Two different filmmakers, two different films

I was curious how Gary Ross, director of The Hunger Games, was going to handle such a violent, disturbing book. A book which described, among many other things, a child beating another one to death with a rock, another being tortured by wild animals before mercifully being killed by the protagonist. The director handled the violence inherent to the story in a toned-downed, off-screen way, and removed a lot of the most heartless violence. He actually managed a PG-13 rating. In my view this was the lowest possible rating for any movie in which the theme is children killing children for sport. In short: the director did great, given the violent material he had to work with.

Peter Jackson's handling of The Hobbit, however, was a totally different story. Jackson not only added battles not in the original story, he added especially graphic and disturbing images of violence in those moments, and others, that were completely unnecessary, even to Jackson's remade version. Violent, realistic images in The Hobbit includes: multiple decapitations, chopping off of limbs, multiple mutilations by the sword, a stomach sliced open, someone's brain being repeatedly bashed in until he dies (the victim fights back at first then slowly and very clearly dies).

Gary Ross definitely didn't turn Hunger Games into Pollyanna but he lessened the violence. Peter Jackson definitely stepped it up a notch. The result is that Jackson made a film too slow for many adults new to the story and too violent for most children. The fact that this movie doesn't have an R rating is curious to me. The only excuse I can think of is that every gruesome victim is a computer-generating character, not a human. The "evil" creatures are portrayed as ugly, less-than human, hardly worth caring about as they are being mutilated on-screen. Still, in such a realistic portrayal I don't see that as much of an excuse.

Take my advice: Read The Hobbit to your kids, hold off on letting them see the film, and hope Jackson chills the extreme violent images in his next film so you can take them to see it.