Why Did Peter Jackson Change The Hobbit?

Q: Why Did Peter Jackson Change The Hobbit?

ANSWER: I think many people have been too harsh on Peter Jackson for expanding “The Hobbit” to three films. To cover each of the episodes in the book would in fact take up a lot of screen time, and I think at some point Peter realized that he really needed to follow the book more faithfully than he might have originally intended.

On the one hand, a film-maker who adapts a beloved book to cinema is expected to introduce some twists in order to pique the audience’s interest; on the other hand, things that make sense in a literary narrative sometimes just don’t work well in a dramatic presentation. Although I have always felt that Tom Bombadil adds a great deal of value to the literary story (he introduces an immense amount of foreshadowing while resolving some logical problems with Frodo’s timeline) many people were content with Peter’s decision to excise Tom from the dramatic storyline — even though that decision forced Peter to make numerous changes to the dramatic plot in order to compensate for Bombadil’s absence.

Hence, it was almost inevitable that people would object to how “The Hobbit” was presented on the big screen. You can say the odds are stacked against the film-maker in the court of public opinion. When I saw Chris Columbus’ adaptations of the first two Harry Potter books I was totally enchanted; and yet many people complained that the movies were boring because “they were too faithful” and yet “cut out too many details”. So when Alfonso Cuarón made the third Harry Potter film and people complained that “it was too different from the book” and yet “cut out too many details” while at the same time “departed from Chris Columbus’ vision” I realized that the film-maker’s job is NOT to please all the purists. His job is to make a movie.

So whereas we can go through “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” scene-by-scene and argue the pros and cons of the decisions that were made, I don’t see that anything would be accomplished. The film-maker has to get the character from Bag End to Erebor and back home again; along the way the hobbit must encounter trolls, Elves, Orcs, stone-giants, eagles, a shape-shifting magician, spiders, more Elves, men of a foreign nation, and somewhere beyond that a dragon, talking birds, and a huge battle. How quickly should the movie proceed through each of these events such that it doesn’t seem like the director is “dragging it all out”?

The truth is that J.R.R. Tolkien glossed over a lot of these dramatic encounters. He did a lot of telling rather than showing in The Hobbit and many readers do come away disappointed that The Hobbit is not more like The Lord of the Rings. So now that Peter Jackson is trying to make his “Hobbit” more like his “Lord of the Rings” he is compelled by his desire to choose compromises that don’t necessarily make sense to everyone else.

Two people are telling these stories: J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson. Each man has his own ideas about what is important and each story-teller uses his own medium. I would not expect them both to go about the task the same way. We’re seeing two different versions of the same tale. Some day The Hobbit (which has been produced as a stage play hundreds if not thousands of times through the past several decades) may have been retold in as many different ways as “Cinderella” (which by some estimates has been retold more than 500 different ways).

It’s an unstoppable process but one which attests to the genius of Tolkien in an unexpected way, for if his original telling is overshadowed by the potentially innumerable retellings, he nonetheless made a story so interesting and compelling that he has inspired many other story-tellers to embellish and rework his magic — a feat that very few authors can match.

See also:

• How Much Padding Is There In Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit” Trilogy?
• What Is the History of Dol Guldur?
• Why Did Thranduil Refuse to Help the Dwarves of Erebor?
• Is Tauriel in the Book, The Hobbit?
• Review of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”
• Why Does Tolkien’s World Lack Women?
• Why Is the Hobbit Movie so Different from the Book?
• Why Did Peter Jackson Change Azog from the Book?
• Why Is Azog Called the White Orc?
• How Faithful is Peter Jackson’s “Hobbit” to Tolkien’s Book?

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