The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) ****/*****
Despite trying my best to go into every movie with an open mind and a willingness to be entertained, I must admit that I was pretty nervous about seeing Peter Jackson’s new adventure in Middle Earth, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. First off, he was taking one book and stretching it out into three movies, which seemed like a money-grubbing tactic that was guaranteed to doom any chances of the storytelling being satisfactory. Secondly, this was ostensibly a prequel, seeing as it’s being made after Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, which exist later in the timeline and tell the big, world-ending tale of this universe. By comparison, these movies just tell the story of an incidental adventure that Frodo Baggins’ uncle goes on — one that does little more than set the table for Frodo’s adventure; the important adventure. Also, buzz on Twitter was trending negative, which is always a bummer.
As the film went into its place-setting narration, my reactions were mixed. We’re told the tale of a great dwarf kingdom that was overtaken by a gold-hungry dragon named Smaug. What’s great is how Jackson is able to show an entire village and then an entire mountain kingdom get decimated without ever showing us the dragon who is doing the decimating. Leaving the reveal of the dragon effects for later is smart. Why show something now that you can save for later? It’s the Jaws principle of delayed gratification. What’s not so great is how much CG is used in the sequence. Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films were some of the last movies to mix a lot of models and miniatures in with all of the computer animated stuff, and they looked a lot better for it. By comparison, these scenes look like Lucas’ gaudy, glossy Star Wars prequels.
If the opening narration was something of a mixed bag, then the first scene we get of our actual flashback tale was a complete disaster. It takes place about 60 years before The Lord of the Rings, when Bilbo Baggins was a much younger hobbit. Gandalf has put together a crew of 13 dwarves who intend on taking back their ancestral kingdom from Smaug, and they’ve all decided to get their party together in Bilbo’s hobbit hole. The scene is full of slapstick humor and CG objects flying through the house in implausible ways, and it seemed like the beginning of a very goofy, very bad movie. We even have to listen to the dwarves sing a song, which made an already lengthy setup sequence seem even lengthier. The Hobbit was not off to a good start.
The opening sequences weren’t the only aspects of this movie that were bad either. Another big negative that Jackson’s overuse of computer animation brings to the table is that the action sequences lose a lot of their stakes. That’s not so much because things don’t look real, but because the ability to toss the characters around willy-nilly lead to the film being full of a bunch of A-Team violence. These characters take an incredible amount of punishment and they’re never the worse for wear. They fall thousands of feet, land on jagged rocks, get boulders thrown at their heads, and then pop up unharmed and do it all again. How am I supposed to worry about the fate of Bilbo and company when it seems like they’re all impervious to violence like Roger Rabbit or something?
All of the patented cheese that was present in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films shows up here as well. Every time a character that we’re supposed to recognize shows up in this film they get a dramatic reveal like they’re a dinosaur in a Steven Spielberg film or something. The story gets pretty repetitive too. Gandalf leaves the group, the group gets in danger, Gandalf shows up and saves them. Gandalf leaves the group, the group gets in danger, Gandalf shows up and saves them. Over and over again. It starts to feel like you’re caught in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation with the time loop. There’s just no denying it: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a movie with flaws.
When push comes to shove though, watching a movie where Peter Jackson is bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth to life is just too much fun to get hung up on the details. While this film takes a minute to get going, once our party hits the road and heads out on their adventure, it actually gets quite good. The best thing The Hobbit has going for it is the chemistry that Ian McKellen’s Gandalf and Martin Freeman’s Bilbo share. There’s some banter going on between them, and you can tell that both actors are having a good time. On a broader level though, this movie is just really fortunate for having Martin Freeman playing Bilbo, period. He’s a charming actor, and he’s actually really funny here. There wasn’t anything funny in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. Those movies had the too-cheesy-to-not-make-you-roll-your-eyes Frodo and Sam friendship serving as their protagonist, and the deus-ex-plot-thread-generator hijinx of the annoying Merry and Pippen in addition to that, so as far as the hobbit situation goes, The Hobbit is head and shoulders above The Lord of the Rings.
The action scenes here take things to another level as well. All of the action stuff in Jackson’s Middle Earth movies has been epic in scope, but in The Lord of the Rings that just meant that a lot of stuff was going on at once, whereas here it often means that the action is taking place over huge swaths of geography. The cool thing about that is that Jackson is never afraid to pull his camera way, way back and give you a bird’s eye view of everything that’s happening. This movie’s action sequences are so well constructed and edited that they’re something of a joy to behold. You’ve got groups of combatants chasing each other over hills, diving down caves, stopping to do battle, and you always know where everyone is in relation to one another and what’s going on at every moment. In so many other director’s hands — talented directors — this would have all looked like so much mess.
The scene where Bilbo first encounters Gollum and the One Ring is just so great too. If there’s anything that everyone can agree on regarding these movies, it’s that Andy Serkis and Weta’s animators’ combined efforts to create Gollum’s performance has been impressive and entertaining stuff, and all of that magic gets recreated here without a hitch. The stretch of time Bilbo spends down in Gollum’s cave engaging in logic games with the unfortunate little freak is the highlight of this movie, and the sort of delightful, otherworldly thing we go to the movies for in the first place. Gollum has long been one of the most memorable characters in literature, and now he’s one of the most memorable characters in movies.
Enough about how good or bad The Hobbit is though, let’s start talking about the subtext. This movie makes it clear that the dwarves represent the Scottish, and it’s long been clear that the hobbits represent the English and the elves represent the French, but what is a real revelation is how raucous and unruly the trolls get once they start talking. And who knew that trolls could talk in the first place? It almost seems, to the casual observer, that Jackson has chosen to have the trolls represent New Zealanders. I can’t help but wonder if that comes from any bad experiences he had while shooting the first trilogy.
