I had some of the same feeling watching this movie as I did when I first saw The Watchmen: I have no idea what this movie looks like to someone who isn’t part of the nerd community. There’s plenty of action and excitement once Peter Jackson gets around to it, but does he ever take his sweet time getting there. I could easily picture parents bringing their small children to see this and having a good deal of trouble keeping them still in their seats for the first half. I’m a G.A.M., and found myself fidgeting. I’m not going to summarize the story because I’m guessing any member who visits this post already has a good idea as to the general outline; if not from having read the book, then from the media blitz surrounding the film’s release. I'm guessing you already know this is the story of how hobbit Bilbo Baggins acquire what will be revealed in The Lord of the Rings as the One Ring. I will repeat that according to the Official Hobbit website, there will be three films, as was done for The Lord of the Rings, even though The Hobbit is a much shorter work. Also, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, and Ian McKellan all return to reprise their LOTR roles, as does Andy Sekeris as Gollum. I went with my cousin in tow, to see the 3D version. I wear bifocals, so I generally avoid 3D features, but the glasses we got at the Regal Theater were of reasonably high quality, and fit well over my own glasses. I had no trouble seeing full 3-D. The visual effect really do pop right out at you.
The screenplay stays more or less faithful to the book, but several key events are switched around, and one character who appears in Lord of the Rings but not The Hobbit, but was excised from the film version of LOTR, appears in the film version of The Hobbit. Things like this drive Tolkien purists screeching crazy, but I’m not a purist anything, and it gets on my nerves when fanboys start acting like clergy enforcing church edicts, so I’m in a place where I take a kind of perverse enjoyment of their discomfiture. A good deal of the material comes from the appendices from LOTR. For instance, we get to see the War of the Dwarves and Orcs in Moria.
The film is LONG, nearly three hours. I thought it could have easily lost 20-30 minutes of travelogue. For much of the first half of the movie I felt like I was watching one of the Beautiful Earth series on Blu-Ray. I don’t know if they made one for New Zealand, but I suspect it would look very much like The Hobbit. Peter Jackson really makes his homeland look good. I hear it’s a 13-hour flight so this is probably as close as I’ll get to visiting. The slow buildup may have been the point, as the visual world is very very deeply realized onscreen. Someone did a lot of birdwatching in preparation for this movie. This is in keeping with how Tolkien wrote the source material. A good deal of The Hobbit reads like a naturalist’s guide. Tolkien spends a good deal of time discussing the wildlife of various regions, including the lineage of various bird species (this becomes vital to the plot as it unfolds) and even butterflies. One of our local movie critics thought this amounted to a visual extravaganza, and another (whose review I just read today) just found it ponderous. Some of that , I think, was generational. Someone whose attention span has been defined by single-person shooters and Quentin Tarentino movies might have trouble getting through this, even if they liked the LOTR movies. Someone who thinks Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America is an underrated cinematic masterpiece, and wants an extended version on Blu-Ray, will probably love it.
One thing I thought the film did very well was capture the Tolkienesque view which values the "little" guy, in this case both figuratively and literally. You find the idea in a lot of his writing, which I believe to be a counterpoint to the "Great Man" view of history, that the high and mighty muckety-mucks of the world get us into lots of trouble with their vainglorying, but the heavy-lifting always ends up being borne by the little guy, as do the consequences. Middle Earth is a fantasy landscape, but Tolkien actually did many of the things he writes about. He was a war veteran, a horse trainer, and an academic who enjoyed a pipe and simple food. Apart from having been in WWI himself, he eventually sent his son to WWII. Thus, something one of the movie’s reviewers here in Western New York said in his review, "It’s impossible to distinguish between the dwarves" struck me as jarring. Not only did I have no trouble distinguishing them, Peter Jackson designed their visual appearance so that they could be easily distinguished at a distance. This is a peeve I have with movie, music, and especially literary critics: they often present what is clearly an opinion, as irrefutable fact. Again, I must add as a caveat here, that I am a deep nerd and have been reading Tolkien since I was 12.
IMO a lot of the production design comes directly from Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s artbook Faeries, which is now available in its 25[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary edition, and which I used to own, but gave to a pretty girl. I saw quite a bit of Pan’s Labyrinth and also some of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. There was a definite Monty Python-ish element to the tone of the story and I found myself thinking of Time Bandits more than once. I even thought of The Warriors in places; I half expected Thorin Oakenshield to say "I’m sick of running from wimps!"
