Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped

Peter Jackson arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of “The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies” at the Dolby Theatre on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014. Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

J.R.R. Tolkien once said that “believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough.” But in Peter Jackson’s new and final Hobbit film, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, which opened Wednesday, there is no map. There’s not even a plan. We veer far not just from Middle-earth, but from all plausibility.

But you can’t blame Tolkien for this. Jackson got us here; he’s the one who must be stopped.

It’s not that I’m anti-Peter Jackson. I followed the Lord of the Rings trilogy through Middle-earth like a drooling orc-puppy. I like my fantasy to be exciting, and to take me places I have never been to, and for its protagonists to do cool, heroic stuff. Jackson’s first Tolkien threesome hit all these sweet spots, and made me care about his characters to boot; they were well-rounded people (and hobbits, and elves, and dwarves) whose exploits and feats were still believable.

That’s simply not the case with his Hobbit movies.

Wait, you say. This is fantasy. It’s a story about dwarves, elves, dragons, wizards, pipe weed, and magic rings. Anything can happen, right? Well, not quite. For fantasy to work, it has to be based on reality. And ultimately, these Hobbit films do not feel real.

The issues go back to An Unexpected Journey, the opening film of the trilogy. This film was widely derided for its gratuitous use of action sequences—and rightfully so. There’s wizard Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) driving a rabbit-pulled sled in order to distract orcs so Gandalf (Ian McKellen), the Dwarves, and Bilbo (Martin Freeman) can escape them. There’s the physics-bending episode in the Goblin King’s cave, in which our adventurers are chased along a series of computer-generated catwalks; their fight with the goblins is a horrific ballet of Three Stooges-caliber pratfalls. But when Bilbo tumbled what looked like 350 feet into Gollum’s cave, and survived? That was the moment when I knew that the film was truly a goner.

In film two, The Desolation of Smaug, many of us grimaced at a river-and-barrel sequence more at home in a Disney theme park than a Tolkien movie. The dwarves’ absurd attempt to create a tidal wave of hot gold to pour over an irate Smaug the Dragon was the molten-metal topping to the hubris that is Mount Jackson. Not to mention the silly elf-dwarf romance—which Peter Jackson recently admitted was a “cold-blooded decision” to appeal to “a lot of young girls seeing this film.”