The Hobbit Movies

This should NOT have been three movies!

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings and that I read The Hobbit a few months ago. My family has been watching The Hobbit movies over the past two weeks and just finished the third one a few nights ago. The Hobbit movies have a number of pros, but also a matching number of cons.

I was honestly very impressed by these movies. First, they were very well put together. The visual effects were great, and the action scenes were intense. The second pro is the actors. Every actor chosen for The Hobbitmovies was a great fit. They all played their parts very well and really brought the movies to life! The final pro is also somewhat of a con. It is the fact that they added multiple new plot lines to the movies that weren’t in the book. While this did make the movies a little more interesting, I usually don’t like when movies venture away from the book, so I would say that this is more of a con.

Even though these movies are pretty good, they still have their fair share of cons. The first con and possibly the most obvious is that The Hobbit was split into three movies. It seriously doesn’t make sense. This book was shorter than all of The Lord of the Rings books, yet it was split into three long movies. Don’t get me wrong, as the movies are put together really well, but they are just long. It was very unnecessary to split one book into three movies. Going off this, the second con is that the movies dragged. As much as I hate to say this, the movies just seemed slow. There could have been a lot of content cut out of the movie. Each movie was 2-3 hours long, and there were 3 of them. Talk about some watch time! I’m not saying the entirety is boring (In fact, I was on the edge of my seat at multiple points), I’m just saying that it was very long. The final con, which I mentioned before, is the added plot lines. To make these movies longer, the producers added multiple new plot lines that were not in the book. There were added characters, scenes, and plots to extend the story. While some of these were quite interesting and cool, I would prefer that the movies stayed closer to the book. One of these plot lines was used to set up The Lord of the Rings in a way that wasn’t in the books, and I found this unnecessary. That is how I would describe a lot of what was in these movies: unnecessary. It could have been cut out, but it was kept in or added to lengthen it.

Don’t get the false idea that I hated these movies. I actually really enjoyed them and may watch them again at some point. I think that they did the book justice and portrayed it in a good way. My biggest criticism is that it was split into 3 movies. By doing this, the movies were unnecessarily lengthened. An adequate alternative would have been to make one long movie or possibly two movies, but three long movies is just too much.