The Hobbit hits theaters today, the first of three movies that will translate the single volume by J.R.R. Tolkien into yet another film trilogy set in the world of Middle-earth. And if expanding one rather modest book into three epic movies sounded like a bad idea the first time you heard about it, that’s because it was.

This isn't the first time that the story of The Hobbit has been distended beyond its original proportions in order to better coordinate with the narrative china pattern of Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself once attempted to rewrite Bilbo’s story after the success of the Lord of the Rings novel series to darken its more playful tone, but ultimately gave up, realizing that the result “just wasn’t The Hobbit.” Director and producer Peter Jackson would have done well to come to the same conclusion, rather than attempting to recreate the Lord of the Rings trilogy with the nostalgic desperation of a college freshman trying to get back together with his high school girlfriend.

The problem with The Hobbit isn't that it fails to be Lord of the Rings; it's that it tries so unbelievably hard to be when it isn't, not in its style, characters, or scale. The underlying quest in Lord of the Rings is nothing short of apocalyptic – if The One Ring is not destroyed, then the world of Middle-earth is lost – while The Hobbit deals with a band of dwarves attempting to retake their lost stronghold and reclaim their treasure from a dragon. It’s an adventure quest worthy of a D&D campaign, to be sure, but hardly the End of the World.

Nor is this band of dwarves the Fellowship. If you're not a fan of the books, I doubt you'll remember most of their names beyond their introduction, since they're largely defined in Snow White visual terminology by descriptors like “fat,” ‘old” and “stupid.” They bring a lot more slapstick and song-singing to the screen than our previous party of adventurers, which is all perfectly symmetrical with the source material, but the rest of the film is so rooted in the same visual style and epic grandeur that defined the Lord of the Rings that it seems dissonant. It’s both funny and telling that The Hobbit never feels stranger than when it’s actually being faithful to the spirit of The Hobbit.

As has been noted elsewhere, the movie often feels more like a well-executed videogame than a film, a feeling that isn’t helped by the surreal hyper-clarity of the 48-frames-per-second viewing experience, especially during the underground confrontation with the Goblin King who appears at a particularly dramatic moment like the very best miniboss of Middle-earth.

The action sequences have the look of epic clashes like the Battle of Helm’s Deep, but none of the heft, and above all, none of the tension or consequences. Largely interchangeable dwarves tumble down mineshafts like pinballs and emerge unscathed, and no matter how many times they find themselves dangling by their fingertips over certain death (note: a lot of times), they never fall. Even if they did, you get the sense that they’d just drop off-screen and reappear at the start of the level.

And no fault of Sir Ian McKellen, who does his best to anchor the thin material with all of his considerable gravitas, but there are so many shots of knowing, squinty-eyed Gandalf laughing at the antics of his compatriots that it starts to feel like the same annoying cut scene we saw the last five times we played this game, not a sincere moment of warmth.

Rather than earning most of its emotional moments, The Hobbit settles for referencing them, hotlinking fan nostalgia with the fervor of the Star Wars prequels. The appearance of Saruman is positively Darth Vader-esque, telegraphing his future heel-turn so openly that you can’t even call it subtext. I know he’s going to turn evil. You know he’s going to turn evil. Everything from Gandalf’s face to the music cues knows he’s going to turn evil, unless of course you never saw those last three movies, in which case it’s just going to be weird and inexplicable. It’s a movie that desperately needs a “previously on Lord of the Rings” to explain everything that happens afterward, and makes me pity anyone who one day attempts to watch these movies in chronological order.

When it's not busy dragging out its runtime with filler, The Hobbit is like a little kid tugging on your sleeve saying, “Do you remember the time when ...?” It's cute when you hear it the first time, and unbelievably tedious by the 15th or 20th. Hey, do you remember the time when Gandalf got trapped on the top of Isengard and he whispered to the moth and the giant eagle appeared to catch him? Well, what if that happened again, except we spent way more time watching him whisper to the moth and like, twenty eagles appeared and flew around forever? What the movie can’t do honestly or originally, it tries to do more, like an animal in a psych experiment frantically pushing a button that previously dispensed delicious food morsels.

The core misstep of The Hobbit is the confusion of form over content – it conflates the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with its shape, and attempts to make a simulacrum out of very different materials. The Hobbit is a fine story, a good story, but a much humbler one than the Lord of the Rings series by several measures. Making the former into the latter is a sort of reverse turducken: trying to hide something big inside of something small, with predictably disastrous results.

One of the most powerful ideas in Lord of the Rings was how its hero defied expectations of scale; even though Frodo was small and unassuming compared to his flashier, taller companions, those qualities didn't disqualify him from being a hero – they made him the hero. He inspired us because he never needed to pretend to be any bigger than he was.

Putting a hobbit on a rack and stretching him to the size of a giant doesn't make him a better hero. It doesn't make this a better movie. If anything, it fails precisely because it runs counter to the spirit of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings – the one that said size alone did not determine worth, and that being small was sometimes the very thing that made you great.