Since he prevailed in New York’s third congressional district in the 2022 midterms, George Santos has become a nationally known political figure — though presumably not for the reasons he had hoped. Scrutiny followed his congressional win, under which his seemingly impressive record has withered. A huge portion of his biography appears to have been fabricated, and his conduct is now the subject of several inquiries, including one from the House itself.
But forget all that. The Spectator reports that George Santos has committed what some might say is possibly an even more egregious offense: He thinks Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy is superior to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He told the Spectator that, “while he’s seen every Lord of the Rings movie, he said the Hobbit prequels are better as they ‘give you more depth’ and that The Battle of the Five Armies is ‘my favorite f***ing movie.'”
This is a catastrophic error in judgment that, perhaps (or perhaps not) more than anything else we’ve learned about him so far, indicates he is unfit for office. Marking the 20th anniversary of the Lord of the Rings trilogy for National Review, I argued that its films, though not perfect either in themselves or as adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work, create a world that feels “simultaneously fantastic and lived in,” while also maintaining enough faithfulness to the source to draw out some (though not all) of its best themes and narratives. They have CGI spectacle, to be sure, but this is used to complement other elements, not to substitute for them.
Though CGI that overwhelms the story is not the only problem with the Hobbit trilogy, it is sometimes so bad that it’s hard to believe the same director made both. See this absurd scene in which the elf-warrior Legolas, who had some impressive feats in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, turns into Neo from The Matrix:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kNqc5Hrh0M&t=137s
But the real problem with the Hobbit trilogy is that it takes one book that is shorter than any of the parts that make up The Lord of the Rings and tries to make it into three movies. It does so by inserting some appendix material that is canonically contemporaneous with the events of the The Hobbit but is not depicted in them, but also by just making stuff up. Neither sort of addition, despite what Santos argues, gives you “more depth”; rather, it ends up stretching the narrative beyond what it can bear.
Somewhere out on the internet, there is a fan edit of the Hobbit trilogy that combines all three parts into one film of approximately four hours. Despite my misgivings about this trilogy, I do think it depicts some of The Hobbit well; I imagine that this fan edit is pretty good, if not quite at the same level as The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Regardless, George Santos is clearly wrong. It may seem an inconsequential error, given his other transgressions, but, well . . . it matters to me.