In an interview dated May 17, Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragon in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was pretty critical of Peter Jackson's adaptations of Tolkien's masterpieces, including The Hobbit.

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Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Mortensen went into quite a lot of detail about the production of The Lord of the Rings and how Jackson is, in a way, obsessed with big-budget, technically sophisticated film-making now. The actor suggested that this seemed to have spilled over to his work on The Hobbit.

Mortensen revealed that initially in 2002 Jackson had done very "sloppy" work with the last two in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the film needed "massive reshoots" which happened over the course of a few years.

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"But he would have never been given the extra money to do those if the first one hadn't been a huge success. The second and third ones would have been straight to video," he added.

The actor also alluded to the fact that Jackson might be betraying an organic quality in filmmaking for technical flourishes.

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"Peter was always a geek in terms of technology but, once he had the means to do it, and the evolution of the technology really took off, he never looked back," Mortensen said.

Lastly, it seems like Jackson's dependance on CGI has crippled him, according to Mortensen. He also suggested that films that could be pulled off in a smaller budget were executed on a large scale because of the Jackson's fascination with technology. Mortensen cited The Lovely Bones which he thought was a "smaller movie," yet Jackson needed a $90 million budget for something that could have been done in $15 million. "The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him," he said.

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Mortensen said that this attitude of Jackson's was amplified in The Hobbit films.

"It was grandiose, and all that, but whatever was subtle, in the first movie, gradually got lost in the second and third. Now with The Hobbit, one and two, it's like that to the power of 10," he said.


The Hobbit: The Battle of Five Armies will hit theaters on December 18.

Watch a teaser for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: