What happens when a stand-alone novel gets turned into a prequel in reverse? You get fighting dwarves, a sword-wielding hobbit, a rabbit-pulled-sled and an albino orc henchman…of course. What? You thought a barely 300 page children’s book was going to be enough to churn out three sprawling cinematic “money-in-the-bank” features? You must have been smoking that half-ling leaf….

Some spoilers to follow….

Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hit theaters this month–an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 masterpiece of children’s literature, and the first of three cinematic installments. Like Tolkien’s novel, the film has all the necessary components: hobbits, dwarves, wizards, orcs, trolls, and plenty of magic. It’s fun. It’s adventurous. It’s action-packed. There is one slight problem however: it’s not The Hobbit.

I’m no purist. I understand that changes will occur when adapting a novel to a film. Sometimes I even welcome them. In Jackson’s version of Fellowship of the Ring, I had no problem with the absence of the mysterious Tom Bombadil; if Tolkien-geeks haven’t been able to exactly put a finger on what he was supposed to be, why burden new viewers with the task? Besides, his exclusion didn’t alter the story in any meaningful way. Neither did I mind the expansion of Arwen’s role in the film version; doesn’t help Fellowship pass the Bechdel Test, but it at least provides a brief respite from the otherwise all-male, all-the-time, flick. Same goes for smoothing out archaic prose that may work beautifully on the page, but poorly in a modern cinematic production. Books aren’t films; we shouldn’t expect them to be. And change isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

That being said, films adapted from books can’t be divorced from comparisons to their source. Readers aren’t merely going to forget the original when they see the adaptation. Thus, when any director decides to give his or her interpretation that dramatically veers away from the source, they’re engaging in a bit of high-financed fan-fiction. The question is, do those changes help or harm the original story? Or do they make no difference at all?

Jackson’s Hobbit, like Lord of the Rings, takes cinematic license in translating Tolkien’s works. Some changes, like having the dwarf company show up singly and in groups instead of all-at-once, and in individual dress instead of color-coded hoods, made little difference. Neither did, for instance, Gandalf’s finding and giving of Sting to Bilbo, rather than he (Bilbo) finding it himself. Both scenes had their cinematic purpose–the first, to give the dwarves individual distinctiveness; the second, to allow Gandalf to impart onto Bilbo the lesson of mercy, so important for his meeting with Gollum. Those are minor tweaks that are neither here nor there. The absence of things like the troll’s “talking-purse”–a quirky literary piece that still befuddles Tolkien-geeks–was likely a good move. Other changes however cross-over into gross embellishment, and have become a source of controversy.

Probably some of the most noticeable changes are done to the dwarves. In the book, except maybe for Thorin, they are a funny, proud but often inept bunch. They bungle their way from one crisis to the next as they try to reach the Lonely Mountain, with Bilbo and Gandalf often providing some form of rescue. Jackson’s dwarves may do a bit of bungling, and they’re full of humor, but they also pack a punch–wielding swords, maces, axes, bows and even a slingshot (in the book most just carried knives). In one scene of swashbuckling mayhem, these warrior-dwarves mangle, squish, decapitate and defeat goblin hordes by the seeming hundred–a vast departure from the book, where, with the exception of Thorin, the rest just fled for their lives after Gandalf slew the goblin king (causing the goblins to flee as well). These dwarves don’t channel those of The Hobbit; instead they appear to be crafted in the mold of Gimli, the battle-axe hardened dwarf of LOTR that helped spur the depiction of “fighting dwarves” so common in fantasy depictions like the Forgotten Realms universe. Noah Berlatsky over at the Atlantic points out as much in what he calls “Jackson’s Violent Betrayal of Tolkien:”

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. Given this vision of dwarves-as-ninjas, it’s not entirely clear why the expedition needed Bilbo along in the first place.

It’s not a minor criticism. Where Tolkien’s Hobbit was a children’s fantasy where the only large-scale battle takes place at the end, the movie seems to fly from one fight scene to the next–as if Jackson didn’t believe a 21st century audience would sit still without the requisite rituals of blood-letting. Of course all the baddies are your typical sub-human always chaotic evil types, so it’s killing that can take place without much moral concern.

