The Hobbit — An unexpected journey [2012]

There have been very few times have I left a cinema going “The fuck did I just watch?”

After viewing the first part in Jacksons Hobbit trilogy. I found myself walking beside a complete stranger bamboozled about what we had just watched and if actually either of us could decide if we liked it or thought we’d just sat through nearly three hours of dog shit.

Visually — it was like watching a BBC players Shakespeare play from the ’90s. Overly bright and undecided whether it was a filmed play or a film of the play. At times it felt like the reenactment bits from a history documentary with a sizeable budget.

My jury is out on the higher frame rate. I dislike the High Definition mode on HD televisions that appears to move everything at a slightly higher speed. I will agree with Jackson and co that perhaps I am not used to it, so I won’t be bashing it for that. I will attempt to wait and see can I adjust or if it remains completely jarring and as if a movie is on fast play.

Like the Lord of the Rings — it is some guy and pals reimagining of ‘The Hobbit’ — or whatever they like in the the shell of ‘The Hobbit’. The rearranging and in some cases complete discarding of the history within Tolkien’s book casts his original story and the characters within it — askew and hobbled.

This is not a case of me sitting here clenched fists repeating “No no it is not how I imagined it”. Simple things like the blue hood, Azog, the rabbit chariot. Just leave me rather cold.

People tend to say — but the difficulty of bring Tolkien’s vision to the screen — he has done such good work. Well, you would then perhaps think that if there is so much difficulty in bringing Tolkien’s vision to the screen. Then you have enough to work on, to do — without deciding to rewrite Tolkien’s vision and insert a heap of stuff from your own vision.

The acting is at times wooden. Thorin feels like they just rewrote Aragorn but a bit shorter without the Elf love interest rather than the character presented in the book. Gollum feels as if he’s acting in a bit of a rush — in a two man play about crack just off Brooklyn. Though Freeman is good as Bilbo.

At times it feels like I am watching the FMV intro for a new ‘World of Warcraft’ expansion.

I do have to spare a thought for the hubris involved in taking a book written seventy-five years ago — that has remained a bestseller, in print and entrenched within popular culture ever since. And changing it. Minor adaptation changes not withstanding, the wholesale insertion and rewriting — it is something I can’t quite let go of.

Beautiful in places, always epic, it makes a fine fantasy film — whatever it is that sits within the cored out shell of ‘The Hobbit’ and to some degree Tolkien’s world. Children, blind fans and the most earnest self righteous Tolkien fans (the ones who correct your pronunciation — though are not always right themselves) will adore it. Definitely take them. I would have really enjoyed it were it called ‘Fourteen guys versus a dragon Part 1’. As ‘The Hobbit’ — I will have to watch it again — maybe once again in the higher frame rate and 3D and then again in normal.

It is ‘The Hobbit’ and I have waited to see it. I don’t want to hate it.

Note: Remarkable restraint was shown in the writing of this review.

Wait

No no no no…

I can’t do it.

Never before has one man — one film company been given such a famous and auspicious line with which to open a film adaptation. The sort of line that jars of childhood.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

It’s not hard to get wrong. It’s not hard to mess up the placement. It’d sound pretty awesome if Morgan Freeman said it.

Yet something so simple — as beginning his tale of ‘The Hobbit’ with

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

Jackson can’t even do that.

Originally published on December 14, 2012.