Positive and Negative Press

[Alatar]

I thought it might be worth creating another thread for Press opinions, even ones as early and uninformed as this one!

Peter Jackson's three Hobbit films suggest he is running on empty

Is the Lord of the Rings director pushing his new Tolkien project to ridiculous extremes because he has nothing else to offer?


News about Peter Jackson's ever-expanding Hobbit project continues to appear. Last month he announced that "the richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins," by translating it into three movies. Over the weekend, Warner Bros confirmed that the three films will be titled An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug and There and Back Again.

The Hobbit is a shorter book than even The Fellowship of the Ring alone, and it tells a pretty snappy story, with a more upbeat, playful tone than The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is debatable whether the novel could reasonably be stretched to two films, and so responses to the news that it will now be stretched much further are pretty mixed. Some fans are glad at the project of more time spent in Middle Earth, and are pleased to hear that Jackson will incorporate material from the appendices to LOTR. Others are not so glad, and you can read fan responses on Jackson's Facebook page, as well as on a whole bunch of other movie sites.

The critique is pretty simple – Jackson and his team are stretching a simple story beyond reasonable limits to make more money from ticket sales. Harry Potter was the first franchise to split books, turning the Deathly Hallows into two separate movies. Although there was some creative rationale for the split – Deathly Hallows was a long book, and it meant we got two tonally distinct movies – it's also true Warner Bros probably increased its grosses by many hundreds of millions in the process. Other franchises, including Twilight and The Hunger Games, have since followed suit. Jackson, though, seems to be taking this idea to extremes, and many fans are up in arms at what they see as a blatant cash grab.

I'm not sure I agree this will be a total bust: I generally like my blockbusters slow and introspective, so this change may work for me as a viewer. I'm also not sure money is the only factor. In fact, I think something much more dispiriting has motivated the decision: creative stagnation.

Jackson started out as a director of low-budget horror movies in New Zealand. Although he came to Hollywood in the late 1990s, he had never had any major hits, and his background meant he was an unusual figure to take on a property as big as LOTR. But Warner Bros and New Line took a chance on him, and were rewarded with a remarkably successful series of films – successful at the box office, but also successful as creatively daring and accomplished movies.

Since then, though, Jackson has struggled to recreate the success. His long-gestating King Kong made money, but was also bloated and oddly shoddy (for example, the original soundtrack was dumped weeks before release, and a bland generic score took its place, which undercut many of the film's intended emotional beats). The Lovely Bones has its supporters, but it was a critical and commercial failure.

Jackson continued to work as a producer, and following a protracted battle for the rights, he had hoped to oversee The Hobbit in that position. When Guillermo del Toro dropped out, Jackson took the director's chair, and we end up back where we were 10 years ago – with one key difference. When Jackson took on LOTR, he was an ambitious outsider with a daring project. Now he is an established director on his uppers, revisiting past glories in lieu of anything better to do. Directing The Hobbit is arguably a sign that Jackson is out of ideas. His other projects haven't quite delivered in various ways, and so he has returned to terrain he covered successfully back in the day.

It's hard to see how making The Hobbit could be considered a positive step for Jackson. However, splitting the story into three separate films takes the moribund self-absorption of the project to entirely new levels. It looks as if Jackson is running entirely on empty, pushing this side project to ridiculous extremes because he has nothing else to offer.

Who knows, the movie(s) might be good, and I might have to eat my words. While it may be maddening for those who see cold, hard profit as the prime motivation behind The Hobbit, it looks sad rather than venal to me. Jackson used to be a genuinely capable and interesting figure, with a particular talent for pioneering technical accomplishments (his decision to film in 48fps is the most compelling thing about The Hobbit). It sounds crazy to say, in light of the visionary epic fantasies he has created, but surely he could choose more creatively ambitious projects than this. Tolkien seems to have created the idealised past of Middle Earth in order to escape a confusing present. It's a shame to see Jackson doing the same.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Um, who's opinion is that?

Edit: It is from the Guardian, no byline apparent:

Peter Jackson's three Hobbit films suggest he is running on empty

[Primula Baggins]

Tolkien seems to have created the idealised past of Middle Earth in order to escape a confusing present.

This is all I need to see to define the level of insight in that article.

[Pearly Di]

Tolkien seems to have created the idealised past of Middle Earth in order to escape a confusing present.

