Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey



(Movie Review)

            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

            Also, for a very intelligent breakdown of the original movie trilogy, see Nostalgia Chick’s videos: Fellowship of the Rings [HERE], The Two Towers [HERE], and The Return of the King [HERE and HERE].

Link of the Day

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