Lord of the Rings Star Viggo Mortensen Bashes The Sequels, The Hobbit: Too Much CGI

In a new interview with The Telegraph, Lord of the Rings trilogy star Viggo Mortensen said that he believes director Peter Jackson has relied too heavily on computer-enhanced effects for all of his J.R.R. Tolkien adaptations since The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and that he wishes the director would take on a smaller project. "In the first movie, yes, there's Rivendell, and Mordor, but there's sort of an organic quality to it, actors acting with each other, and real landscapes; it's grittier," Mortensen said. "The second movie already started ballooning, for my taste, and then by the third one, there were a lot of special effects. 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." Mortensen's character, Aragorn, does not appear in the Hobbit films. "Peter, I was sure he would do another intimately scaled film like Heavenly Creatures, maybe with this project about New Zealanders in the First World War he wanted to make," Mortensen added. "But then he did King Kong. And then he did The Lovely Bones -- and I thought that would be his smaller movie. But the problem is, he did it on a $90 million budget. That should have been a $15 million movie. The special effects thing, the genie, was out of the bottle, and it has him."