I don't think I even watched all three of them i was so disappointed with the first one.
Myself, all the members of my family, and most of my friends loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The academy awards and most critics agree with us on this one - so naturally we were all elated when we found out that Peter Jackson was going to make another 3 films.
I should have seen it coming but this trilogy did not live up to the hype and if you think about it there were lots of reasons why that could not end up being true. Here are just a couple reasons why.
The first trilogy was so epic that it would be impossible to top it. Sometimes, something is so good that it is best to just leave it alone. However, they wanted money and they ended up getting it, so whatever.
The LOR book is 1000+ pages long, so big that mostly you can buy the book in stages unless you want to be reading it in 4pt fond. The Hobbit book is about 150 pages long. Both of these books were made into 3 movies that were at least 2 hours long per. I can't imagine how that would present a problem? Can you?
Because there is not much source material in existence in order to make 6 hours of film we end up with scenes where Dwarfs are having dinner for 35 minutes, complete with a long history lesson about who each one of them is and stupid filler like songs being sung for 10 minutes. If i am not mistaken, the first 45 minutes of the film takes place inside Bilbo Baggins' house. snoooooze....
Then we have stuff like giant rock people fighting which depending on who you talk to, wasn't really in the books but was rather a metaphor.
these guys could certainly take over all of Middle Earth but don't for some reason
There was entirely too much slapstick in these movies and it wasn't until the last one where Smaug was featured so prominently that I felt as thought the movies took on a dark overtone the way the original 3 did. Even that was short lived and if there is one thing you should do it is to look up the youtube vids of Benedict Cumberpatch where he is actually reading lines running around in scenes with other actors despite the fact that all his work is voice-over in the movie.
In my mind the main thing that disappointed me about this was that it definitely did not need to be a trilogy. It easily could have been one film. But we must remind ourselves of Mark Hamill's words:
it doesn't matter if it's any good, only that it makes money!
It certainly accomplished that as merely the first part of the trilogy ended up making more than a billion dollars worldwide, becoming on the 15th film of all time to accomplish this. Most of my marks are awarded because it is visually stunning. The story is horribly paced and a bit dumb.
