The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I don’t know where to start. I didn’t take notes and I haven’t written an outline—both things I used to do when I wrote these more often. A few general notes, then, before I get into nit picking. I love The Lord of the Rings. I loved the movies and though it took some coming around I also really love the books. When I read The Hobbit in 6^th grade I liked it a lot, in fact for years I preferred that book to the later trilogy because it was less about world building and tangents, more about a clear story and brisk pace. It stood to reason that Jackson, who gave The Lord of the Rings a clarity and briskness in their cinematic versions, would easily work another miracle with The Hobbit, after all the work of streamlining the story was already done. Instead Jackson did the exact and total opposite of this, stretching simple material into a repetitive empty mess that just goes and goes and goes nowhere, and—we can hear Hollywood laughing all the way to the bank—will do so for two more movies. We may not get to see Smaug in this movie, but believe me, the presence of a lazy moneygrubber is manifest from start to end.

I might as well talk about the High Frame Rate format, since that’s the version Jackson wants audiences to see. HFR may be the next 3D—I pray to God that it won’t be—but if that’s the case this movie is its Clash of the Titans, not its Avatar. You can’t blame the awfulness of the format on a bad post conversion, though; they made it look as good as it could and it still looks terrible. Try this for me, I have a point: think of the colors in Life of Pi, every conversation in Casablanca, A New Hope’s opening shot, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’s flying sword fights, the first half hour of WALL-E, bullet time in the first Matrix, Atonement’s five minute shot on the beach in Dunkirk. Think about these things. Movies have a way of reminding you you’re watching a movie by pulling you deeper in. It’s intoxicating and wonderful. HFR reminds you you’re watching a movie like a slap in the face. Supporters promise that after fifteen minutes, half an hour, an hour, however long, you get used to it and you’ll never want to go back. No. It’s that occasionally the camera is stationary, and the actors, sets, and props are still enough that you don’t notice the jarring effect. As soon as things move again, your teeth will be back on edge.

I’d love to talk about this movie on its own merits—free from comparisons to the original trilogy, I mean—but that’s impossible because at every turn this movie reminds you what came before: Here comes Gandalf entering with another not-particularly-funny-or-wise first line to the poor unsuspecting hobbit whose life he’s about to decimate. And there he goes hitting his head on that darn chandelier again—silly hobbit holes! And look! Bilbo tripped and accidentally slipped the ring on! Like uncle like nephew I guess. LOL! You probably didn’t realize this guys, but that party Bilbo’s planning in the first ten minutes of completely unnecessary story framing,  that’s the party from The Fellowship of the Ring! I’m serious. It totally is. Go watch it again, it’s it!

Ugh.

It’s like PJ’s winking at you the whole time, but instead of being charming it’s creepy and annoying. We get that these stories are connected. That’s not an excuse to just cut and paste from your older better work.

The tone of the movie is all over the place. The first hour is all knee slapping Dwarf shenanigans and PG tomfoolery, followed by the introduction of some potentially interesting villains—I did like Super Orc and his White Wolf—and then closed off with a series of shockingly casual violent encounters completely at odds with the preceding and permeating childishness of the movie.

Have a goblin king villain who’s played completely for laughs, or have a goblin king villain who gets his gut and throat cut open by Gandalf. You can’t have both, Pete, you just end up making a movie without an audience: too childish for adults and too adult for children.

This isn’t a very good review, or anyway it’s not a very complete one. But it’s not a very good or complete movie, so maybe that fits? On its own terms, completely apart from the three pretty much unqualified masterpieces we got a decade ago, this movie is an annoying, loud, overly long, meandering, repetitive debacle, in which a dozen or so mind-numbingly uninteresting characters wander around getting into yawn-worthy trouble only to be saved by a wizard whose greatest powers appear to be breaking rocks in half, setting pine cones on fire, and convincing his huge eagle friends to save his ass. There’s no dramatic tension, there never once seems to be real risk that a good guy might die, and every unnecessary tangent seems more interesting than the central plot of the movie. If I were going into this movie cold that’s exactly how I’d leave it.

On the terms it can’t escape—living in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings—this isn’t just annoying and aimless, it’s insulting and offensive. We know everyone involved can do better. We’ve seen a Middle Earth adventure with high stakes, where evil and innocence mean something and their conflict has weight, with distinct characters whose motivations we know and understand, where—for crying out loud—the storyteller respects the audience’s time and money.

This movie is finding out your best friend quit med school to sit home, smoke pot, and play video games all day. This movie is your girlfriend telling you she thinks you should go back to just holding hands. This movie is a classmate giving a fifteen-minute speech from a single 3x5 card. This movie is watching As The World Turns with your grandma. This movie is Star Wars Episode I. This movie is your aunt giving you a copy of The Secret for Christmas. This movie is lukewarm water. This movie is twice as many frames as necessary, and only a third of the one story it ought to be telling.

I’m sure this isn’t the worst movie that’s come out this year, but it’s the least I’ve enjoyed watching a movie in a good long while.