Lord of the Rings made Peter Jackson, but the Hobbit films left him behind

Ten years ago, Stephen Fry ate balls in the Hobbit movies. If that doesn't ring a bell as something from Tolkien, don't worry. Not only is it from the second film in the culturally forgotten Hobbit trilogy, but this particular series only exists in the Extended Edition.

That's right. The Hobbit films, an eight-hour trilogy of films best known as perhaps unnecessarily padded adaptations of a 300-page children's book, have an even longer version. And unlike the Extended Editions of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, which supplement these masterpieces with nearly three hours of more character and world-building, these are all about PJ letting his freak flag fly.

The Hobbit Extended Editions are a welcome return to form for an author who started out making self-described “splatter” films. That is Bad taste, a $25,000 science fiction film about aliens trying to harvest the human race for fast food; it is also Meet the weak, a puppet musical in which a busty hippo carries out a mass shooting while a fox sings about sodomy; And his Brain deadin which the main character slaughters an army of zombies with a lawnmower.

Fry references those films in his behind-the-scenes interviews about the underexposed testicle-eating scene. “He's built a reputation as a kind of filmmaker with a lot of flair and artistry,” he says. “But at the end of the day, he's the same Peter Jackson who made it Brain dead, Bad taste – films of the filthiest, most disgusting, mud-splattered, blood-splattered (kind). And that little part of him is still alive.”

To be honest, it was hard to tell. This isn't to say that Jackson's journey from indie rebel to Hollywood mogul has robbed him of his charming quirkiness. One of the most magical things about the Lord of the Rings trilogy is its combination of epic bombast and personal idiosyncrasy. A giant talking tree engulfs an anti-environmental empire, but still finds time to stick its head in the water when it catches fire; The tide turns on one of the greatest battles in movie history when a dwarf is thrown with restraint.

Still, making some of the most iconic films of the 21st century has a way of changing a man, and by the time Jackson King Kong And The beautiful bones, a depressing kind of anonymity had crept into his work. The villain who stretched his measly budget to chop off as many limbs as possible had built a reputation as a hired gun dealing with long-term IP, a criticism not helped by the fact that he didn't even want his only other position to lead.Rings narrative features, the Hobbit movies.

As many die-hard Rings fans know, Guillermo del Toro was initially hired as director and spent two years doing pre-production work on the films before disputes between MGM, Warner Bros. and New Line gave the green light and forced his departure for other pastures. The Hobbit behind-the-scenes material tacitly reveals that Jackson actually only accepted the gig to save the jobs of the immense team of crew and craftsmen who had already dedicated two years of their lives to the project. In the same footage, Jackson calls the task “impossible,” saying he “just started shooting the movie and most of it was completely unprepared.” This is not to excuse what are ultimately quite confused films, but rather to argue that their lackluster reception and legacy bury the slogan about a filmmaker who was thrown into the wilderness of production and somehow managed to unleash his inner strange to get back.

That weirdness, that cheeky brand of Jacksonian humor that's equal parts a tea-drinking professor and a naughty schoolboy putting a spider up his sister's dress, is on full display in the original version of the first Hobbit movie, an unexpected journey. After all, this is the movie where Sylvester McCoy plays Radagast the Brown, a hippie wizard with bird poop in his hair who rides a sled pulled by rabbits for no reason other than vibrations. It also features a giant goblin king, voiced by Barry Humphries, whose scrotum-encoded chin is sliced ​​open by Gandalf's sword like a sack of potatoes.

Such grace notes seem to promise a series of films that are more in tune not only with the idiosyncrasy of the source material, but also with the sensibilities of Jackson's earlier works. Unfortunately, the sequel of the film, The desolation of Smaug, almost immediately squanders this atmosphere for that of a trashy fanfiction. Despite a well-realized dragon and a high-flying amusement park-style set with barrels, there's just way too much nonsense about Sauron, about Legolas and Galadriel and Saruman and Elrond and an elven warrior named Tauriel, all of whom barely feature in the lead role. in the original text at all. By the time we get there The Battle of the Five ArmiesJackson finds himself adapting a sentence from Tolkien's book: “Thus began a battle that no one expected; and it was called the Battle of the Five Armies, and it was very terrible.”

