The Hobbit: A disappointing set of movies, but a worthy set of prequels

By and large, Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy has been an unwelcome journey. The first movie is riddled with bizarre comic relief, including an extended dishwashing sequence and a bunch of farting cave trolls. The second entry — by far the best one — succeeds due to two genuinely thrilling set pieces: a trip down a river and a confrontation with a terrifying dragon.

The third movie, which turns out to be the worst, is so clearly overstretched that it's hard to justify its existence at all. There's about a half hour of story in The Battle of the Five Armies' 144 minutes; most of the rest is spent on the brutally monotonous battle, as dozens of characters we don't know or care about are killed by dozens of characters we don't know or care about. Strangest of all, Bilbo Baggins — the titular hobbit — is almost totally irrelevant to the story. When Jackson gets tired of dealing with him, he simply knocks him out and pushes him off-screen.

But despite my irritation with the Hobbit trilogy as a set of movies, I have a begrudging appreciation for it as a set of prequels. As a standalone franchise, The Hobbit falls flat — but for all the flaws, this is the rare set of prequels that actually enhances the original movie series. When you imagine watching all six movies in a row, beginning with the first Hobbit and ending with The Return of the King, the weaknesses become less prominent, and the strengths begin to emerge.

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Hollywood's fundamental approach to prequels has always been flawed. When a movie succeeds enough to merit a prequel, the most beloved parts of the original story are revisited and over-explained until they've lost whatever power they had. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal is terrifying because his actions are inexplicable, but he's totally defanged by Hannibal Rising, which patches together a tragic backstory to explain why he became a cannibal. (His sister was killed and eaten by Lithuanian troops during World War II. Seriously.)

The worst, of course, was the other big prequel trilogy Hollywood churned out: the Star Wars prequels. Those dead horses don't need any more beating, but they remain the best example of sheer ineptitude when it comes to delving into the past of a beloved franchise. Given the chance to expand the scope and breadth of his massive sci-fi universe, George Lucas made it smaller, crowding his Star Wars movies with pointless cameos and nonsensical, revisionist backstories.

The Hobbit trilogy, for all its flaws, is wise enough to expand the story in ways that enhance The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Galadriel, who comes out of nowhere in The Fellowship of the Ring, gets a far more graceful introduction in the Hobbit movies, adding some character and texture to her original appearance. Legolas, who pops up among a half-dozen other characters at the Council of Elrond in Fellowship, will be a familiar and welcome face to anyone who watches the Hobbit movies first. And the fall and rise of Sauron, which is handled in an inelegant exposition dump at the beginning of Fellowship, unfolds more gradually and ominously here, which gives the darker side of Middle-earth an actual story arc.

Jackson also uses the Hobbit trilogy to make certain moments in The Lord of the Rings hit harder. Though Bilbo encounters Gollum only briefly in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, you have to imagine that Jackson was tempted to make the character play a larger role in his expanded take on the franchise. But once Bilbo acquires the ring in An Unexpected Journey, Gollum disappears from the story. When he rears his head again in The Fellowship of the Ring, it's fairly sudden — but anyone who began with The Hobbit will get an "aha" moment that was lost on those who started with The Lord of the Rings.

The prequels create other echoes that make the events of Lord of the Rings land with more punch. The "death" of Gandalf the Grey at the hands of the Balrog will be more surprising to those who have watched him survive similar life-or-death situations several times in the Hobbit movies. And the elderly Bilbo's fixation on the ring in Lord of the Rings will be sadder and more powerful to those who have watched him argue with The Hobbit's Thorin Oakenshield about his own obsession with a hypnotic artifact, unaware that the same fate awaits him decades down the line.

Jackson doesn't completely resist the urge to make obnoxiously on-the-nose callbacks to The Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the second Hobbit, one dwarf by the name of Gloin makes an eye-rollingly gratuitous reference to "my wee lad, Gimli." In Battle of the Five Armies, Legolas' father Thranduil delivers a similarly heavy-handed speech in which he encourages Legolas to seek out the ranger Strider. ("His real name, you'll have to discover for yourself," he teases. Who could it be?!)

And unfortunately, the two trilogies don't fit together quite as neatly as they should. Though Jackson managed to reassemble his main cast from Lord of the Rings, he made a misguided decision to rely on CGI for The Hobbit's orcs and goblins. The effect is similar to that of the Star Wars prequels, in which the "earlier" movies rely much more heavily on state-of-the-art computer effects than the later ones. (The CGI also looks much, much cheesier than the makeup and props used for The Lord of the Rings' orcs, but that's a different argument.)

But the overall impact of The Hobbit isn't telling a great story; it's telling a mediocre story that has the side effect of making a great story even greater. At this point, you could argue that The Lord of the Rings is a six-movie series — and while the first three movies don't live up to the latter three, they feel a lot like Tolkien's novels when taken as a whole. The Hobbit is weaker, with lower stakes and more child-friendly antics, but both its plot and theme pave the way for the darker, grander story of The Lord of the Rings. It's easy to imagine a future in which those introduced to Jackson's Middle-earth will experience the story the same way.