The other issue I had with the first one initially was the way it looked, The Lord of the Rings had a tangible, almost realist aesthetic that owed to a surprisingly limited budget and reliance on very old-school, craftsmanship-led production design, it felt like a window you could have stepped through. Unfortunately while the first film succeeded in doing this, the actual plot ended up being spread quite thin with not enough time devoted to character development and too many action sequences, it isn’t often a film well over 2 hours feels hurried, but An Unexpected Journey does. My typical response to people who moaned about the idea of stretching a short children’s novel into a long running trilogy is that Jackson was never directly adapting The Hobbit, he was using the story as a jumping off point and going on to further realize the world of Middle-Earth through the majestic landscape of New Zealand and the talent of its artisans. ![]() The Desolation of Smaug is the first Middle-Earth adaptation made by Peter Jackson not to implement a volume or chapter title from one of the original novels, which I find to be very fitting since this film noticeably deviates from the original source material and is very much its own beast. The first Hobbit film fell under similar scrutiny even before it came out due to decisions made about the length and quantity of films that would ultimately end up in theatres, to say nothing of the ill-fated 48fps experiment, but despite all that it was still the film Jackson wanted to make. Peter Jackson was always going to have problems with his reputation after The Lord of the Rings, it’s a tough act to follow, but he carried on making the films that he wanted to make and maligned as they were (King Kong: overlong, The Lovely Bones: boneless) they were still his films, not an attempt to make lightning strike twice.
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