"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" is, on the whole, a delightful film. Though it hits many of the same beats as its Lord of the Rings predecessors, occasionally lapses into flat out nostalgia for said earlier trilogy, suffers in spots from second rate CG (see: the wargs) and lacks a true climax it nonetheless manages to succeed in spite of itself.
The film starts slowly with Bilbo (played by Ian Holm as he prepares for the party at the beginning of "Fellowship of the Ring") narrating the mandatory prologue. The purpose of this prologue though is different than the one on Fellowship. That prologue's job was mainly historical while the prologue here serves to present us a more fully realized picture of the Dwarves than Tolkien himself gave us in the book. Consequently by the time they arrive at Bilbo's door their zany antics are no longer just the cuddly wuddly shenanigans of a bunch of munchkin clones but instead can be seen almost as a kind of defense mechanism the Dwarves employ to deal with their time in the wilderness. So, right off the bat Jackson diffuses an aspect of the original story that could have potentially kept a lot of adult butts out of theater seats and actually makes it a kind of dramatic ally in the process.
After the prologue we flash back 60 years and Gandalf arrives at Bag End to coerce a much younger Bilbo (Martin Freeman) into joining the company of Thorin Oakenshield as the Dwarf leader and his band of a dozen compatriots set out on a quest to reclaim their historical home Erebor (The Lonely Mountain) from the dragon Smaug. Smaug - as we learned in the prologue - crashed the Dwarf party decades earlier and laid claim to the Dwarf king Thror's accumulated treasure. Bilbo is reluctant to go but Gandalf eggs him on by reminding him of his earlier, apparently more adventurous days. Ultimately, faced with the fact that the company has left without him Bilbo is bitten by wanderlust and catches up to them.
As they head out on their way the company is beset by Orcs who seek to capture and/or kill Thorin for his having cut off the arm of the Orc leader, the Pale Orc, during an earlier battle. We're also presented with the wizard Radagrast the Brown who lives a solitary life in the forest. He's become aware of a dark force at work but can't put his finger on exactly what it might be. We see the Stone Giants duking it out in perhaps the movie's only truly pointless scene and we visit the underground kingdom of the Goblins, which is connected to the same cave where Gollum is holed up with the ring of power and where Bilbo engages him in the world's most famous riddle game.
Jackson and company go to extraordinary lengths to retrofit The Hobbit into the LOTR narrative (Tolkien of course never intended The Hobbit to be anything but a stand alone children's book). The introduction and handling of all things "ring of power" are given waaaaayyy more weight than they had in the original story, Sauruman (Christopher Lee) is given a steady stream of dialogue hinting that he's already at work to undermine the good people of Middle Earth and that shadowy figure Radagrast is dealing with is built up until his/her identity - though unspoken in the movie - becomes crystal clear to everyone in the audience who hasn't been living under a rock. (At the time he wrote The Hobbit Tolkien had no idea who this character would morph into.) It's a narrative sub thread that was present in the book to be sure but is used here in a wink wink fashion intended to bolster the prequel trilogy's prequel-cred (say that 5 times fast). It's during these moments - when the film makers motivations are on full display - that the movie stumbles a bit.
Still, while An Unexpected Journey does occasionally stumble it never careens entirely off the track and through most of the film I sat drooling at the spectacle like the obedient 21st century entertainment consumer I can be. There is plenty of wonder, joy, intrigue and pathos on display as well as physical humor that had little place in the earlier trilogy but which works here because it's both character appropriate and isn't overused. If there is a genuine "problem" dogging the production it's the same narrative one that popped up in the earlier trilogy: the eagles. Is there a person alive today who doesn't see them and think "why don't they just fly all the way to
your location of choice here?" Damn good question that...
As far as the cast is concerned Martin Freeman is fine as Bilbo but perhaps just a bit too much the everyman to be perfect for that character. Frodo, in the form of Elijah Wood, makes an appearance at the start of the film but was gone before everyone in the theater had taken their seats. Richard Armitage as Thorin brings tremendous range and authority to his role while the rest of the Dwarf actors are neither problematic nor memorable, which is probably the best you can ask. The one-man distraction machine that is Andy Serkis has his time here blissfully limited and isn't the anchor weighing down the proceedings he was in "Two Towers" and "Return of the King". Many of the other returning veterans though were decidedly worse for wear and whenever the likes of Christopher Lee or Ian Holm were on screen you could almost see the hands of the assistants reaching out prepared to catch them should they keel over. Ian McKellen as well looks exceedingly ashen at the beginning of the film but miraculously seems to get younger and more vivacious as the film goes along.
Though three hours long I didn't feel at any time that the film was dragging. Some scenes - like the whole Goblin kingdom under the Misty Mountain sequence - could have been cut and I wouldn't have missed them at all but they didn't (with the exception of the rock giants scene) feel like they'd just been dropped into the story from another planet. They fit. They just weren't needed.
Film making is like painting: sometimes you need to mix yellow and blue right on the canvas to get the green you want and sometimes you can just use the green that's in the tube. In Jackson's world, where he's the editor in chief who believes everything he does is right, what you get is lots of mixing on the canvas that isn't really necessary. The Goblin scene is one such example. It wasn't bad per se, it just didn't add anything to the story. It smacked of content for an extended DVD release.
I entered the theater to see "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" last night with my mid-drift bulge quivering in nervous anticipation. Would it be a garden of cinematic delights ala "Fellowship of the Ring", a tortuous epic that largely got lost on the way to The End ala "Return of the King" or pretty good ala "The Two Towers"? The answer is "yes". There's a garden of cinematic delights clanking around inside a pretty good movie that bears little resemblance scale-wise to the source material and is padded with narrative moments it doesn't really need. But it's only when you get to the end of the film and begin to think back upon it that you realize that not much actually happened here, that much of the action in the film has taken place in flashback or on the sidelines. In three hours Bilbo and the Dwarves basically went down the street and around the corner where they spied their destination a hundred miles hence. It's a testament to Tolkien's book, the astonishing New Zealand locations (both natural and CG enhanced) and Peter Jackson as well that so little could be made to feel like so much. Hopefully though, in subsequent installments, what I feel I'm getting will match what is actually delivered.
Note: I saw the film in 2D on a standard screen at 24 fps, unconvinced by any
arguments I'd heard explaining why I should see this movie in 48 fps, 3D
IMAX. As it turns out I made the right choice. It looked great in the
traditional format.
