The Hobbit Trilogy: 5 Changes That Worked And 5 That Didn't

3. The Audience Perspective

This has already been touched on in the previous two entries, and it's a change that needed to be made for the transition from book to film to work successfully. The Hobbit novel is a tale that focuses almost solely on Bilbo's journey and his interaction and observations of the people, places and monsters that he encounters on his journey to the Lonely Mountain. Many staunch fans of the book will quite rightly criticise the films for being bloated and unnecessarily long in comparison to the book, placing too much emphasis on events that had little to do with Bilbo's story. Those are all valid criticisms when the book and trilogy of films are directly compared on a point-by-point basis, but Jackson's decision to tie the films directly into the Rings trilogy and open the narrative up to multiple different character perspectives made a direct adaptation of the book impossible. The pacing of a film is entirely different to that of a book, and there can be no better example than the climactic battle of the five armies. Bilbo is knocked unconscious in the book, only regaining conciousness when the battle has already concluded in his side's favour. If the Bilbo-only perspective had been kept, Jackson would have had to either omit that detail or show a black screen signifying an unconscious hobbit.