the Hobbit

In 2001 a good friend of mine urged me to come see a movie with him. The movie was called "the Fellowship of the Ring", and I am ashamed to admit that at the time, this did not ring any bells. I never was much of a reader, and my only encounter with cinematic fantasy had been "Willow", a movie I enjoyed alot, but which never sparked my imagination in such a way as to become a avid fan of the fantasy-genre. The fellowship of the ring had my jaw drop firmly on the floor and proceeded to keep it there for it's full 3 hour duration. I loved everything about this movie: the characters, the scenery, the soundtrack, and above all, the story.

This movie sucked me into the fantasy-genre. So much so, that I even started reading books. I've read all of the brilliant Tolkien's work, as well as several series of other fantasy-novelists (Eriksson, Martin). The continuation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was fantastic, even though in my opinion the 2 sequals; the Two Towers, and the Return of the King, could not reach the heights of the Fellowship of the Ring. Ofcourse, I did view both sequals in a different way than I did the first one. I had now read the books  beforehand and knew alot about the existing Tolkien-universe. I realised that the film's director, Peter Jackson, took a few liberties with the storyline, but I mostly understood these, and respected his decisions. Mostly because they seemed to be in service of the storyline.

Immediately after the Lord of the Rings trilogy was completed rumours about a Hobbit movie started to surface. It seemed Peter Jackson was highly interested in directing them, but there were issues about the license of the story. This went on for quite awhile until finally Jackson was given the green light. The Hobbit was originally intended to be divided into 2 films. This, to me, was a reasonable suggestion, as the Hobbit may be a small book, but it is packed with detail. The seemingly last minute, and dollar-inspired decision to make it a trilogy was met with alot of questions.

......and understandably so. The obvious greediness behind this decision did not reduce my level of enthusiasm one bit though. Especially after I found out the movie would also be available in 2D instead of the headache-inducing horror that is 3D. I figured there would now be lots of time for character development. After all, the Hobbit is basically a heavy characterdriven fantasy story. So I went in there with alot of excitement, waiting to be emerged into Middle Earth once more...

My initial feelings leaving the theater were a mix of confusion and disappointment. Confused because I had trouble pinpointing the reasons for my disappointment. It is only know, a few weeks later, that I am able to discernate all that is wrong about this film. For organisatory purposes, I will divide the review into 4 "problem-areas": (1) (lack of) character development; (2) additions and alterations to the original story; (3) battle-scenes; (4) tone of the movie. I'm purposefully leaving out the problems with the new format, because those problems only arise when you've watched the film in 3D. And let's face it, if you prefer 3D over 2D, you deserve all the crap you get.

(1) (Lack of) character development. With a runningtime of 3 hours, and 2 more films on the horizon, the one thing I was not worried about was lack of character development. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy the main characters all had an interesting developmental-arc, so what could go wrong here? Well about everything it seemed. With a total of 14 of them, even the book did not try to give all of the dwarves alot of characterdevelopment. Thorin, Balin, Fili, and Kili were the ones most mentioned, and their characters were the most worked out. The other dwarves were actually quite shallow. In the film this is mostly the same. After Thorin, the dwarves Balin, Fili, and Kili are given the most screentime. Thorin himself however, is done in such a poor way that it is hard to sympathize with him. From the very start he is a grumpy, vengeful, distrusting dwarf, particularly towards young Bilbo. This all changes abrubtly, and in a annoyingly forced way, after Bilbo saves his life. There is no middleground here. There is not a moment in the movie where Thorin is starting to warm up to the hobbit. For most of the film he finds him utterly useless, and then all of a sudden he is idolizing him.
This is not the movies biggest concern when it comes to characterdevelopment however. The main character Bilbo Baggins suffers from severe motivational issues. Why he decides to go along with the party of dwarves is still unclear to me. He really didn't want to go, was completely annoyed by all the dwarves. They leave without him howver, and suddenly he wants to tag along, knowing it will probably get him killed. As with Thorin, he also has a hastened, forced development of character. Being used to a life of quiet, peace, and luxury in the Shire, Bilbo is quite useless, be it with a sword, or any other survivalskill for that matter. All he has is his wits, but they are never used. This does not prevent him from swinging his sword wildly at well-trained Orcs and killing them in the process. His competence in battle is comletely uncredible. The hastened, uninspired characterdevelopment of the story's two most important character makes it very hard to feel for them in any way. There was plenty of time for this, so if this wasn't in the film, what was?
(2) additions and alterations to the original story. I will try my best not to come across like a Tolkien purist in this section. In order to do so convincingly, let me start by saying that I understood it when Jackson completely left out Tom Bombadill in the Fellowship of the Ring. There was an entire book to cover in 3 hours, 9 characters to introduce and develop, so this decision made perfect sense to me. As much as I loved Tom Bombadil, he hardly made any impact on the storyline. I was also perfectly fine with exploring the love between lady Arwen and Aragorn. I believe this was done to make sure Middle Earth would feel more real, and it accomplished just that. There were some decisions I did not agree with (the encounter between Gandalf and the Witch king for instance), but they were mostly minor nuisances.
In the Hobbit it was a whole different story. Scenes were added just to stretch the duration of the film. Throughout the film there were additions and alterations that did not make any sense at all, and a few that did make sense (the introduction of the Necromancer). Some scenes are added to remind the audience that the Hobbit story takes place in Middle Earth. These are the scenes with characters from the previously made Lord of the Rings movie. They do nothing, but incite a feeling of familiarity with people who are unfamiliar with the Hobbit novel. I find these annoying wastes of time, but they are not as bad as the addition of Rhadagast the Brown, and the white Orc. Why Rhadagast is in this movie, is completely beyond me. He does not add anything and worse, he changes both the flow, and the tone of the movie. He feels like a distraction thrown in for comic relief. The white Orc is supposedly added to give this part of the story a bad guy. In my opinion this addition has way too much influence on the original story, and more importantly, on the character of Thorin. The vengeful side of Thorin is mostly fueled by the existence of the white Orc, and completely ruins Thorin for me. It also leads to way too many battle scenes, which brings me to my next point of critique.

