While the book's Smaug does indeed descend on Lake-town to punish the community for interrupting his slumber, the dragon-originally described as about 100-feet long-is now 'the size of a 747' and Lake-town-largely evacuated in the book prior to the great worm's arrival-bears witness to something more akin to 'the fire bombing of Dresden,' says Drout. It's as though Tolkien’s original 1937 children’s book had been put on steroids. But overall, the essence of Middle-earth and its characters are intact enough to make the journey to the cinema worthwhile for all but the pickiest of purists.Īs per tradition, we asked Michael Drout, an English professor at Wheaton College, and John Rateliff, an independent Tolkien scholar and author of the forthcoming book, A Brief History of the Hobbit, to help us navigate the hodge-podge of Tolkien material and Hollywood invention.įor starters, there's the scale of things. In some cases, the Jackson additions seem to work in others, not so much. Much of the final film operates in a grey area somewhere between the Tolkien-Jackson dichotomies. The Battle of the Five Armies, however, turns a significant corner, relying on a heavy dose of artistic licensing and big screen razzle-dazzle.

The second, The Desolation of Smaug, strayed a bit further from its source material, but was still largely Tolkien. The first movie, An Unexpected Journey, contained bundles of nerdy references and was largely faithful to J.R.R. The third and final installment of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy opened this week.

The hobbit book trilogy