Armies

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies had its premiere tonight. The expansion of the story into 3 movies isn’t bad, necessarily, since the expansions make it clear how much is really going on in there. What’s surprising is how the relatively light book, about a content although perhaps boring hobbit on an adventure, was turned into movies with a much darker tone. 

Certainly Bilbo and the Dwarves are in constant danger the entire journey, and keeping the possibility of sudden death accessible throughout the series naturally would make it darker.  It's also true that a lot of throwaway items in The Hobbit - the Ring, Gollum, the Necromancer - are very significant in Lord of the Rings, and only a little scraping away at the surface would reveal the fell events that really were happening. 

Then again, there’s nothing that said the filmmaker had to focus on that, and earlier productions - particularly the 1977 animated version - really didn’t. 

It’s the difference between, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Saving Private Ryan. We never expect Indiana Jones to get killed or even seriously inconvenienced, while anyone but Ryan could easily get hurt during that group’s quest. In the original story, Bilbo often appears surprised by the situation he finds himself in and what he should do next, but not especially fearful for his life. He's in an adventure and willing to go along with the logic that an adventure demands.  These movies, though, dig into the fears that would really happen to someone plucked from their home and made to engage in dangerous activities - which was, incidentally, rather well examined toward the end of LOTR. (When Sam and Frodo discuss their personal "story" as they head up Mount Doom, that is.) It’s as if the hobbit's story wasn’t appropriate to our current Turning and needed to be made relevant by making it more “realistic.”