Spoiler alert: it used to be very bad. At least theatrically.

But the material in the Extended Editions reveals a much more playful Jackson, one who has almost no idea how to balance the whimsy of Tolkien's book with the studio's desire to make a good prequel to The Lord of the Rings that he that's not possible. It doesn't help, but mess around a bit. Why else would he have come up with the aforementioned scene of Stephen Fry chewing on goat testicles? It's certainly not in the text! Yet there is Fry, as the Master of Lake-town, in his Dickensian finery and stringy red comb, plotting at his window when suddenly his servant, Alfrid, appears behind him, holding a plate of swollen animal scrotums .

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

“Bollocks, sir,” he says. “Ram and goat, fried in a delicious little mushroom gravy.” So begins the feast, with Fry tearing the crap to pieces like a five-course meal, the cartilage dangling and the bits spewing from his mouth onto his chin. In the documentary footage, Jackson can be seen giddily saying, “I think it would be great if you had one by the string, like a bobbing apple.”

This kind of twisted madness goes into overdrive in the Extended Edition of the trilogy's finale. The Battle of the Five Armies, which almost plays like an entirely different film than the original theatrical version. Re-rated R for 'some violence', it completely transforms a lame trilogy closer to an unnecessary trilogy into a Furieweg-meets-Evil Death piece of cinematic anarchy.

Forget the emphasis on richer character interactions or more structured world-building; Jackson uses almost all of the extra twenty minutes of its extended running time to fill his battle with all kinds of gruesome deaths and beheadings. For example, the previously discussed Alfrid, himself the Jar Jar Binks of this film in the original version, running around in full Monty Python drag to avoid battle, gets a fitting ending when he is literally catapulted into the mouth of a troll. Alfrid gets stuck, the troll suffocates and both die.

But the real one piece of resistance is a five-minute chariot race, Jackson's insane variation on Ben Hur. After turning the tide of battle, chief dwarf Thorin Oakenshield turns his attention to the top of a mountain called Ravenhill, where antagonist Azog, the pale orc, awaits. He leaps onto what can only be described as a war goat and charges to the top, closely followed by his fellow dwarves, steering a rickety chariot through a slew of enemies. The chariot is equipped not only with a crossbow, but (in a detail that clearly reminds Jackson of its potential for bloodshed) two spiky propellers on each of the wheels. These serve as the incidental weapon of choice as the dwarves plow through a field of orcs, leave the battlefield and handily decapitate six trolls in one fell swoop (and one perfect shot).

From the battlefield, Jackson shifts the terrain onto an icy path, unleashing all manner of enemies, from trolls to orcs and wargs, upon his heroes, sending them all into elaborate explosions of blood, finally unleashing his inner sadistic showman. It's the best part of a movie that, at least theatrically, didn't have one. Best of all, it's a clear cinematic handshake between the mogul Jackson, who knows how to stage a big-budget action movie, and the younger man who gleefully drove a lawnmower through a pack of zombies all those years ago .

Image: Warner Bros./Everett Collection

The Hobbit movies still don't quite work. They are a tonal mash-up of Tolkien, the original Rings films, and the del Toro film that sadly never came to fruition. But the Extended Editions reveal a lost element: Jackson's personal touch. Bilge Ebiri signed up for the first release his review of Five armies for Vulture that “Peter Jackson has lost his soul.” But this added material seems to show that this may indeed be the case found it it, even as he lost control of the films themselves.

At a time when visible authorship of blockbuster films seems increasingly remote, it's exciting to see these flickers of inspiration from an old pro in a series of films that were written off as soulless at the time. Jackson may not have been the right man The Hobbit in theaters, but his unexpected journey managed to reignite many of the impulses that made him such a special filmmaker in the first place. Such flickers may have all ended up on the cutting room floor, but their inspired madness flies in the face of the naysayers who would argue that Jackson has lost his touch. I have only one answer to them: “Bollocks.”