The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Alternate Review)

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.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Unexpectedly, and undocumented by many of the major coverage and reviews, Peter Jackson has delivered an extremely successful and entertaining adaptation of The Hobbit.

More on the reception later, because it’s worth dwelling first on the achievements of the film.

It seamlessly picks up the style, imagery and tone of the previous Lord of the Rings films in such a way that it is hard to feel over a decade has passed since The Fellowship of the Ring was first released. Aside from a curiously lumbering prologue that brings us back to Ian Holm’s Bilbo and Elijah Wood’s Frodo, the film picks up once we’re positioned in the time proper of the story. Admittedly, the introduction of the dwarves and their quest – to retake the homeland under the Lonely Mountain – is detailed and thorough, and some may feel too long for what is an adaptation of a short book. But ultimately it’s all necessary, as Jackson knows the relevance and resonance of these early scenes with Bilbo and the dwarves carries and underpins much of the crucial action throughout this film, and will have to do likewise for the coming two films.

This is not a retroactively constructed trilogy, formed out of three spontaneous stand-alone stories. These are thoughtful and considered plot points, made in full awareness of how long the journey will be, and how tedious it can become if it’s all spectacle without character-driven emotion and desire underneath. Much is the same in the original Lord of the Rings films.

The journey itself moves swiftly along, and continues the up-and-down episodic nature of the original novel, but introduces stronger thematic through-lines and overarching conflicts that stitch the episodes together into a continuous dramatic narrative. To be honest, this was something always missing from The Hobbit as a novel. It is a story written for children, in the manner of bed-time tales, which need to be short and almost televisual in the way they deliver a series of ongoing tribulations. Compared to The Lord of the Rings novels, this is a weakness of The Hobbit, and Jackson has improved the source novel immensely with this film.

The special effects will win the Oscar. That’s pretty much a given. Phenomenal.

Andrew Lesnie’s cinematography has never been better. What was so satisfying with this film was that Jackson and Lesnie’s camera allowed the audience time to actually sit in the environments, witness details and characters in wandering close-ups, something that wasn’t there in the original three films. Those had very much the staple of wide shots for new locations, close ups for dramatic moments, and everything else carried in standard mid to full shots. Here the camera is far more inventive and fluid, and it leaves impressions on the viewer more than the earlier films. The best example of this by far is the crucial Riddles in the Dark sequence where Bilbo encounters Gollum. Other moments, such as the flashback to the Battle of Azanulzibar (yeah I looked that up) and the climactic scene where the company fights off Azog and his wargs, are so captivating in the way the camera documents the scenes, that I could rewatch them over and over for all the tiny details included.

So I loved this film. More than I expected to. I expected to enjoy it, and more than some reviews had made out, but also because I didn’t like the book nearly as much as the longer, darker, more structurally sound trilogy. And yet I’d hazard an early stab at saying that I think this film is – as a film – more successful than any of the earlier three. It is, as a fantasy genre film, high above than almost anything else made before, something a lot of reviews are studiously ignoring. It is a testament to Jackson’s ability that these high-fantasy genre films are dissected on a level rarely afforded of the genre.

So why has there been negative coverage of the film’s release? Not to put too much stock in this, but Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 65%, whereas IMDB rates it an 8.3. It has grossed nearly $900 million to date. And it’s only been out a few weeks. Apparently there’s a divide between what critics are saying, and what people actually think.

Many people have lamented the fact that Jackson’s taken one short book and is turning it into a trilogy of films potentially as long as The Lord of the Rings, which was adapted from three very long books.

This is incredibly short-sighted and narrow-minded. Harsh, but necessary.

Some maths:

The Hobbit – 310 pages.

The Lord of the Rings – 1570 pages.

Brokeback Mountain – 65 pages.

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The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey – 169 minutes (so far, we don’t know the running time of the next two films, and they could well be shorter).

The Lord of the Rings – 558 minutes.

Brokeback Mountain – 134 minutes.

It is often said short stories adapt best into films. Hitchcock did this often. It is too hard to fit all the detail from a novel into a film. A 310 page novel will always lose detail. Jackson actually had to lose material – and a lot of it – from the original trilogy in order to adapt it into three very long films. What that shows is a mark of his adaptations that the three films are coherent, let alone entertaining. To reduce that volume of pages and detail into just over 9 hours of film is incredible.

We can only speculate how long the total running time of The Hobbit trilogy will be, but what’s become apparent from this first film is that he’s not wanting to leave parts out, and is including parts from other areas of Tolkien’s oeuvre to improve the drama, tone and consistency of the original novel. To make a child’s story into a film faithfully, after adapting the rather adult The Lord of the Rings, would be ridiculous.

Finally, my favourite thing about viewing this film. It seemed clear whilst watching this that Jackson was very careful not to repeat the mistakes of prequels-past, and nullify what was so good about the original films. Additionally, the lengthy preproduction time on this film has served it well in that the story is much more considered than the first three, which had the feel of trying to control a runaway train. Every scene in this film is entertaining in its own right, but also is going to enrich and expand and damn well improve future viewings of The Lord of the Rings. Characters and events get hasty treatment there, and this film has managed to change that and hopefully – when all three are released – allow an extremely pleased viewer the chance to watch six films in chronological sequence and have an experience never put to film before.