Two Hobbit or not two Hobbit?

I'm dreading the two part film version of 'The Hobbit'. For a start, it's in two parts, and 'The Hobbit' is definitely a one part book. It's episodic, sure, but there's a very natural flow of episodes.

Maybe it's the news that a lot of extra characters have been crammed in to satisfy fans. I'm not much of a purist; if you aim to tell someone else's story in a different medium, do what you must to make it work. But, this is the book of a man who got upset when purposefully misspelled words were corrected by an editor, and didn't even want a film-adaptation of his works.

Maybe I'm nervous that this is a product being forced by people who saw the LOTR's success reap in more money than a small country.

But most of all, it worries me because...

...Well, because Peter Jackson really is not a very good film-maker.

There we go, I said it.

I should clarify that statement before it angers too many people; he's alright, he's not terrible, but he's no Almoldovar. What I meant by saying he's not very good, is that he is first and foremost a man of production. All of his films have a beautiful gloss. If his films were ornamants, you'd have them on the mantlepiece because they look so good.

What Jackson is not is a natural story-teller. He has a remarkable, envious array of tools before him, but he uses them as if he were making a flimsy model home. All spectacle, just a little too big, and lacking a geniune human touch.

Harsh criticism. Sorry.

My criticism is not based on the fact that the books are better, just that the films cannot hope to achieve even a fragment of the emotion that is charged in the book, and yet they still try.

'Lord of the Rings' was an amazing movie, a true cinematic spectacle, rammed with all the story and emotion of a hundred Bollywood films, and styled to western tastes. But how much of that was Jackson?

The worst parts of all three movies were the parts that Jackson and his writing team shoe-horned into the scripts: the death of Saruman, the romance between the true-king of scraggly hair and lady lips, Viggo's descent down a cliff-face that seems to serve no other purpose than to make him ride 5 minutes behind the rest of the plot. Or the patchy moments when a lot of book text has been shoe-horned out or condensed, such as the army of ghosts washing through the city like a green fog from the mind of John Carpenter.

Epic, sweeping shots of miniatures in combination with James Newton Howard are one of the most impressive aspects. I look forward to them in The Hobbit. And moments of subtlety, like Frodo's first encounter with a ring wraith; hopefully the tact of that entire sequence can be repeated with Bilbo's encounter with the trolls.

And yet I know that I despair for the the fact that the relatively brief battle at the end of the Hobbit (book) will take up most of the second The Hobbit movie. Has no one watched the last Harry Potter movie? Epic battle does not make for satisfactory conclusion.

I treasured The Hobbit as a kid. The story stuck with me for a very long time, until I discovered the joys of alcohol as a teenager mostly. And there are still images, and snatches of story that haunt me. I don't want Jackson to gobble them up and crap them out the same way he did with Return of the King.

Rant over.