Lord Of The Rings & Hobbit: 12 BIGGEST Mistakes We Have To Live With
6. ALL The Hobbit's Fan Service
And you thought The Force Awakens was too much of a nostalgia-fest.
Fan-service can be a lovely thing, but too much of it is generally very distracting and this was very much the case with The Hobbit Trilogy. Many of its LOTR callbacks were so unsubtle and forced that they no doubt made many viewers roll their eyes.
The most infuriating examples include the aforementioned Sauron subplot, Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and Saruman being there but not doing anything and finally, Legolas being told to go and find Aragorn at the end of the third film.
There were two things that made this all so annoying. Firstly, it padded out a trilogy which was in desperate need of cutting right down and secondly, it added nothing to the films at all. If you took Legolas, Saruman and Sauron out of the films, the central plot wouldn't change.
One moment which did work was one of the dwarves, Gloin (Peter Hambleton) revealing he was Gimli's father. That was fine because it was subtle and was taken from the book, so it felt justified, but unfortunately most other fan-service moments were far too in-your-face.