Naomi took me to see the latest Hobbit movie:"The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies". I think it's the best of "The Hobbit" trilogy, recapturing some of the qualities that made "Return of the King" an Oscar winner. Some of the qualities. The epic storytelling was there, as well as some outstanding action sequences. But the characterizations tended to come up just short of making me really believe the actions of the characters. I think this is because Peter Jackson may have lost touch with what "The Hobbit" is really about.
It's those characterizations which convey an important message of "The Hobbit" as well as "The Lord of the Rings", which is that what we fight to save is often never as big or important as the fights themselves. Unlike "Lord of the Rings", Tolkien intended "The Hobbit" to be a simple children's story, so the layers of events and scale of "The Lord of the Ring" is absent, and with good reason. He didn't want us to read the book with the idea that it was all just a part of a much bigger chain of events. To Bilbo, the events of "The Hobbit" are daunting and life changing enough as they are, without being placed within the backdrop of saving the entire world. That would have been too burdensome for Bilbo as well as the intended audience for the story.
In my opinion, the first two "Hobbit" movies lost track of this, as they attempted to infuse the much simpler story of "The Hobbit" with the same sort of epic grandeur and narrative that "Lord of the Rings" required to be effective. The fact is, the book itself requires the simpler approach, but Peter Jackson probably felt the pressure, both personally and professionally, to at least match the cinematic and financial success of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
"The Lord of the Rings" is actually such a huge tale that to make the movies workable, Jackson had to remove a lot of source material (much to the chagrin of devout Tolkien fans). With "The Hobbit", the decision to turn what was originally meant to be two movies into a trilogy required the addition of considerable extra material.
This wouldn't necessarily have been a problem in itself. However, I think the issues stem from the way and the degree to which Peter Jackson diverged from the book. Because "The Hobbit" was never intended to be the epic that "The Lord of the Rings" was, stretching the story out into three movies by drawing on "The Silmarillion" and adding characters and new plot elements obfuscated the appeal of the book.
"The Silmarillion" is even more epic than "The Lord of the Rings" and is the most obviously "mythological" of Tolkien's stories. The characters are meant to be larger than life: that's the whole purpose of the book. Injecting into "The Hobbit" story elements such as the White Council and the power of characters like Elrond, Saruman and Galadriel shifts some of the attention from Bilbo and Thorin's company. It can leave people thinking that if such powerful, mythic entities are involved in the events, why are we bothering with the stories of mere mortals? The answer is that the story is about the mere mortals, and so inserting scenes involving immortal, mythic characters detracts from the real plot of "The Hobbit".
One thing about "The Hobbit", which was written after "The Lord of the Rings" is that it took Middle Earth, and some of the characters and events relative to the one ring, and made them more accessible. Instead of drawing readers into a tale in which dozens of characters are involved in interconnected events upon which an entire world depend, The Hobbit tells a story of simple, unassuming Bilbo Baggins, who gets caught up in epochal events without ever really grasping the scale of them, nor his own importance in them.
That's one reason why I think "The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies" is the best of the three. Not because it returns to the original feel of the book, but the opposite: it finally admits that Jackson is telling an epic story that just happens to be using "The Hobbit" as a source (similar to how "Troy" used "The Iliad" as a source). Bilbo becomes a supporting player to the epic events and acts of heroism by the mythic, larger than life characters such as Thorin, Gandalf and Legolas. This actually makes Bilbo's presence as mainly a witness to the epic heroism of others that much more telling, because in the end, all the heroism is meant to preserve the ordinary existence of those such as Bilbo. The reason for the heroism is so that just plain folks can survive and go back to being just plain folks.
In the first two "Hobbit" movies, Jackson seemed to struggle with the thing he did so well with Frodo in "The Lord of the Rings", which is to explore how an unremarkable Hobbit rises to a remarkable status in order to be able to go back to his unremarkable life. It seemed as though the fact that Bilbo would be involved in remarkable events was underlying all the action and the dialogue, and that Jackson implied Mr. Baggins would become a mythic hero as a result. As a result, the first two installments set Bilbo up to become a mythic character himself (perhaps unwittingly), which didn't happen in the book and ultimately didn't happen in the final movie either.
Perhaps this struggle of how to present Bilbo, and the simple tale "The Hobbit" tells was unavoidable, given the enormous success of the "Lord of the Rings" Epic. Most moviegoers already knew that Bilbo was going to come into possession of the one ring and become a hero in spite of himself. Therein lies the problem: Bilbo is never really a hero in "The Hobbit" in the same way Frodo is a hero in "The Lord of the Rings".
Bilbo truly has no idea what lies before him and so his heroic efforts catch him unaware as much as anyone else. He is just trying to survive, aid his friends and still be true to himself. Saving Middle Earth not even hinted at in the story, and to introduce that element to the movies is one reason why Jackson drew material from "The Silmarillion" and other of Tolkien's writings.
By contrast, in "The Lord of the Rings" Frodo quickly realizes that in order to save the Shire, he must reluctantly step forward and become a hero central to the salvation of the entire world, challenging the might of entire armies and beings of godlike power. There is nothing more mythic and epic than that.
I think that's where Peter Jackson and company erred. They treated Bilbo a bit too much like Frodo, until the final installment when he basically becomes a backdrop to events far greater than himself. In the first two installments, it seemed to me that we weren't sure whether the story was really about Bilbo, or rather about the epic events and Bilbo just happened to be involved.
It's disappointing that Jackson and company would allow this uncertainty, because it's not present in any of Tolkien's writings. In "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien made it clear that Frodo, and to a lesser extent the other Hobbits, were all destined to reach far beyond themselves in order to protect their friends and save the Shire. Even bits of dialogue make it clear that Tolkien's message was that it's the ordinary, the average folk who hold evil at bay, not because they are heroes but in spite of it: all they really want is to protect the average lives they have and those they love, and if saving the world is what it takes to do that, then that is what they will do.
That's what I feel was missing from the first two Hobbit movies, the sense that true heroes are simply those who step up to protect what they love without being or becoming larger than life. That is how true heroes are made in real life: they perform heroic acts in order to survive or protect what and who they love, rather than being knowing participants in epic events, fully aware of the scale and scope of what they are doing. I think the true message of the Hobbit isn't found in the epic battles and events, or even in Bilbo's transformation from a simple and slightly self-absorbed Hobbit into a reluctant hero. I think the message Tolkien has for all of us through the story of Bilbo, Frodo, the ring and Middle Earth is summed up by an exchange between Sam and Frodo in Return of the King:
Sam: I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for.
That is the real message of both "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". That is also all it really takes to be a hero.
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