The moral lessons of The Hobbit

After having defended Peter Jackson’s Hobbit from some of its most common critiques, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s Hobbit, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.

The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!

But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. 

A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:

• that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
• that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
• that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book

I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:

• that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
• that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)

My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.