"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012, PG-13)






Sometimes, part-one movie-to-book adaptions are Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:  Part 1 or Mockingjay:  Part 1, and sometimes they’re An Unexpected Journey.  I’ll see The Battle of the Five Armies when it comes out, as a fan of Middle-earth, Martin Freeman and many of the other actors, and the original Lord of the Rings films, and as such, I’m rewatching parts one and two in preparation, but there’s no getting around it.  There is no earthly reason that The Hobbit needed to be three movies, and there’s no godly reason each of those movies needed to push three hours.  I could have maybe seen a pair of hour-and-forty-minutes-max movies, but I’m so annoyed at this bloated, indulgent, tonally-haphazard mess we’ve been given.  Though I like Peter Jackson, and I love his vision of Middle-earth, his out-of-control ego re:  The Hobbit has done the franchise an enormous disservice.

Let’s start with what works, because it might otherwise get overlooked in the diatribe to come.  Martin Freeman was absolutely born to play Bilbo.  He has such a knack for playing everymen dragged unwillingly into extraordinary situations, and he’s pitch-perfect throughout the film.  He shines especially in scenes that highlight Bilbo’s quick thinking and talent for stalling.  The “riddles in the dark” scene naturally comes to mind – this delectable thespian battle royale between him and Andy Serkis’s motion-captured Gollum is easily the highlight of the movie.  The other actors are likewise terrific, giving their all to their roles.  In particular, you wouldn’t have known Sir Ian McKellen had ever stopped playing Gandalf.  Beyond that, Middle-earth looks as amazing as ever.  The loving detail paid to the costumes and sets, as well as the luscious New Zealand landscape-porn, are a real treat.

Unfortunately, none of these great elements are given a very worthwhile movie.  It’s needlessly long, painfully slow.  Scenes drag on far longer than they have any reason to, stray world-building details are pointlessly transformed into interminable action sequences, and the plot is stuffed with stray elements that don’t have any business being in The Hobbit.  There’s this overbearing drive to make it an epic like The Lord of the Rings, so there are unrelated tangents foreshadowing the rise of Sauron and the dark days of the trilogy.  This grimness and high drama jars with the actually story, a light adventure about 13 dwarves, a wizard, and a hobbit who discovers the world outside his door; the movie careens confusedly between sober, buoyant, disturbing, and goofy, and it doesn’t make sense as a whole.  Furthermore, all these disconcerting signs of a rising evil make the good guys look for morons for recognizing the signs but then sitting on their heels for sixty years before doing anything about it.

And this is a small note, but I still think it’s worth mentioning, because it’s something that the original trilogy received so much praise for:  a lot of the CGI is nothing to write home about.  The orcs are unconvincing, the goblins look downright cartoonish, and while Gollum was a stunning achievement in The Lord of the Rings, that was over a decade ago, and he still looks exactly the same.  CGI has come a long way since then, and we’ve come to expect more, but it’s like they didn’t even bother trying.  Tsk, tsk.

Warnings

Battle violence, a few bits of gross-out humor, and frightening sequences.

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