What, exactly, was unexpected about this journey? If you ask me, it was only a matter of time. A lot of time–over two hours, in fact. This has been the problem with the entire Lord of the Rings series: the fanboys (and girls) can't get enough, and everybody else wishes it was over already.
Can you tell which category I'm in?
Don't throw tomatoes, please: I actually thoroughly enjoyed the prologue to The Hobbit, which explains how the dwarf kingdom of Erebor was destroyed by the dragon Smaug–with a little help from the mercenary dwarves themselves. Anybody who knows my taste in film is liable to be surprised by this, as it features a boatload of voiceover, which I hate. But the prologue also features some truly stunning animation, and even better, some subtlety.
Subtlety is usually lacking in Middle Earth, which is lousy with Exposition Fairies who tend to harangue the viewer with backstory. This sequence, apparently set before the coming of the Exposition Fairies to Middle Earth, explains beautifully why elves and dwarves don't get along, even though it never says so explicitly. The dragon itself is never fully seen, making it extremely convincing.
And then...to the Shire, and the perpetually perplexed, vexed, and miffed Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman). Freeman appears to be playing Bilbo the same way he plays John Watson on the BBC's excellent series Sherlock, which seems to make Ian McKellen's wizard Gandalf the Sherlock here.
Bilbo is besieged with dwarvish visitors in a sequence lasting an eon or two. I still don't know how many dwarves there were or what their names are, so the whole thing was lost on me. I do remember that their leader is Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), the grandson of the last king of Erebor, and the company of oafish midgets is out to retake the mountain from the dragon.
Gandalf wants Bilbo to come with. I can't see any middle-earthly reason why the homebody hobbit should sign on with this group, nor does the movie give us one. It's also unclear why the group needs him, except that it will make for nice emotional moments later on. To be fair, at one point Gandalf utters some blather about how he brought Bilbo because of the Hobbit's everyday goodness and how inspiring it is, which, frankly, it is not.
From this point on, The Hobbit begins to feel very similar to The Lord of the Rings. It's a buddy movie with too many buddies, and a road movie without any roads, and it's just too damn long. The group heads to
The movie is filled with the fantasybabble that is so common in movies like these, and it's really a shame, because however well it reads on the page, in a movie fake-Shakespearean dialogue like that inevitably sinks, Ophelia-like, and drowns the movie withal. The only light in this thespian obscurity is Gandalf's fellow wizard Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy), the film's Mercutio, who brings a desperate, birdshit-festooned looniness to the proceedings that it sadly needs.
There are some lovely fight sequences, and it's a shame that some of the best ones, like the encounter between the Storm Giants, appear to be completely and utterly irrelevant to the plot. This is the problem with many modern movies. There are some movies that are stupendously visual but have pretty much totally dispensed with story, so that they are enjoyable only as long as you suspend not just your disbelief, but also your intelligence.
The strange thing is that the movie ends almost like a television episode–it's only missing the title To Be Continued–and maybe The Hobbit would have made a nice miniseries. As it is, the next movie will apparently be subtitled There And Back Again–but I think, metaphorically, that's exactly how I felt about this one. I'm sure fans of the Tolkien universe will be thrilled, as they should be; I just wanted to be enthralled as well.
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