I guess like hundreds of millions of other people, come December I'll flock to the theater to see The Hobbit. Looking back from the vantage point of a decade though, I think Peter Jackson has been rather overrated. I always thought it was interesting how one day he was making grade 'B' horror movies in New Zealand, and the next he is being proclaimed as the greatest director of our time.
I thought his King Kong was absolute rubbish, and for a holiday film it was a total downer. It was way, way too long, and I couldn't wait for it to end. Also, I loved Jack Black in School of Rock, but he was dreadful in Kong. My feeling with Kong was that PJ couldn't decide whether he wanted it to be a light-hearted or dark movie, and it didn't work as either.
Concerning the much lauded trilogy, I do admit that PJ did a great job re-imagining the Tolkien books as entertaining modern action-adventure films. Also, I agree that creating the trilogy must have been a logistical nightmare, and I give Jackson credit there as well. Looking back at them now after repeated viewings, however, they were not without their flaws and would not rate as being the greatest films of modern times. For one thing they were terribly death-centric to the point of morbidity. I didn't see that at all in the Tolkien books. To be fair though I think this was PJ's wife Fran Walsch's fault. For another, the way too many hobbit bonding scenes make me want to gag....."Oh Sam!" :kotz: Also, the women in the cast tried hard, but they came off boring and cardboard most of the time, and even the great Eowyn character ended up 'standing by her man' at the end.
The CGI was good, but I've become desensitized to it and am not nearly as impressed with CGI as I once was. I'm sure the trilogy wouldn't hold up nearly as well if you stripped away much of the CGI. Also, even when watching ROTK the first time in the theater, I found myself becoming impatient with the 4-5 false endings. On DVD at home this is not as big a deal, but in the theater it was painful. Anyway, at the end of the day we all knew that the LOTR movies had to happen, but did they have to happen in such a pretentious way???
If anyone doesn't think PJ has let success go to his head, you need look no further than the pic of him walking barefoot across Abbey Road. Please! Anyway, I hope his enormous ego doesn't spoil The Hobbit too much, but I'm not optimistic. In fact, given PJ's ego, I was not at all surprised when Guillermo Del Toro bailed from the project.
With this post I'm probably going to gain the enmity of the PJ fans at GameSquad, but in the words of the great journalist HL Mencken, "The purpose of the free press is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
BTW, like one or two of you mentioned, on revisiting the LOTR books a few years ago they did indeed lose some of their luster and appeal since first reading them as a teenager. I would add though that I have no such problem with the Silmarillion. It holds up very well, and I would love to see someone (other than PJ
do it as a series of films.