I’m something of an apologist for the Hobbit movies. There Are a lot of things wrong with them, but most of them come down to massive studio interference, like the decision to do three films, and a bunch of the stuff that they added. If you watch the surprisingly candid extras on the DVDs and Blu-ray’s, you will see how insane the production was. Once del Toro Left, Jackson basically took over the project to prevent it from being added to some blockbuster hack. He had almost no time to prepare, in the movies suffered for it.

But there are good things scattered about; almost all the acting is uniformly excellent, there are frequently you some striking visuals, it has the most amazing dragon ever committed to film, and some very fun set pieces. I understand that a lot of people have problems with it, and there are a lot of legitimate criticism is to be made of it, but saying that it is Phantom Menace-level bad is frankly unfair. Given what Jackson had To work with, it is amazing that they even came out coherent.