The dwarf poster – not ordered by hotness.
First things first, I don’t awfully disagree with My Esteemed Colleague when it comes to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – after all, it’s not a bad film by any means. But I did have my own problems with it, not all of which can be assuaged by the development of the next two films.
OK, yes, New Zealand is very, very pretty. Thank you Peter Jackson, I think I’ve kind of got the idea now, some more, that the country is stunning. I really don’t know how many more panoramic shots of landscape with the lead characters trudging across it I could take, so here’s hoping the next two movies have none. Though I sincerely doubt it. Also, I think this will be my yearly 3D movie which reminds me I prefer to see things in 2D if possible. Though I will commend his use of the technology, I don’t like how it blurs things in motion and the edges of focus, and overall I find it rarely enhances my experience as much as the studios (and pricier tickets) would claim it does; instead, I usually find it annoying.
As for the content of the film itself… well, I didn’t really get into it until everyone left Rivendell, and that’s more than halfway through the film. Everything was just so portentous, with a score designed to really hammer home that Epic Things Are Happening from the start of the film. From the awkward prologue with Ian Holm and Elijah Wood to the too-long sequences that follow (Meet the Dwarves and Watch them Sing, Radagast the Brown, Elves Walk Slowly), the first half of the film never showed any lightness of touch, instead making everything serious, grave … and a bit dull. There’s a moment near the end, where Thorin runs into a fight, where I forgave the overly dramatic everything, but it was far from the first instance of the film trying so hard to emphasise its own importance that I found myself waiting it out rather than enjoying it.
Now, I studied The Hobbit in Year 7, but haven’t read it since then, so while I remember the broadest of strokes (including the bit that made me so annoyed as a kid that I stopped reading before the end) of the plot, I don’t know it nearly well enough to point out all the stuff taken from other parts of Tolkein’s canon. But it felt filled with extraneous details, and while I could see one more film, that there’s two to go really doesn’t fill me with faith that Peter Jackson will have relearned how to edit. Considering the audience is given a dozen dwarves (barely distinguished; except for James Nesbitt I really only could follow The Fat One and the Hot Ones), several fictional languages (spoken and written), a map’s worth of place names and a bunch of new species, I would have thought a little simplification was in order, but that didn’t seem the case – or like it is on the cards.
I didn’t hate the film – far from it. The second half onward I enjoyed especially, even as it veered towards the cartoonish. But it pushed the grandeur too hard and too early, for me, and so I didn’t enjoy it as much as My Esteemed Colleague, and wouldn’t put it on par with the first two Lord of the Rings, at least. Or even the third, which I liked less than the other two.
Honestly, it should be the first rule of Tolkein adaptations – when running long, cut the song.
Macguffin & McGuffin 