The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
As a fan who loved - LOVED - the Lord of the Rings trilogy, it was notable to me just how disinterested I was in seeing the first of The Hobbit films. It was mostly because of the previews - which featured a great deal of singing - perhaps my least favorite part of the books. But it was also because I knew it was a short book being broken into three films. Three? Really?
We promise this is NOT a cartoon. Not really.But of course, I knew I'd eventually see the film. Holed up in a hotel outside of Hartford, CT with nothing much else to do and it being 36 degrees - sorry, 30 degrees - outside, I queued it up.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive review. But the film itself is sort of exhausting. It starts SO slowly. So. Very. Slowly.
Which is weird because again, The Hobbit itself isn't a terribly long book.
Eventually, it does find a rhythm that is satisfying and engaging, and some of the better scenes here are outstanding (in particular, the fight with the goblins). But the look of the film seems all wrong. You've likely heard that it was filmed with 48 frames/second because ... well, I think because Peter Jackson was able to do that. The above is a still from the movie - but it looks like a cartoon, right? Or a drawing of some sort?
It's notable that the Lord of the Rings movies looked WAY more realistic (and we're talking about Middle Earth here, I know) than The Hobbit. It's not supposed to work that way. Also, while I did eventually learn the name of the main dwarf (whose story we're supposed to be primarily concerned with), the rest of the troop was by and large unknown. The film was almost three hours long and I still don't have a real sense of most of the main characters? What the Frodo is that all about?
I don't know his name, and I can't take this guy seriously. (Though in fairness, I do actually remember his role.)There are some fun things - we see the trolls turn into stone (which of course, Frodo and company run into in The Fellowship of the Ring; we meet Gollum; we see Rivendell. But in all ways, this is the least impressive of Peter Jackson's films of this series, and in no way should that be the case, right?
While the film rebounds enough to make the film successful, that doesn't mean it isn't also disappointing. I'll watch the next...okay, the next TWO films in this trilogy - but I'm hopeful that they pick up the pace.