It's not really an understatement to say that Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy were the formational films for me growing up, akin to how I imagine the original Star Wars trilogy must have been to youngsters watching it in theaters for the first time (before Lucas tampered with it, of course). I was 16 when The Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters, and it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. I was already very familiar with Tolkien's invented worlds, but Jackson's Fellowship was special. Sumptuously shot, gorgeously costumed, powerfully acted, Fellowship of the Ring struck an emotional chord in me that I can't remember too many other films ever doing. Watching the Lord of the Rings movies is a holidays tradition for me, and I admit, I still tear up when Gandalf falls in Moria, and I still get goosebumps when the Hardanger fiddle plays the Rohan theme, and I still cry like a baby when Sam tells Frodo that even if he can't carry the burden of the Ring, he'll carry his friend.
Now, with Jackson's Hobbit trilogy coming to a close, I've had occasion to consider why, exactly, these movies mean so much to me.
I think one answer is because I grew up largely without a history. We moved around a lot when I was a child. I was an only child for six years. We went to church -- sporadically. I was homeschooled. I didn't have many friends as a child, and so I found my friends in books. My mother's family was largely unknown to me, other than my great-grandmother (whom I loathed). My father's family, being Pennsylvania Dutch, were quiet and extremely reserved...essentially unknowable to a kid. I had no roots. I had no family history. And so I looked to books for that too.
The Lord of the Rings, as many will tell you, is full of history. That seems to be either its principal allure or its principal detractor, depending on which readers you ask. Some people really don't care about the line of the Stewards of Gondor or the lost Entwives. (Those people are silly. I married one of them, but with misgivings.) For me, though, all this was exactly what I needed. I wanted roots. I wanted the idea of families of Tooks and Bagginses who had lived in the same village for generations, of Elves whose lineages could be traced for tens of thousands of years, of Ents with stories that stretched into time immemorial.
The other thing the Lord of the Rings touched in me, I think, was a sense of yearning. I think most children who grow up with their noses in books are accustomed to longing. Me, I longed for a lot. I longed to grow up and find my own way, as my heroines Anne Shirley and Jo March had. (No surprise that they too were bookworms who read their way out of their everyday lives.) I longed for a world where things felt significant, as though they mattered, instead of the isolated quiet life I felt I led. How could I help but love a story where, as Galadriel tells Frodo, "even the smallest person can change the course of the future"?
So I was predisposed to love the original film trilogy, and I did. It has its flaws, of course. Jackson is a master of communicating scale onscreen, but his ability to create vastness that dwarfs his characters can sometimes work against him. He's not great at restraint. It literally took my father a decade to stop talking about how long the bridge scene in Khazad-dûm was. Literally. I'm not exaggerating. Jackson started as a horror director, and those roots show onscreen -- sometimes for the better, sometimes (as with the interminable cave-troll battle followed immediately by the interminable bridge chase) less so.
The Hobbit is a much different book, and I'm not saying anything a million other film critics haven't when I say that Jackson's Hobbit movies feel less like an adaptation of a slim children's fantasy novel and more like Lord of the Rings Lite. After all, we're talking about a book in which a chatty narrator tells us that a Hobbit named Bullroarer Took once knocked the head off a goblin during the Battle of Greenfields, sending it flying a hundred yards and down a rabbit hole, thereby simultaneously winning the battle and inventing the game of golf. This is a far cry from the Pelennor Fields.
Nevertheless, when my local multiplex announced it was showing a marathon of all three Hobbit films back to back, I immediately ponied up my $25 and committed to nine straight hours of sitting in a dark movie theater surrounded by the other lunatics who would pay $25 to sit for nine straight hours in a movie theater on a Monday. (As it turns out, there were only about twenty such lunatics, and I'm also pretty certain I was the only woman in a room of male thirtysomethings.)
What is charming about Tolkien's Hobbit is that it is about a "very little person, after all" who discovers that his courage and ability to do good is larger than he imagined. Yet for three movies with The Hobbit in the title, there is
remarkably little of Bilbo Baggins onscreen in this final flick, which
is a shame. Martin Freeman has been the quiet, solid emotional core of each
movie for me, his Bilbo unassuming, good-natured, and clever while also gradually discovering that he has reserves of real strength and hope that surprise everyone -- himself, perhaps, most of all. The scenes in which he interacts with Gollum (Andy Serkis) and Smaug (Benedict Cumberbatch) are masterful, by far my favorite scenes of all three films. The "Riddles in the Dark" sequence is perfection, both because it is beautifully acted and because it is content to linger with these two characters and let their relationship develop.
