But how are Jackson's Hobbit films in any way "child-like"? They're attempting to be just as grim and mature as LOTR. And the violence in The Hobbit is far more gruesome than anything in LOTR. There's like a million beheadings on-screen in The Hobbit.
12 dwarves and Hobbit fall down a canyon, have a several thousand pound giant goblin fall on top of them with a satisfying thud, and the worst that happens is the audience laughs. 12 dwarves and a Hobbit are trapped in barrels going down a river, followed by an army of Orcs, and between a waves of groans from the audience PJ is forcing laugh moments. Entire armies fall to ruin by paper cuts.
It's trying to ride this line of dark and grim, but still trying to be "It's a story for kids yah!", but without actually wanting to face the consequences of what that actually means. I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that there's beheading every other second here, I'd say 90% of the fighting in these movies happens without bloodshed. Just slash your sword across their breastplate, they scream and fall down, "Oh the horrors of war." It wants to present the evils of mankind, so it has some asshole in a unibrow dress up in drag and be an asshole. It wants to be epic and grand, but nothing feels real, both in the sense that it's a literally an f-ing cartoon, but also in the fact that I, as someone watching this world, can't interact with or understand the motivations of barely anything going on. These guys do this cause... ehh, and those guys are doing this because- "Shut up and watch the over-saturated cartoons would yah?"
EDIT: Actually thinking about the Goblins again got me thinking, they're a pretty apt metaphor for what I'm trying to say.
Here are the Goblins in LOTR:
Terrifying, pointy bits everywhere, skin looks like it's rotting away in parts. Every part of the design is made to instill fear. These are scary mo-fo's.
Here are Goblins in the Hobbit:
They're bloated, confused, almost all of the points and edges have been filed away. The eyes are just bulging out of the skull like they didn't really know where to put them, and just squished them into the skin roughly where the eyes ought to be. It's all confused, and the result is something that...kiiiiindaaa.... resembles the terrifying visage we knew before, but ultimately is just kind of confusing, and at the end of the day just gets played for laughs anyways...cause "Hah, why would we want to make an enemy that's actually scary right guys? This is a kids movie!"
(And yes, whatever, you can argue it all away with they're a different species of Goblin, blah-blah-whatever-good-job-missing-the-point if you want to)
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