The Hobbit: 10 Times Peter Jackson Ruined A Character

When the Lord of the Rings trilogy was released in the 2000s, it generated a sense of frantic excitement and wild enthusiasm, unknown in the world of fantasy cinema. Now, cast your mind back to when the first trailer for The Hobbit dropped sometime in 2011. The child inside awoke and your imagination ran wild with the prospect of revisiting Middle-earth.

With that first trailer came hope that this would be a cinematic experience to match the original trilogy. Even with all the rumours of a troubled production, directors dropping out and studio interference, the initial images of the Hobbit looked incredible.

But as the first movie began to unfold, the unease started to set in. There was a feeling that Jackson had forgone all the things that made the Lord of the Rings great: prosthetic make-up and set design was replaced with CGI; the gritty realism gave way for comic spectacle; and cheap thrills had taken precedent over plot. The next two instalments only compounded these issues.

But put aside the crappy animation, the over-bloated action sequences and the forced love triangle, the most egregious insult was the miss-handling of almost every major character.

Bolg was certainly imposing, but in terms of his character there wasn't much going on...

In the book, Bolg was the leader of the orcs at the Battle of Five Armies (Azog was long dead by this point). The fact Jackson adapted this significantly is not the issue, he just went about it in a piss poor way.

The character certainly required some fleshing out, Tolkien only mentioned him briefly in the book, ascribing his demise to the furious skin-changer, Beorn during the final battle. The character design indicated that Jackson was aware of this plot point, though. Bolg certainly looked like he'd had a history with the skin-changers; he wore bear claw trophies on his shoulders, and that head wound looked like it was inflicted by something big... With Beorn mentioning the orcs were responsible for the death of his people, it seemed Jackson was setting up some big showdown between the two.

Sadly, that didn't happen, Bolg merely served as punching bag for Legolas to practice his combat acrobatics on. He had almost no significant impact on the plot... There's that prolonged boxing match with Legolas in the second movie, and he took part in a version of Middle-earth: Total Wipeout in the third, but apart from that what other point did he serve?