Development, unfortunately, is in very short supply in the Hobbit movies, which thus feel hollower than the original Rings movies. Part of this feeling is no doubt due to the scale of events; although Jackson and his screenwriters bring in plenty of material from elsewhere in the Tolkienverse (much of it retconning by Tolkien himself), this doesn't change the fact that the quest to retake Erebor just isn't as important as the quest to destroy the One Ring. It doesn't change the fact that the Necromancer doesn't have the power that Sauron has (yet). And it doesn't change the fact that Thorin Oakenshield is, pardon my language, kind of a dick.
For all that these movies have The Hobbit in their titles, the story largely revolves around Thorin's quest to retake his homeland, accompanied by his dozen loyal Dwarven companions, Bilbo, and occasionally Gandalf, who has many other Very Important Things to do. Other than Bilbo, who gets surprisingly scant screentime, the only character given a real arc is Thorin, who has the aforementioned difficulty of also being a raging dick for most of the movie. Although Richard Taylor did his
best to give the other Dwarves each a recognizable "look," I'm still not sure they all actually get lines, and I'm not confident I could name half of
them in a lineup. (Kili, of course, is the Hot One, and Fili is the Hot
One's blonde brother, and Dwalin has head tattoos and broods, and Balin is the Old One who
appears to be the only one with moral sense and as such
is usually the only one I am much interested in hearing speak anyway.) It's difficult to feel deeply invested in characters' survival and success when you aren't even sure what their names are. (Who's the one with the cozy sweaters? I like his sweaters.)
The other players in this game, Thranduil and Bard, feel similarly underdeveloped. Thranduil is Pretty and Petty and wants white gems from Thorin's mountain because...memory, I guess? Bard is a Simple Man of the People who Merely Wants What His People Were Promised. There's a female Elf, Tauriel, who takes three minutes to fall in love with the Hot Dwarf because he has a rock with some runes on it and a saucy mouth, and there's Legolas, who I guess loves Tauriel (because he tells his father so) and does very Legolas-type things like running up a collapsing bridge and surfing Orcs, but without John Rhys-Davies' Giml -- with whom he had much sparkier chemistry, as legions of fanfic shippers will tell you -- he loses a great deal of his charm. There's a lot of bluster and a great many (generally well-done) CGI shots of characters jumping off things and setting things on fire and jumping off things on fire, but nothing feels connected to anything else.
It's difficult to feel immersed in the emotional weight of a story
that feels so weightless so much of the time. Even more so than the
original films, the Hobbit movies are stuffed with action
sequences that, while sometimes exciting in themselves, don't feel as
though they contribute to a larger whole. The titular Battle of the Five Armies recalls
Jackson's skillful rendering of the Battle of Helm's Deep and the
Battle of the Pelennor Fields in the original trilogy, and there are some genuinely cool battle moments that feel new and visually striking. Nevertheless, there is so much happening, in so many different places, with so many different armies, led by so many characters whom we barely know, that everything feels unmoored.
Thus, even when loss is seen, it isn't really felt. Part of the trick of the original trilogy for me was that it took characters I had never really cared about in the books and made them significant. Boromir's final stand in Fellowship is one of the all-time great death scenes, and the tearful final goodbye between him and Aragorn gets me every time. (What can I say? I'm a weepy movie watcher.) Here, Richard Armitage and Martin Freeman do their damndest to give Thorin's deathbed speech emotional impact, but it doesn't quite click. Thorin hasn't had enough time to be redeemed from his "dragon sickness" before he's killed off, and it's hard to overlook the fact that this whole damn battle, in which so many were killed, is almost entirely his fault. This wasn't a battle to defend Middle-Earth from a rampaging evil malevolence; it was a battle to defend a mountain full of gold against others with a pretty decent claim to some of it.
Yet that, I think, could have been powerful if Jackson had spent more time on it. Greed does literally kill in these movies, both embodied in the great dragon Smaug and in Thorin's futile defense of his treasure hoard. That's a message that hits close to home in this world as well as Middle-Earth. In the Hobbit movies it isn't the nearly all-powerful, nearly unknowable Abominable One whom the heroes must battle, but our own worst natures: our own corruption, our own pettiness, our own greed. Treated with more care, this final film could have made an effective statement about the power of simple goodness: that if, as Thorin finally admits to Bilbo, "more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." Regardless of how squicky my feminist self feels about (white, mostly male) guardians protecting Middle-Earth and the restoration of rightful (white, male) Kings to power, I do think Thorin's right.
In the "real" world, of course, evil rarely comes tidily packaged in the form of a Dragon or an Eye of Sauron or a Ring of Power. Greed and powerlust are not so easily defeated by a few white men with bows and swords. But isn't pretty to think so?
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