And the relationships were DULL--specially the one between Aragorn and Arwen, which was barely even touched on and we basically had to be TOLD that the relationship was there. I always felt that Aragorn and Eowyn worked better precisely because she got orders of magnitude more pages in the book--with actual interactions with Aragorn--than Arwen ever did. Hell, she was the ONLY female character with any meaningful role or significant involvement in the book, as far as I recall (it's been like two decades by now). Aragorn's involvement with Arwen felt predetermined, like Tolkien chose that it was going to happen before hand no matter what actually transpired in the actual pages.
But that's perfectly fine. Because it is not a book about Aragorn and Arwen. If there was such book then whole LOTR would be like third book of such trilogy or smth.
Whole point is - this is not book about their romance, but it exists as part of Aragorn history. Aragorn had his character arc before LOTR basically. And that's what's structurally awesome and more subvertive compared to modern novels than any GoT shit.
Two movies? Would that have been better? It's still one movie too many. The book stood on its own, for what 15 years before even LOTR was published, let alone the later hooh-ha. No "lore" needed. Alluded to, sure, but not needed. In fact, better for only being alluded to. In my opinion, a missed opportunity to make one great movie instead of three (or two) tedious ones.
I doubt it would work. "Hobbit" as a book is recollection of actual dangerous adventure of quite epic scope, including major battle, death of one of last wyrms, restoration of Erebor and Dale kingdoms (that will later stop invasion of Easterlings during War of Ring.) told in-verse by Bilbo Baggins to hobbit children basically. Simplified and colored vision of events. Could work that way if Hobbit was filmed before LOTR. Would not after. The problem is - where they could delve deeper into lore and mood, they delved into pointless overblown action scenes instead - which TBH was also sin of LOTR 2 and 3, too much time spend on batalistic.
Jackson's female Dwarves on those movies are easily distinguished from the males. But they do have beards.
You call that a beard? Amigo, maybe what Richard Armitage wore would count as female beard, but even that's very doubtful. Yeah, Jackson was also a hack, but this mistake was thankfully blink and you miss it, not within starring cast.
It's not an epic prequel to LOTR, and trying to shoehorn it into one... well we all saw how that turned out.
If you strop it of Bilbo jokes clearly ment for children, it is kinda epic prequel, and with LOTR appendixes one could relatively easily make it as such.
Problem is Hobbits action is terribly overblown, it's drunk over CGI epicness, not to mention utterly uncessary side scenes.
It's a mythology for England, yes the skin color is an issue.
It started as such, but evolved into quite something different. Good example will be - in any mythos ancient heroes are meant to be ancestors of people telling myths. Greek heroes were Greek, and they lived in Greece, Nordic berserkers from sagas lived in Scandinavia generally, Ilya Muromets in Russia. They were relatively little removed.
Tolkien evolved past it. Let's note - while hobbits speak English and Rohirrim Old English it's presented by Tolkien himself as translation from language spoken pre-Ice Age, language that's not even remotely simmilar to German or English (see original names of hobbits, or names of Numenorean kings). There is no even clear connection like in Conan books, it's mere translation of some archaic myth of different time and culture. If he wanted it to be English mythology (bit a folly considering English are simply speaking West Germans and they participate in Germanic mythos) well that's place where it fails.
But more importantly for a case - even if it was meant to be truly English - it means nothing for dwarves, because dwarves, like ents, orcs and dragons are not even human. I mean hobbits are ok, but not the rest of group. And Tolkien purposefuly modeled dwarves after Jews both in terms of language and using certain positive and negative stereotypes about Jewishness.
So I think we can clearly say - even if this world is meant to be English - the dwarves they are well Not-English element in this fantasy.
Honestly problem is more that they do not give dwarves any specific look. They gonna be Seatlle random bag. If they looked coherently as race, then let's say casting Ethiopians to play them would be fine. But instead by have other than black princess, random Jackson film like dwarves (Jackson dwarves design was also terribly and taken from D&D and Warhammer more than Tolkien) so it's diversity for diversity sake. And for that fuck those people.