This is all I need to see to define the level of insight in that article.

That was my initial reaction too, Prim, but a fellow Tolkienite and I were discussing this on FB and she agreed with the Guardian writer that LotR is escapist, and she also thought there was a lot of truth in that rather damning statement.

Would any of us deny that, really? To be sure, Tolkien's imaginative fiction is glorious, beautiful, therapeutic escapism, and his work is deeper than that line suggests, but ... how else would we describe it?

I absolutely adore Tolkien and his books, but he, like his colleague C.S. Lewis (whom I also love) were a couple of reactionaries, even for their time.

As for James Russell's article, it seems to be engendering outraged responses along the lines of 'OMG how dare you diss PJ'. But I think Russell is simply saying out loud what some of us suspect might be true but we will be delighted to be proved wrong.

I hope he's wrong about this. But, at any rate, I would rather watch three unnecessary films about Middle-earth than one single Twilight film.

I was sceptical about Deathly Hallows being split but have to admit it wasn't half as bad as I feared (although DH1 drags in the middle).

PJ's King Kong was also let down by a draggy middle, IMO.

[Alatar]

I think it all depends on whether you accept his underlying assertation that 3 films is too many for the Hobbit. Personally, I'm not convinced of that argument. I believed GdT when he said there was too much story in The Hobbit for one film, and I think PJ has no good reason to risk his reputation by extending it further unless he believes it will make better movies. This is not some studio exec saying "Make three, it'll increase the Box Office". This is the Academy Award winning director deciding his legacy would be better served with more time to tell the story.

Now, we know PJ can be self indulgent. He may be wrong about needing that extra time. However, I believe his decisions were based on artistic choices, not desperate cries of inadequacy. This is simply an ill informed opinion piece basing an entire article on the assertion that the book is smaller than even Fellowship of the Ring, so therefore the film should be shorter too. Its just wrong. And no matter how cleverly he may build his arguments after that, they're still based on the foundation of an incorrect assertion. His lovely castle is built on sand.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I agree completely, Al. Moreover, while my first preference continues to be one long film based strictly on the book with no Dol Guldur/White Council add-ins, I think that three films makes much more sense from a cinematic point of view than two. I was always worried that a second film with Smaug's death occurring in the first sense would simply be nonsensical. Structurally, three films makes much more sense. And while I am sure that there plenty of self-indulgent material that makes me cringe to fill out those three films, there will also be all the more brilliant Middle-earth adaptation (including probably virtually everything from the book, The Hobbit).

[Primula Baggins]

Di, in my remark I wasn't denying that reading LotR is a lovely escape. It is. What I resented was the implication, which seemed clear to me, that Tolkien wrote LotR because of his personal inadequacy to face a "confusing present"—that it was his escape, created only to take himself away from realities he was too weak or too dim to face.

[kzer_za]

Well, there is an element of nostalgia for the past and anti-modernism in LotR, or "wish fulfillment" as Shippey put it. However, there is also an element of accepting that some things pass and the world changes - much of the long ending of RotK (the booK) deals with this. Tolkien holds them both in tension. PJ did a pretty good (though imperfect) job of capturing it, I think.

[Primula Baggins]

Point taken, kzer_za. But as a lifelong reader of fantasy and science fiction, and more recently a writer of SF, I'm hypersensitive to the very common implications that all stories set "elsewhere" exist only because the writer or his audience, or both, are unable to face the hard realities of the present time and place—that's there's something infantile about enjoying them.

[eborr]

If it's from the guardian then I would never take it too seriously, the arts correspondants of the guardian are invariably arrogant and ill-informed, and function under the deeply misguided notion that that they can add to the in some way to the work they are criticising, typically by taking as this character has a slant on the story.

Maybe LOTR will have proven to be the artistic highlight of PJ directing career, but that's quite a high bar and the writer ignores the other project that PJ has been producing.

[yovargas]

While it's all well and good to chat about the possible motivations and dangers for the 3 movies, this particular article just strikes me as a cheap attempt to stir some controversy or grab attention. "These movies I've never seen will probably suck!!!!1" Um, okay, thanks for that, guardian.

[Impenitent]

What yov said.

And I agree with Al.

Also with Prim.

Not sure why I'm posting, now I think on it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Here's a response to that Guardian piece from stuff.co.nz:

Hobbit trilogy 'creative stagnation'