(3) the battle scenes. In order to give the Hobbit the same epic feeling as the Lord of the Rings, this film is filled with battle scenes. There is a flashback to a battle scene between dwarves and orcs, a battle between dwarves and 3 trolls, a chasescene with wargriders, a battle between stone giants, a battle inside the mountain between dwarves and goblins, a finally, the episode-ending battle between dwarves/eagles and warg-riding orcs. Note that 3 of these 6 battles are actually in the book. The only ones that aren't are the flashback battle, the chasescene with the wargriders, and the battle between stone giants. The problem is that even though those 3 battles are in the book, they are both elongated and ridiculous to the point that the it induced a audience-wide facepalm several times. I haven't quite measured it, but I think I would be mild if I were to say the battlescenes take up about 2/5 of the movie. Now if the battles were well done and filled with excitement I could live with this, but unfortunately they are not. With the exception of the battle with trolls (which is the shortest one I might add) all battles have a tedious feel to it and are derived from any excitement. At no point in time do you feel like this could go wrong. All of our merry band feels invincible. They survive smashing, bashing, falling a couple of hundred metres, and ridiculous odds without so much as a scratch. To top this off, they are miraculously saved by (1) a group of Elves, (2) superGandalf, (3) superGandalf again, and (4) Eagles a total of 4 out of 6 times! It is just so boring, and it all just feels so wrong. which reminds me:

(4) the tone of the movie. This really seems to be an almost common problem with movies these days. The tone of films is all over the place. For a nice example of this, go see the Redlettermedia reviews of the Star Wars prequels (www.redlettermedia.com). In this film an attempt is made to alleviate the mood by using humour. There are 2 problems here. The first one is that there basically is no mood to alleviate because there is no tension (see point 3). The second one is that they are using slapstick humour, which is enormously out of place. Radagast the Brown, the slime and muckusjokes of the trolls, heck even the entire existence of both Bombur (the fat dwarf) and the Goblin king are pieces of slapstick. It is not funny, and it completely changes the tone of the movie, once again distracting from the storyline. You would think Hollywood knew what slapstick could do to a movie *point at Jar Jar Binks*.

This is supposed to be an adventuremovie from a characterdriven concept. What we would suspect is excitement, filled with wonder, tension, and sometimes drama or humour. We want to feel the joys and pains of Bilbo, his excitement, his fears. We want to see him grow, to overcome obstacles and to succeed. Yet after 3 hours of his story, we hardly know who he is, and what his motivation is. How are we supposed to care about him? to care about the movie? For me the result is that I don't. I fear this trilogy will be as bad as the Star Warsprequels and that it will taint the Lord of the Ringfilms accordingly.

Please mr. Jackson, learn from George Lucas' mistakes, it is not too late, you can still escape from the evil clutches of Disney.