10 Biggest Mistakes That Completely Ruined The Hobbit Trilogy

3. Turning Quiet Moments Into Epic Action Set Pieces

In Tolkien's The Hobbit, the dwarves escape the elf prison by hiding in barrels that discreetly wash them down the river to Laketown. In Jackson's The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, they loudly leave, alerting the elven guards just as a gang of orcs also on their trail try and cut them off. What follows is a raging rapids action sequence of ever escalating action beats. Just as subtlety is a secondary concern for the whole cinematic Hobbit enterprise, so is not fighting for the characters. Whenever there's an opportunity for a big action set piece in the films, you can bet Jackson will throw it in. Obviously, as discussed earlier, these scenes lack any discernible tension, but as they're entirely fabricated for the screen, there's also no narrative drive to them either - once one starts you an basically switch off and miss nothing. Heck, The Battle of the Five Armies all happens off screen in the book - Bilbo's knocked out at the very start. By far the worst example of this is the foundry fight at the end of The Desolation Of Smaug. In the book the dwarves never come face to face with the fire-breathing lodger. Instead, the entire sequence is just a lengthy conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, with the latter finally getting riled up to the point he fancies visiting Laketown. Clearly included only to give the artificially constructed second movie an action finale, the sloppiness of the editing - the fight merely punctuates Bilbo and Smaug's confrontation, with all the motivation towards dragon's decision to actually attack the humans coming from their interplay - makes the sequence's superfluousness painfully obvious.