“True courage is knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one,” Gandalf tells Bilbo in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.*
Gandalf’s homily doesn’t appear in Tokien’s original novel The Hobbit. Still, the sentiment has some textual support….
[However]…if Jackson meant for Gandalf’s comment to highlight Tolkien’s nonviolent ethic, though, the rest of his film undercuts it””and, indeed, almost parodies it. The scene where Bilbo spares Gollum in the movie comes immediately after an extended, jovially bloody battle between dwarves and goblins, larded with visual jokes involving decapitation, disembowelment, and baddies crushed by rolling rocks. The sequence is more like a body-count video game than like anything in the sedate novel, where battles are confused and brief and frightening, rather than exuberant eye-candy ballet.
The goblin battle is hardly an aberration in the film. I had wondered how Peter Jackson was going to spread the book over three movies. Now I know: He’s simply added extra bonus carnage at every opportunity. The dwarves, who in the novel are mostly hapless, are in the film transformed into super-warriors, battling thousands of goblins or orcs and fearlessly slaughtering giant wolves three-times their size.
People want their eye candy and will pay to see clearly what imagination brings only darkly; textual faithfulness is optional.
I tend to agree – the Hobbit movies give the impression of being rather unimaginative slash-fests, in a way that the Lord of the Rings movies were not.
But others will have a different view.
I am glad to see that Tolkien’s works are getting publicity, and I trust that will encourage more people to read them.