Damn right I do, so back up. I bring the dork whenever I want, and the dork's about to hit the fan. You don't want any of this...
Peter Jackson is telling reporters he'd love to direct The Hobbit. Scalzi's happy.
Horrible idea. Because:
All the weaknesses of the current trilogy will be glaring in a Hobbit movie. It's a smaller book: short on themes, long on adventure for adventure's sake. You can say a lot of great things about Jackson direction of LotR, but his execution is all about reverance, not adventure.
LotR's two chapter are way better film thans either of recent Star Wars episodes. They've got great performances, drama on an epic scale, the best acting by a CGI character to date. There are no glaring weak spots, no idiotic dialogue, no crappy actors, no bad CGI.
He seems to have realized most of Tolkien's atmospherics, but only after Gary Gygax, Lloyd Alexander, George Lucas and dozens of others have spent decades stealing ideas from LotR one idea or image at a time. A million underweight dorks were carrying this book around during the early 80s, and the cover is just another uncredited depiction of the Balrog fight at the end of Fellowship. Tolkien-inspired media is everywhere.
Consequence: the LotR movies don't ever surprise the audience, because Jackson sticks to Tolkien's script.
Less focused crit: Between the first two movies, isn't there about an hour of film where characters mope around saying "I am sure am sad Frodo/Pippin/Mary/Gandalf/Aragorn is dead," when in fact they aren't? Throw it out. I don't care if that's how Sauron really is supposed to look: he looks like a Power Rangers villain. And Enya: why?
Speaking of the music, LotR's score is predictable doom doom doom whenever we get yet another panaromic shot of trees falling or people rowing or horses galloping. Compare that with the kickass chorus-of-ululating-valkyries before the Darth Maul showdown. Somebody turned that saberfight into a house remix. Nobody's going to get sandwiched between glo-stick toting lesbians to Howard Shore's score.
LotR's CGI armies fighting: cool. But not as jaw-droppingly cool as the end of Attack of the Clones, which really felt like something new on the screen.
Obviously, these are niggling complaints in the face a huge success. But if you take this same approach to Hobbit, if you're going to take audiences backward to a smaller story with characters who have a lot less at stake, this paint-by-Tolkien's-numbers system will flop.
Consider: the last third of The Hobbit revolves around a dragon. Just the idea of a big CGI superlizard being introduced at the end of a could-be-good movie makes my brain turn to sludge. We, the public, need no more CGI superlizards. And The Hobbit is littered with dwarves, a species Jackson hasn't really found a purpose for in two movies so far (Which is too bad: a dwarf fight is exactly the kind of scene that could feel new. A little three-foot tall butterball cutting orcs down at the kneecap: good times at the cinema!)
Post-LotR, for The Hobbit to be any kind of worthwhile entertainment, it's going to need to be tinkered with and given a non-Dungeons & Dragons-centric vision. They can make it political, they can make it a musical, just don't make it look anything like Willow.