The movie was filmed using an advanced high definition digital process which supposedly doubles the number of frames per minutes over the LOTR movies. I don’t pretend to understand it in total, but the visuals were deeply immersive. That may have been the 3D, however. I still have a free movie pass to burn up, and I’m tempted to go see the 2D version just to see if the experience loses anything. In short, I very much enjoyed the movie, but my initial thought is that it could have lost 20-30 minutes of footage and only strengthened the experience. The reason I qualify this statement is because I remember thinking the same thing about The Two Towers the first time I saw it, but ended up getting the even longer extended version and loving it. As of this writing, Part 1 has already made truckloads of money at the box office, and we have the next two movies to look forward to, but be advised, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes A LOT of time building up. IMO, if you like your fantasy delivered Avengers style with nonstop action, you might want to wait till this comes out on DVD or Netflix.
JAMES
The screenplay stays more or less faithful to the book, but several key events are switched around, and one character who appears in Lord of the Rings but not The Hobbit, but was excised from the film version of LOTR, appears in the film version of The Hobbit. Things like this drive Tolkien purists screeching crazy, but I’m not a purist anything, and it gets on my nerves when fanboys start acting like clergy enforcing church edicts, so I’m in a place where I take a kind of perverse enjoyment of their discomfiture. A good deal of the material comes from the appendices from LOTR. For instance, we get to see the War of the Dwarves and Orcs in Moria.
The film is LONG, nearly three hours. I thought it could have easily lost 20-30 minutes of travelogue. For much of the first half of the movie I felt like I was watching one of the Beautiful Earth series on Blu-Ray. I don’t know if they made one for New Zealand, but I suspect it would look very much like The Hobbit. Peter Jackson really makes his homeland look good. I hear it’s a 13-hour flight so this is probably as close as I’ll get to visiting. The slow buildup may have been the point, as the visual world is very very deeply realized onscreen. Someone did a lot of birdwatching in preparation for this movie. This is in keeping with how Tolkien wrote the source material. A good deal of The Hobbit reads like a naturalist’s guide. Tolkien spends a good deal of time discussing the wildlife of various regions, including the lineage of various bird species (this becomes vital to the plot as it unfolds) and even butterflies. One of our local movie critics thought this amounted to a visual extravaganza, and another (whose review I just read today) just found it ponderous. Some of that , I think, was generational. Someone whose attention span has been defined by single-person shooters and Quentin Tarentino movies might have trouble getting through this, even if they liked the LOTR movies. Someone who thinks Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America is an underrated cinematic masterpiece, and wants an extended version on Blu-Ray, will probably love it.
One thing I thought the film did very well was capture the Tolkienesque view which values the "little" guy, in this case both figuratively and literally. You find the idea in a lot of his writing, which I believe to be a counterpoint to the "Great Man" view of history, that the high and mighty muckety-mucks of the world get us into lots of trouble with their vainglorying, but the heavy-lifting always ends up being borne by the little guy, as do the consequences. Middle Earth is a fantasy landscape, but Tolkien actually did many of the things he writes about. He was a war veteran, a horse trainer, and an academic who enjoyed a pipe and simple food. Apart from having been in WWI himself, he eventually sent his son to WWII. Thus, something one of the movie’s reviewers here in Western New York said in his review, "It’s impossible to distinguish between the dwarves" struck me as jarring. Not only did I have no trouble distinguishing them, Peter Jackson designed their visual appearance so that they could be easily distinguished at a distance. This is a peeve I have with movie, music, and especially literary critics: they often present what is clearly an opinion, as irrefutable fact. Again, I must add as a caveat here, that I am a deep nerd and have been reading Tolkien since I was 12.
IMO a lot of the production design comes directly from Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s artbook Faeries, which is now available in its 25[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary edition, and which I used to own, but gave to a pretty girl. I saw quite a bit of Pan’s Labyrinth and also some of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. There was a definite Monty Python-ish element to the tone of the story and I found myself thinking of Time Bandits more than once. I even thought of The Warriors in places; I half expected Thorin Oakenshield to say "I’m sick of running from wimps!"
The movie was filmed using an advanced high definition digital process which supposedly doubles the number of frames per minutes over the LOTR movies. I don’t pretend to understand it in total, but the visuals were deeply immersive. That may have been the 3D, however. I still have a free movie pass to burn up, and I’m tempted to go see the 2D version just to see if the experience loses anything. In short, I very much enjoyed the movie, but my initial thought is that it could have lost 20-30 minutes of footage and only strengthened the experience. The reason I qualify this statement is because I remember thinking the same thing about The Two Towers the first time I saw it, but ended up getting the even longer extended version and loving it. As of this writing, Part 1 has already made truckloads of money at the box office, and we have the next two movies to look forward to, but be advised, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes A LOT of time building up. IMO, if you like your fantasy delivered Avengers style with nonstop action, you might want to wait till this comes out on DVD or Netflix.
JAMES
