| Have you seen The Hobbit? Ilana Teitelbaum gives...

2nd Jan 2013

Have you seen The Hobbit? Ilana Teitelbaum gives her take in “Enchantment Dispelled”:

The moment news came that The Hobbit was going to be stretched into an immense movie trilogy, the outcome should have been obvious, but I still allowed myself to hope. After all, somehow Pride and Prejudice made an excellent six-part TV series for the BBC, ensuring that all future film adaptations would seem rushed in comparison. With a lavish attention to the details of Tolkien’s world, I reasoned, perhaps three movies would afford the filmmakers an opportunity to do justice to the richness of Middle Earth. But in that reasoning I was optimistically overlooking evidence from the Lord of the Rings movies that when it comes to the director’s take on Tolkien’s world, a better title for all the above movies would be The Battle Fantasies of Peter Jackson. Battles that are mere paragraphs or chapters in The Lord of the Rings books are the centerpieces of Jackson’s films. For this director, Tolkien’s stories often seem little more than backdrops for cinematic experiments with CGI and catapults (or CGI catapults).

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