hero fumbling attempts to tie

this story into the lord of the rings shameless fan service more singing those [ __ ] eagles again which dump our heroes hundreds of miles from their destination for no obvious reason obnoxiously long cgi action sequences that go on forever and destroy any sense of tension the point i'm making is that at least 50 of this trilogy is nothing but pointless filler and like anything that doesn't add to the story it all just feels empty and unsatisfying like you're watching someone play a video game instead of a well-structured movie in lord of the rings every

encounter felt significant helping to move the plot forward or expand the rich history of the world or provide some kind of insight into the characters their outlook or motivations the best ones even managed to do all three at the same time but here it just feels like the movie's treading water trying to make each scene an event last for as long as possible because there's so little material to work with in the first place and of course peppering it all with ridiculous over-the-top action sequences which brings me neatly along to my next points number two

the action since there's so little story to work with all three of these films are chock full of boring tensionless cgi heavy action scenes that go on forever and do nothing except waste time the lord of the rings had its share of action as well but believe it or not it was usually fairly grounded and restrained well apart from legless surfing that [ __ ] shield down a flight of stairs the characters might have lived in a world of magic and monsters but it was still a world governed by rules just like ours rules like

gravity and physics and the limits of what the human body can realistically survive jump off a 500 foot cliff in middle earth and you're gonna [ __ ] die regardless of the fantastical [ __ ] that lives in the world with you when characters were put in dangerous situations in lord of the rings you actually felt tension because for the most part they were given realistic limitations to what they could endure and when they exceeded those limits well guess what but now take a look at the so-called action scenes from the hobbit movies and ask

yourself a serious question could any of this stuff ever possibly happen could anyone even hope to survive this i mean this fall alone should have killed every single one of them a dozen times over but there they are right as rain with barely a scratch on them [ __ ] off film the problem with all this stuff is that not only does it look goofy as [ __ ] but it also shatters the audience's suspension of disbelief once you realize that your characters can easily survive falls impacts and deadly situations that would definitely kill a

normal person then it's hard to feel any concern when the movie puts them in danger because well they're not as a filmmaker you can conjure up the most fantastical worlds imaginable but you still have to set rules for those worlds to abide by and you have to stick to them break them too badly or too often and your audience will disengage from your story because there's nothing left to believe in reason number three the dwarves let's be honest here in the great pantheon of fantasy creatures dwarves really got the [ __ ] end of the

stick they're short and dumpy and they look kind of ridiculous on screen if they're handled wrong gimli from lord of the rings showed us that it was possible to create interesting and multifaceted dwarf characters yeah the movies sometimes crack the odd joke at his expense to provide a bit of levity during heavy moments nobody tosses a dwarf but they also gave him scenes of genuine pathos and drama i thought i'd die fighting side by side with the house what about side by side with a friend the message here was clear this was a character you

were supposed to take seriously but the hobbit goes completely off the map with its dwarves for a start there's 13 of the [ __ ] things i mean i know there's 13 in the book so i can't exactly blame them for being faithful but there's just no way you can give 13 characters distinct personalities and outlooks never mind anything even approaching an arc in fact i doubt if most people could even identify more than four of them there's the leader one the old wise one the big angry one and uh the fat one the rest

of them just blend into a generic mass that gets lost in the background because most of the time there's [ __ ] all for them to do and worst of all they're treated as goofy clumsy comedy sidekicks they're always falling over each other or blundering into dumb traps or singing crappy songs and it's like the script wants you to mock them i mean a group of hardened warriors going on a one-way mission to reclaim their homeland is a pretty [ __ ] solid basis for a dramatic story you could do a lot to explore the

mindset of men ready to sacrifice their lives on the slim hope of success but nah the movie just resorts to [ __ ] like this instead [ __ ] off films number four the antagonists there's no other way of putting this the antagonists in this trilogy [ __ ] suck none of them have any real menace or charisma or interesting qualities that made me want to learn more about them like everything else they're treated more like cartoon characters than believable dramatic vessels for you to tell your story first there's smaug the dragon who drove the

dwarves out of their home why because he really likes gold apparently wow what a fascinating motivation there's no plan for conquest or domination with him no differing perspective that he has to offer no goal that he's working towards he sleeps under a mountain of gold because i guess food and water aren't considerations for such a massive creature and he only reacts when people disturb him then he [ __ ] off and gets himself killed by someone else great are you serious azog the defiler is basically just a generic orc that likes fighting and killing he's

