Peter Jackson's Worst Lord of the Rings Sin Was Forgetting the Story's Fairy Tale Roots

I couldn’t have been more excited for a movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit . The story of Bilbo Baggins is my favorite book — I even prefer it to The Lord of the Rings — and I try to read it again every year. By virtue of being less ambitious, The Hobbit lets Tolkien deliver a compact narrative that makes his talent as a worldbuilder and writer shine. That is also why, when I learned Peter Jackson would adapt The Hobbit as a trilogy of movies, I realized something was quite wrong.