Dear Peter Jackson

Dear Peter Jackson,

I hope this letter finds you well. Actually, I know it does. Your last movie, The Battle of the Five Armies, has earned about $700 million around the world. I also just read that the other two movies in that trilogy have made close to $2 billion combined. I offer my congratulations to you and your family. You are fabulously wealthy and I, being a conservative, can take genuine pleasure in success and riches that aren’t my own.

I want to also thank you for doing something important and meaningful: You have brought the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to life through cinema in a way that has obviously reignited interest in his books. That’s an accomplishment that may eventually have (and possibly already has had) extraordinary reverberations; could the next great fantasy novelist be reading “The Lord of the Rings” right now because of you? May it come to pass.

You might have noticed that I mentioned “The Lord of the Rings” just now, and omitted “The Hobbit.” Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about. As much as I admire your accomplishments in film, and as much credit as you deserve for introducing a new generation to one of the great minds of Western literature, I think your legacy as Tolkien’s cinemagician has been tarnished. I realized this recently as I sat in the Carmike Stonybrook cinema watching the credits roll for The Battle of the Five Armies. I searched for the right words to describe what I had just experienced. A few came to mind, including some that I was taught by my mother not to use. But the word that stayed with me, the one that I couldn’t get out of my mind, was betrayed. I felt betrayed.

The three films you created based on Tolkien’s wonderful little book “The Hobbit” are not too unlike your “Lord of the Rings” pictures. Both trilogies are beautifully photographed, well cast, and nicely edited. Both trilogies feature dazzling special effects and epic battles. But the two sets of films differ in one very important way: While neither set are strictly faithful to the letter of Tolkien’s books, “The Lord of the Rings” was steadfastly true to the spirit of its source, and “The Hobbit” films were not.

I know you have read “The Hobbit.” I know you know what kind of book it is. I know that because there were moments during “The Hobbit” films that only a true Tolkien man would have been able to capture. “Riddles in the Dark,” were Bilbo meets Gollum and plays a riddle game, was the best part of the first movie. You did very well. Likewise, Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug in the second movie was pure brilliance from start to finish. Everything about that scene was perfect, from Bilbo’s nervous-but-not-panicked demeanor to Smaug’s arrogant playfulness. Thank you for that. Those scenes, and some other moments, convince me that you really do understand “The Hobbit” and know what kind of story it is.

So here’s my question: Given the fact that you do know “The Hobbit,” and given the fact that you are most capable of faithfully filming Tolkien, what possible excuse can you give for that awful, worthless, tragic, ugly, bombastic, boring, pointless, loud, shameful, silly, glum, pandering, and fundamentally atrocious Battle of the Five Armies?

Mr. Jackson, let me assure you: you’ve made a very, very, very bad movie. Officially, it is the shortest of all six of your Tolkien films, but it still runs about 90 minutes too long. Halfway through the mess, I remembered, to my sustained depression, that you had stirred a bit of controversy by changing the movie’s name from “The Hobbit: There and Back Again” (a beloved phrase that comes straight from the book’s title) to “The Battle of the Five Armies.” Fans took that as a red flag, an indication that you and Warner Brothers were more than ready to sacrifice the book’s adventurous ethos in order to market the film to the same masses that keep giving Michael Bay a career. I absolutely believe that was the goal from the outset, but I now suspect you had more noble motives in the change. I think upon watching your movie, you realized that there wasn’t a shred of anything “there and back again” about it, but that the entire film–yes, the whole thing!–was indeed a bloated, poorly staged, jaw-droppingly repetitive reenactment of the book’s final battle. I now choose to believe that you, Mr. Jackson, were warning us. You were warning us to stay away, to wait for Redbox and homemade popcorn to watch this catastrophe. Alas, I ignored you. I am sorry.

Your time is valuable and mine is running out, so I will be brief. Mr. Jackson, I believe I can identify three things that went wrong with “The Battle of the Five Armies.”

1) You didn’t need to make it. Seriously. The day the studio announced your adaptation of “The Hobbit” would be a trilogy must have set a record for highest altitude of combined raised eyebrows. It’s common knowledge that “The Hobbit” is a children’s book. It is less than 250 pages long, not even a third of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.” That book was adapted into two films, each well done and satisfying. You want to know something odd? Warner Bros, the studio henchmen I mentioned previously, also authorized that two-film adaptation of Harry Potter. That leads me to believe the studio would have allowed you to make The Hobbit two pictures if you’d fought for it. As it is, you opted to fill the third movie with more than 45 minutes of action, most of which is boring and none of which is even comparable to the scenes you filmed for “The Lord of the Rings.”

2) The characters aren’t really interesting. I’m willing to bet you agree with me, because “The Battle of the Five Armies” manages to end without resolving numerous arcs. Evangeline Lily’s character seems to evaporate the second her lover dies on the battlefield. Literally: The very last shot of her is as a weeping willow wisp, hunched over a corpse and striking a pose so similar to Vivien Leigh that I was actually disappointed she didn’t remind us that tomorrow is another day. We never hear from her again, implying that her sole purpose in existence was to love a Dwarf. I’m not a feminist, but come on.

Neither do we see what happens with the Dwarves themselves, or with the residents of the devastated Lake Town, or with Gandalf. We only see the final destination of Bilbo, which is small atonement for

3) the fact that “The Battle of the Five Armies” completely abandons Bilbo for unbelievable stretches of time. I don’t know that I have ever seen a movie care less about its hero than this one. I’m sure you would agree, Mr. Jackson, that Martin Freeman’s performance was excellent. He was a fine choice to play Bilbo Baggins. He was, actually, the best part about your trilogy. I sat and watched as Thorin Oakenshield did his best to sell the forthcoming video games with an endless Boss Battle against a giant orc. Before that, I watched as you turned the mythology of Sauron and the Rings of Power into a Dragon Ball Z episode with a laughable sequence featuring your favorite elf ex machina, Galadriel. I was subjected to all this and more when I could have been much happier watching Bilbo try to climb something.

Mr. Jackson, disappointments are part of life. In the grand scheme of time and eternity, a disappointing movie is not much to get worked up about. Your films were a big hit, and when it comes to taking care of a family, that’s what counts I suppose. I do hope that someday you will realize that, for whatever reason, your vision for “The Hobbit” did not succeed, and the quiet poetry of Tolkien’s novel was lost in the bombast of a chaotic action movie. Begin thinking now how you could make amends. If all else fails, you could always sell your stuff to Disney and make a quiet getaway.

Best wishes,

Samuel James.