not much different from that big urak hai in fellowship of the ring i mean he's got kind of a grudge against thorin for slicing off his arm but it's not exactly a complex motivation and don't even get me started on stephen fry jesus christ i've seen better villains in christmas pantomimes let us not forget that it was gilliam lord of dale your ancestor who failed to kill the beast what kind of [ __ ] ridiculous argument is that your dad failed to do something that was almost impossible therefore we should ignore your obviously smart pragmatic

and logical advice well that's definitely shite who the [ __ ] wrote this script the lord of the rings had a wide variety of antagonists with differing motivations and goals some were brutally simplistic others cunning and seditious and still others were tragically damaged beyond repair some harbored grandiose plans for conquest and domination while rising powers tried to turn the situation to their advantage and in a way the biggest antagonist of all was a little gold ring that could turn you invisible a ring that exposed the weaknesses of everyone who touched it potentially turning anyone into

an antagonist the point being the enemies and lord of the rings explored interesting ideas about the corrupting nature of power the eternal temptation to use it with good intentions the dangers of hubris ambition and pride and the power of friendship trust and loyalty they were complex and multifaceted and the fact that most of them started out as good people gave the story an added layer of pathos and poignancy but what the [ __ ] do we have here a dragon that burns entire cities to the ground because he likes doing it an ark that kills

people because he likes war a corrupt town leader that's only in power because his people are too [ __ ] stupid to get rid of him it's bland and dumb and shallow as a puddle of piss and it has nothing worthwhile to say number five bilbo bilbo's annoying as [ __ ] partly because like every other character in the hobbit he's written as a complete caricature with no depth no personal history no facets to his personality and worst of all no personal growth frodo really went through the mill in lord of the rings developing inner

strength maturity and wisdom through his long adventure but also losing something in the process by the end you could tell that he was no longer a whole man and that the destruction of the ring had left a gap in him that could never really be filled therefore you understood his eventual decision to leave middle earth bilbo doesn't really learn anything about himself or get tested like frodo did apart from being richer and better traveled he's basically the same person at the end as he was in the beginning there's none of the weary pride that comes

from the completion of a difficult quest no feeling that he's stronger or wiser or better for what he's been through he just goes right back to his normal life as if nothing happened and by the end i found myself asking what was the [ __ ] point of any of this also there's something about martin freeman that really pisses me off one because he's basically a small time character actor that somehow fell ass backwards into major movie roles with none of the magnetism or charisma needed to command the big screen and two because he's basically

been playing the same bumbling uptight socially awkward square for the past 20 years and what started out as funny and endearing is really starting to wear thin now and really this just reinforces my belief that just like seth rogen and kristen wiig he's basically made a career out of playing himself now this video is getting long as [ __ ] and i'm starting to forget what i was even talking about but i feel like i've barely scratched the surface of the hobbit's problems i haven't even mentioned the irrelevant subplot about gandalf investigating the return of

sauron and the ringwraiths featuring a bunch of d-aged actors from lord of the rings in a desperate attempt to make these films seem more legit or the unnecessary fan service cameo from legolas or the totally forced and unbelievable romance between an elf and a dwarf wait doesn't this count as an inter-species relationship or the 4k 60 frames per second viewing experience in the cinema that made the whole thing look fake as [ __ ] like i was watching a dodgy stage play or something god's sake i just missed standard frame rates and film grain is

it too much to ask that my movies look like actual movies like i said all of this stuff is basically just filler shoved in to pad out the runtime and make these movies seem like there's more going on than there really is the emotional tone also swings wildly from ridiculous slapstick humor to epic conflict to heavy and ominous drama in a matter of minutes with absolutely no sense of structure or consistency on the one hand it wants to be a fun light-hearted adventure with lots of gags to keep the kids amused but he also wants

to be an epic dramatic saga to rival the lord of the rings and well you kind of have to pick one and stick with it i think this criticism is particularly telling when you look at the wider context of these movies when lord of the rings came out there really wasn't much else to compare it to the market for big budget adaptations of fantasy novels was more dead than movie bob's youtube career but by the time the hobbit came around the landscape had completely changed game of thrones was reaching the peak of its creative and

cultural popularity and well compared to a show ram full of boobs and swearing and violence the hobbit just came across as childish and ridiculous a relic from a different time coupled together by four different screenwriters trying to recapture the magic from a decade earlier and directed by a man that really should have moved on by now and all of it done because they knew no matter how [ __ ] it was the name alone would be enough to make money and i guess that's my big takeaway from the hobbit trilogy it's a series of movies

that feels kind of unnecessary filling in the blanks of a story that's already been told and told extremely well a modest little adventure that probably would have functioned well as a standalone film but instead got packed full of unnecessary filler and scaled up into a bloated clumsy extravagant movie trilogy that nobody really asked for but hey at least it'll probably be better than the amazon tv series anyway that's all i've got for today go away now