Jackson, who was responsible for the Oscar-winning adaption of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, said be began considering the possibility of three films after watching an early cut of the first Hobbit movie. And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved 'yes'.
The decision to add an extra movie follows a recent Hollywood trend of splitting a single book into multiple movies to maximise box office returns from blockbuster franchises. The final novels in the Harry Potter and Twilight series have been stretched into two films and the same is set to happen with the last book in the Hunger Games saga.
Jackson said the decision to make three films was possible because of the extended appendices in the Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien adds details of the Middle Earth fantasy world in which the Hobbit takes place.
British actor Martin Freeman, from "The Office", takes on the central role of Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor from the fearsome dragon Smaug. Sadly there is no real dramatic tension here. Thorin is an epic character with a rich destiny, but little psychological depth. Asking us to care about his nervous breakdown this late in the series is too little too late — especially when we already have a character, Bilbo, whose psychological complexity has already been established in a pleasing way.
The same goes for Thorin's orc nemesis, whom we're supposed to view as some kind of foil for the dwarf leader. I would love to have watched a trilogy where the orcs actually had interesting motivations and interior lives. But instead of giving us a multi-layered enemy, these movies gave us little more than monsters. We never truly understand the orcs' plight, nor why they ally with Sauron. Despite all its flaws, this movie does deliver good battle.
Of course you should expect nothing less from Jackson, but he and his team at Weta Workshop have outdone themselves here. Even the people of Laketown get to kick some ass. But as I said earlier, the battle doesn't feel terrifying or portentous the way it might have if we'd seen it after two hours of movie instead of seven.
Instead, it feels like a romp — complete with some really awkward attempts at slapstick. Which — there's nothing wrong with a romp. But when an epic journey of three movies ends with drag jokes and campy speeches about love, it's a letdown. If you've already seen the first two Hobbit movies, you should absolutely stick it out and watch this one. Just remember to keep your expectations low and smoke a little twist of Hobbit herb to make the whole thing go down easier. Unlike on The Lord of the Rings , Jackson and the production team had next to no prep time, and filming was a frantic process with narrow deadlines being met on a day-to-day basis.
In contrast to most filming schedules, Jackson also didn't have the actual story structure nailed down by the time cameras began rolling and, by the director's own admission, shooting began with no clear plan of where the footage would end up or exactly how it would be utilized in the finished product. This was especially true of the climactic The Battle of Five Armies fight scenes, where footage was simply "banked" to be worked into the script during editing. These battle scenes began shooting in May , but were cut short when Jackson decided to insist on a delay in order to rework the script and set a clearer plan for the path ahead.
It's surely not a coincidence that the decision to move from 2 to 3 films was announced shortly after in July While it could certainly be said that a trilogy was always Jackson's desire, the lack of planning behind the scenes and self-confessed "wing it" approach to filming perhaps created a situation where condensing the story and the banked footage into a brisk two movies was a tougher ask that simply extending The Hobbit into a trilogy.
The extra movie may have eased pressure from a production point of view but, in broad terms, wasn't received well by audiences. Despite the flaws of the Hobbit trilogy, the fact that Peter Jackson and his production team managed to turn in a workable, high-quality trio of films under such enormous pressure and impossible time constraints is a miracle worthy enough to rival Frodo's destruction of Sauron.
Given the conditions placed upon it, The Hobbit had no right to be as good as it was, even if Bilbo's story couldn't come close to the heights scaled by the original Lord of the Rings trilogy.
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