The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Putting up my blog post on schedule. Take that New Year’s resolutions! Anyway, I saw the Hobbit right before I left for Hawaii and boy was it fantastic. So here I go nerding out for all of you to see. Today is also JRR Tolkien's birthday, so it seemed fitting to save it for today. :)

Hobbit Promo Poster, featuring Martin Freeman as Bilbo

I feel like me and Bilbo Baggins are soul mates. Bilbo is a Hobbit, of Bag End. He doesn’t go on adventures. He likes his simple life with his socialising and good food and nothing out of the ordinary. Then Gandalf shows up and invites him on a grand adventure to The Lonely Mountain to defeat the dragon Smaug (side note: when I read the books I thought this was pronounced “smog”…but I guess you say it “sm-ow-g”. Am I the only person who did that?). Gandalf brings along a dozen plus one dwarves to make things interesting. Bilbo is reluctant, but this kind of opportunity will never happen again, so he takes it, even though he knows he probably shouldn’t.

Like the rest of The Lord of Rings franchise, this movie should just be a 3 hour ad for New Zealand. The scenery is fantastic. It has winding hills and desolate plains and snow-capped mountains. It’s beautiful. All of those wide sweeping shots from the other movies are still present in this one, in true Peter Jackson style. There’s also a lot of walking. Getting to Smaug takes a lot of foot-travel.

The cast consists of a lot of reprisals from the previous cast which is fantastic. It gives the film this unparallelled continuity, really binding the franchise together in a cohesive way. This was done seamlessly. Well. Nearly seamlessly. Frodo is like “I WILL GO WAIT FOR GANDALF” and that seems a little cramped. Even though this movie allegedly takes place like an hour before Fellowship of the Ring, it seemed unnaturally forced. Besides that, it feels real that these characters that I’ve been so used to for more than ten years now have continued adventures without changing, even though the actors themselves are a decade older. Some of them even looked younger. Yay movie magic.

The new cast members can hold their own though. Y’all know that I’m a big old Sherlock fan. Martin Freeman is simply divine as Bilbo. It’s like it was really and truly meant to be. Bilbo grows a lot from the Hobbit who talks nothing of missing home to the caring and adventurous individual. By the end of the third movie, he’s going to be phenomenal.

And the dwarves. Oh the dwarves! In the book, only a couple are ever described in an in-depth sort of way. This is really tricky when you remember that there are thirteen of them: Dwalin, Balin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Oin, Gloin, Fili, Kili, Dori, Ori, Nori, and Thorin Oakenshield. Dang. So how do you tell them apart? They all look very different, which is helpful, and it’s quick to distinguish obvious personality traits. I was expecting this to be the real shortcoming, but it wasn’t. They also sing. JRR Tolkien was big into writing songs, but these often get edited out. It was nice to see some of that get incorporated into the movie. They sounded really good too :)

Andy Serkis as Gollum consistently blows me away. It’s always a surprise and delight when he shows up. Gollum is in one scene, but it’s one of the most major in the book, and I thought it was a real highlight of this film. Sir Ian McKellan is a fantastic Gandalf the Grey, who is only present for half of the Fellowship of the Ring before he becomes the White. Watching that sort of transition back into Grey Gandalf’s personality is neat. It just adds these facets onto the character.

The only character that I was really like WTF about was Radagast the Brown. The whole movie was coming together so well, so there just had to be something not quite right. He’s given a much bigger part of the movie than in the novel, helping to flesh out the plot a little. He’s turned into the crazy cat lady of Middle Earth. He is generally unkempt and a little eccentric. Whenever he was around I was really just a little confused about why he was there. Surely, as a plot device you could come up with something better? I felt like his presence didn’t take anything away from the movie, but it didn’t add to it.

Radagast...sigh.

The score for the film is great as ever, except there is a little bit of recycling from LOTR. It's pretty obvious if you look out for it and seems more like a flash of laziness than anything else. 

From a technical standpoint, I saw the Hobbit twice. Once in IMAX 3D, and once in HFR 3D. HFR stands for high frame rate, and is the number of still frames that shoot by every second. Normal movies and TV go in 24 frames per second, but the HFR Hobbit was done in 48. IMAX 3D, five stars. It was brilliant. Normally I really hate 3D. It bothers me. This was different though. The colors vibrant and certain scenes completely phenomenal in 3D. It was fantastic. IT blew my expectations out of the water. HFR is another story. I suggest avoiding it. It seems to me like an experiment that failed. All I got from that was a distractingly awful headache. Hobbit = awesome. HFR = crap.

The Hobbit was a love letter to fans of the books. The details were perfect, and it interwove the various histories of Middle Earth so that you get a full picture of everything that led to the events of Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately, this is where many critics cry “filler”. It does balloon the length of the movie to 2 hours and 45 minutes ish. But for the nerds among us (*cough*) it’s brilliant. It’s just a little bit more for you to enjoy.

I consider this to be better than any of the Lord of the Rings movies. Even as a hard-core fan, it’s pretty excellent. The tiny details are perfect. It’s like they thought of everything. I was honestly astonished at how good it was. I definitely recommend.