The Hobbit movie review

Let’s get the consumer-guide aspect out of the way first. Anyone who loved Lord of the Rings will love The Hobbit (by the same director, Peter Jackson). Anyone who didn’t obviously won’t. Anyone who mildly enjoyed LOTR but wondered why it had to be so long – remember the endless pile-up of endings in Return of the King? – may well lose patience with the new film, for two reasons. First, because it’s based on a much shorter book (J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit, written for kids, is 300 pages long) which it stretches out mercilessly, Unexpected Journey being the first instalment in a trilogy that’ll take us to Christmas 2014. Second, because – how to put this nicely? – it’s just more of the same.
   That’s the depressing part: that Jackson, a director who burst out of the gate with hyperactive energy in the late 80s, making horror films of deranged inventiveness, has now – after the disappointment of King Kong and the outright failure of The Lovely Bones – crawled back to the cosy nooks and crannies of Middle-Earth. For all its talk of new technology (the film was shot at 48 frames per second, though most cinemas – including our local multiplex – don’t have the equipment to screen it that way), The Hobbit is a sizeable step backwards. This is the film of a director licking his wounds.

The less depressing part is that Jackson hasn’t forgotten how to play this game. The landscapes are majestic, the God’s-eye shots often stunning; early on, there’s a vista of myriad refugees trudging across a flooded wilderness that stirs the soul with its epic beauty. The refugees are dwarves – not Snow White’s comical midgets but stubby, stubborn warriors – and they’ve been cast out of their kingdom of Erebor by the dragon Smaug. That whole prologue (which wasn’t in the book), showing how the fortified mountain kingdom was devastated by the fire-breathing monster, is rousingly done even if Smaug remains mostly unseen (I assume they’re saving him for later instalments). You could stop watching after 20 minutes and come away satisfied. Unfortunately, you still have 150 to go.
   The Hobbit’s name is Baggins, but the film itself is baggy – a generic quest movie in which Bilbo (our hero), 13 dwarfs and the wizard Gandalf ride to Erebor to reclaim what was lost, running into trouble at every turn. It’s exactly like a videogame, with a through-line and a succession of obstacles – though it also feels like a book with lengthy footnotes, any stray mention of something (the forest wizard Radagast the Brown, say) seeming to spur a digression or flashback. There are orcs, trolls, stone giants, even a necromancer. There’s ‘Azog the Defiler’, a villain with the mug of an albino Leatherface. We learn intriguing snippets of Tolkien lore – for instance that “dwarf doors are invisible when closed”, or that Moon-runes can only be read under a Moon of the same shape and season as the one that shone when they were written. Did you know that dwarfs are meat-eaters, whereas elves are veggies? And of course there are battles at every opportunity, that being the reason why Jackson shot the thing at 48 fps in the first place – a process (apparently) that flattens out the visuals but allows battle scenes to go berserk without unsightly blurring.
    That said, Jackson’s battle scenes are longer on spectacle than detail; his trademark (both here and in LOTR) is the panoramic shot filled with running and jumping, his warriors scurrying like frantic insects. It’s dismaying how samey The Hobbit is; not only have we seen it all before, we keep seeing it again and again. The quest is banal, a journey of self-discovery where Bilbo will (eventually) find he has “more to offer” than anyone imagined, including himself; mention of “the Beast” raises thoughts of a spiritual angle, but there’s nothing overtly religious about this motley crew. The film is also lacking Elijah Wood’s unearthly Frodo (he appears briefly in a 60-years-later opening scene, a kind of prologue to the prologue), though Martin Freeman does well as the rather prissy Bilbo. And of course Gollum – tortured, schizophrenic Gollum – is great, but then we already know Gollum is great. We’ve been here and done this, though I guess completists will be thrilled to view the moment when he actually loses his “preciousssss”.

   “It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay,” says Gandalf at one point – but Jackson, like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, isn’t interested in keeping it small. Film culture is increasingly big nowadays, partly because it’s increasingly migrated to TV: a 9-hour Hobbit is nothing compared to the 80-hour Lost or the 40-hour-and-counting Breaking Bad – and indeed Unexpected Journey has a TV rhythm, that steady, prosaic, rather long-winded rhythm. To be fair, Jackson’s style was always spectacular, making him a good fit for epic fantasy – or maybe it’s that Tolkien is a sure thing, a familiar destination (blending grandeur, bloodshed and folksy humour) which, once experienced, you keep coming back to again and again. It’s a hard hobbit to break.