It is
probably impossible to review this film without comparing it both to the
original source material, and to the 3 Lord
of the Rings movies that came before it.
So, in order to lay bare my own biases, I’ll start by briefly sketching
out:
My History with
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit was one of my all-time favorite childhood stories.
I was, it
must be admitted, more influenced by the Rankin-Bass cartoon (W)
than Tolkien’s original story. I first
saw the cartoon when I was 8 years old, and due to the miracle of VHS I was
able to re-watch the cartoon again and again and again. I had seen the cartoon multiple times before
I even learned it was connected to a book. (In the 1980s, before the explosion
of the Internet made geek culture so much more accessible, it was
possible to be ignorant of a lot of things when growing up in the sleepy Midwestern
suburbs).
But I did
eventually get around to reading the book as well.
Like many
children before and since, Tolkien opened up a whole new world to me that I
wanted to play around in more, and many of my own childhood literary attempts
were based in a Tolkien-esque world.
But for all
that, I never got into The Lord of the
Rings books. I tried several times
to read them, and just didn’t have the patience. The furthest I ever got was through the first
book, and about 20 pages into the second book before I got so frustrated with
the fact that the story wasn’t going anywhere, and just gave up. (Although that being said, it still remains
my ambition to read the trilogy someday before I die.)
I also have
a love hate relationship with The Lord of
the Rings movie trilogy. There are
moments of brilliance in them. (The big
battle scene in The Return of the King
is just amazing.) But on the whole I
find them hard to sit through.
I don’t mind long epic movies if they keep a good pace, but
I thought the Lord of the Rings
movies were poorly paced. Slow motion
was over-used, which caused some scenes to drag out needlessly long. (I don’t like slow motion in movies in
general, but as a rule you should never have slow motion sequences in a movie
that’s 3 hours long.)
Also, in the first movie especially, Peter Jackson set up
all these terrifying creatures, only to have them be hopelessly inept when
conflict actually came. (The Ringwraiths always miss what was right in front of them, no matter how poorly
Frodo hid himself. And the Orcs looked
scary, but then hardly put up a fight when good guys just sliced right through
them.)
All of which brings me to review the latest Peter
Jackson/ Tolkien offering: The Hobbit: An
Unexpected Journey
The Review
You know, it’s funny: despite all the bad
reviews this movie has gotten, and despite my mixed feelings on previous Peter
Jackson Middle-Earth films, I actually enjoyed this film.
Maybe it’s because of my childhood fondness for the
original story.
Maybe it’s because my expectations were low. I had read
the early reviews, and I was already well aware of what the film’s flaws would
be. (I’ll get to this more below, but
before I even started watching this film I knew people had complained it was
padded with extra material to stretch out the story, and I knew people said
there were tonal problems from trying to make a children’s book into an epic.)
So I watched the film with a forgiving eye.
Probably, more than anything, it’s because I didn’t watch
this film all in one sitting. I watched
the film in small bits over 3 days, just as a way to unwind a bit after work.
If I had watched this film all at once, I suspect it
would have tried my patience just like the previous Peter Jackson films. But in this day and age of DVDs, and pause
buttons, there is no reason why anyone has to be held captive to a movie’s
length ever again. Why not just watch 3
short movies instead?
Also, maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I think Peter
Jackson may actually be improving his craft with age. In spite of all the extra material and padding
that was added into it, this film showed better pacing than the Lord of the Rings movies. The action scenes, even though some of them
were arguably a bit superfluous, were well done and impressive to watch and the
slow motion sequences were cut to a minimum.
(I would have preferred Peter Jackson cut the slow motion out entirely,
but apparently he can’t help himself. He
has to have some slow motion
sequences in all of his movies.)
I was worried about Gollum’s scene, and thought the film
would drag during the game of riddles. But actually the directing was quite
good in that scene—Peter Jackson did a good job of maintaining the suspense
even though it was just two characters talking to each other.
As for the film’s flaws—these have already all been
pointed out by other reviewers.
Some people are appalled that Hollywood has the greed to try and milk The Hobbit for a whole trilogy, but I’m
pretty jaded myself. Every single thing Hollywood does is a
business decision, and everyone knows this.
There’s no point in trying to criticize Hollywood for being greedy anymore than you
would criticize any other capitalist enterprise. You take it for granted that Hollywood are greedy money-grubbing
capitalists, and then you ask, in spite of all this, did they manage to produce
something that’s entertaining or worth watching?
Final judgment will have to wait until the whole trilogy
is completed, and then we will be able to see how well the extra material
worked through the story as a whole. But
based on the first installment, I didn’t have a problem with all the extra
material.
After all, people often will read the novelization of a
movie to get more in depth into a story.
It’s not often that the movielization of a novel is what provides the
extra material, but in theory there’s no reason it can’t work the other way
around. To me, it just made the story more interesting
to see how Peter Jackson was trying to add extra plot threads, complications,
and extra motivations to Tolkien’s original simple story.
I also thought it was kind of cool how Jackson integrated material and characters
that will better help to set up The Lord
of the Rings story. In the future,
when all 6 Middle Earth movies will have been completed, there’s every
indication that these Hobbit movies
will move very smoothly into The Lord of
the Rings. It should make
interesting viewing for future generations.
(Of course, once again I should emphasize the key to
putting up with Peter Jackson is not to watch his films all in one
sitting. I probably would have had a lot
less patience with all the extra material in this movie if I had watched it
straight through, but broken up into 3 different nights I didn’t mind it at
all.)
The Tone
The Hobbit was originally written as a sort of children’s fairy
tale, while The Lord of the Rings was
an epic for adults. The tone between the
two stories is not entirely consistent.
I have read some reviewers who have criticized The Hobbit for its mixed tone, but in my
view this is a problem inherent with the source material.
Because The Lord of
the Rings movies came first, they obviously had to have some impact on how The Hobbit would be made. The filmmakers had to make some sort of
effort to bring The Hobbit more
inline with the darker, more epic tone of the previous movies, but at the same
time stay true to the original source material.
For the most part they do an okay job at this balancing
act, but either way I just think it’s interesting to see how they try and deal
with this problem.
Big Screen versus Small Screen
Some of the action
sequences were a little hard to follow on my TV screen. There was just too much happening at once.
For this reason, the action sequences would probably be
better appreciated on the big theater screen.
But then if you watch this movie in the theater, you don’t
have the luxury of pausing it halfway through and breaking it up into small
chunks. So you have to pick one or the
other.
(On a sidenote: it seems more and more movies these days
contain really dense action sequences that I have trouble following on my small
screen TV. This was never a problem when
I was a kid. Am I just getting old, or
is CGI enabling movies to pack a lot more action into one frame?)
New
Zealand
Even before I saw The Lord of the Rings movies, I spent two years in Japan living next to a New Zealand fellow who was
constantly telling me how beautiful his home country was. (I would be constantly overwhelmed by the beauty of the Japanese countryside in Oita Prefecture, and he would always refuse to be impressed by it. “I’m sorry,” he used to say, “but when you
come from New Zealand,
it takes a lot to impress you. These
small waterfalls and mountains in Japan are nothing like what we’ve
got back home.”)
Although I still have never been to New Zealand,
these Peter Jackson movies have done a lot to convince me that he wasn’t lying.
The Hobbit
follows in that tradition. Wow! What
beautiful scenery throughout the whole movie!
And I thought landscapes like this only existed in fairy tales!
Other Stuff
Basically I’m in agreement
with Whisky Prajer’s short review of this movie
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