Doubling-down on this theme, Jackson conjures up a whole new antagonist to trouble Bilbo and the dwarves–a giant albino orc by the name of Azog the Defiler. Now there is an Azog in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, but he’s no more than a name and didn’t even survive the mention. Jackson however remakes Azog as a malevolent baddie bent on revenge against Thorin because of a minor amputation incident way-back-when. Part of the intent may be to provide a back story for Thorin (transformed into a Dwarf-sex-symbol), explaining his motivations and allowing him to gain more depth–beyond the stingy curmudgeon of the book. It may also help tie together scenes that will come up in the later movies, in particular the battle between the dwarves and Azog’s son–Bolg.

One thing is certain however, Azog, with his swarthy inhuman henchmen and snarling Wargs, help make sure there’s violence a-plenty in Jackson’s adaptation. When he’s not executing his minions for failure, he’s making life fairly miserable for Thorin, Bilbo and the dwarves–either directly or by proxy. This allows our company to show off their martial skills in a climatic scene, where they are trapped in fir trees by warg-riding orcs. Instead of merely waiting for the arrival of the giant eagles as their saviors, these dwarves jump from the burning trees to get into a battle-royal with Azog and crew–assuring a clash of swords, teeth and fists. And, probably most surprising of all, this ever-present violence gives us a very unexpected hobbit.

In the book, Bilbo isn’t a fighter. He’s far from it. In fact, he manages to survive mostly by his wits. When he does finally use his sword meaningfully, it’s to rescue his companions and save them from a nest of really nasty giant spiders. And even in that case, he does so stealthily. In the movie, Bilbo is still no fighting man–at least not initially. But it seems the violence rubs off. In one scene he somehow holds his own against an experienced goblin by sheer luck. He does it again later on, managing to slay a Warg quite by accident. Then, as if the battle-lust has taken hold, Bilbo the hobbit actually flies headlong against a full-grown orc, sword-drawn. He then, if you can believe it, continues to plunge his sword into the orc, in an act of near disembowelment

For anyone familiar with the book, this was one bizarre scene. A violent hobbit? Bilbo the action-hero? What’s more, it is this battle-rage that eventually endears him to Thorin–who by film’s end hugs and thanks him, declaring the hobbit as brave and battle-hardy as any dwarf.

Stop. Stop. Wait a fool of a Took minute.

One of the enduring points in Tolkien’s Hobbit is actually that violence isn’t always the best option–embodied by none other than Bilbo Baggins. In fact, by the end of the book, in the famed “Battle of Five Armies,” Bilbo has had such his fill of violence he refuses to take part. A mortally wounded Thorin admits at last that his push for war and violence was perhaps not the best path, and says the hobbit had it right and displayed the “true courage.” This key theme in the book, a driving part of the moral lesson, seems to lose credibility–what with Bilbo going all berserker. To Berlatsky this is illustrative of a key problem in Jackson’s interpretation, the seeming contradiction of the book’s theme:

Rather desperately, the film simply falls back on making Bilbo an improbably competent swordsman who somehow, without training, holds his own against whatever infinitely superior antagonist the film decides to throw at him. The dwarves embrace Bilbo not because of his pluck or smarts, but because he turns out to be a great warrior who can stand shoulder to shoulder with them and slaughter their enemies. So much for the true courage of sparing lives.

Not every Tolkien fan sees these embellishments as a problem. Michael Martinez over at Middle-Earth welcomes some of the changes like Azog, and views it as a worthwhile expansion. Martinez reminds us that Tolkien initially wrote The Hobbit for his sons, and hence kept it simple. Certainly he likely never envisioned the story might one day become a major blockbuster produced for a mass cross-cultural audience fed on a lengthy diet of cinematic action-adventures. For Martinez, the newly invented back story of Azog helps tie together loose ends to make a more coherent tale, giving Thorin a larger role by providing an adversary. This helps make the Hobbit a more mature story to fit a more mature and modern audience: