Tolkien as a children’s tale, is a single work that is four-and-a-half times smaller in size than the three Lord of the Rings books. The Hobbit, originally published by J.R.R. He and his co-writers were able to pare the text away to find the adventure at the core of the story and all of this worked perfectly well when delivered up as three films. The problem for Jackson is that all of this worked fine when it came to The Lord of the Rings where he was condensing a story that was originally published in three volumes. Jackson understands his fanbase only too well and has made a good deal of effort to give them more of exactly what they want – more of Tolkien’s world, more epic adventure, more visual effects wow, more endearingly likeable characters, the return of familiar characters and everything driven by a massively scaled plot where the destinies of a world and its different races play out against forces of ultimate evil.
Lucas’s failing was simply a misunderstanding of his fanbase, of thinking that the effects and toys were all that people wanted and somehow neglecting any of the warm character interplay, the sense of wonder and mythological arcs that drove his original trilogy. Jackson doesn’t quite fail in the same way that Lucas did. Where George Lucas took nearly two decades to go from creating a trilogy of fan favourites to returning with a second trilogy where everything the fans had loved was drowned out by visual effects and the Lucasfilm empire’s obsession with marketing, Peter Jackson has done the same in under a decade. More and more, The Hobbit trilogy is starting to feel like Peter Jackson’s equivalent of the Star Wars prequels. Indeed, I would argue that The Desolation of Smaug is the weakest work that Peter Jackson has delivered under the Tolkien banner to date. After all, as I recently argued on the issue of Orson Scott Card and Ender’s Game (2013), dislike of an author/filmmaker’s politics and personal views should not stand in the way of critically evaluating their works.Īll of that said, I went into The Desolation of Smaug hopeful but came out heavily disappointed.
Even though Jackson’s dishonesty is something that strikes close to home for me, I went in determined not to allow this to affect the viewing of The Desolation of Smaug. (See above-listed link for An Unexpected Journey for details).
The way that Peter Jackson acted during the pre-production of The Hobbit – his underhand union busting activities, his falsifications and half-truths on the matter and manipulation of New Zealand people’s pride about the films – gave me cause to switch off him as a person in a major way. These in turn, for anyone who has lived in a fallout shelter for the last decade, were a follow-up/prequel to Jackson’s earlier, massively successful three-part adaptation of Tolkien’s magnum opus with The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). It was preceded by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) and followed by The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). The Desolation of Smaug was the second in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of films spun out from J.R.R.
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