The Hobbit Review

Well at long last, partially because of the imminent second instalment and partially because I finally watched it again. I have decided to throw my two cents worth into the seething internet debate about the prequel to the Lord Of the Rings; The Hobbit an Unexpected Journey. First, allow me to say I will be watching this movie again. Now that that's said lets get to the good stuff.

I guess I'll start with the negatives. There are a couple of long drawn out scenes that are kind of mood killers, and while I understand that the filmmakers wanted to tie this film in with the Lord of the Rings, the amount of time spent with the older Bilbo felt way too long and drawn out. Then there was the equally lengthy but more necessary back-story of the dwarves. The white council scene is also far too long; although it does develop the characters of Gandalf, Saruman, and Galadriel it swiftly gets bogged down with all the stuff they are trying to accomplish with that scene.

Another issue I have is the amount of epic moments in this movie that don't feel all that epic. Yes they are intense or rather epic but they lose that quality once they are slowed down to half speed and you have to watch a thirty second event take place over a minute and a half. There are a number of fight scenes, that seem to drag on and on with far to many slow mos and not enough actual action to carry them through.

The third and largest problem is that you go in to the Hobbit expecting an epic adventure and I think one screenwriter did and the other went in thinking it would be a funny kids movie, and more reminiscent of Tolkien's book. The result is an odd mix of epic adventure and rollicking comedy that has disastrous results for someone who goes in expecting a movie to equal the Lord of the Rings. Lastly I will mention the animation, it just didn't strike me as the kind of realism that the Lord of the Rings had, although it was pretty decent.

I won't nitpick with characters for this review because if I did then in the pursuit of fairness I'd have to list the good things about them too. Suffice it to say that there are some I like and some I don't.

Okay! Now that I have all the negative stuff out of my system lets move on to the good stuff. First off, DWARVES!!! All you fans of Gimli are going to love this. I mean honestly what isn't cool about watching Dwarves perform their awesomeness and throw dishes? The overall film, once it got going, was pretty awesome, the story was cool and the film making, decent. The setting was very coherent with the Lord of the Rings and the story hit most of the high points while sticking tolerably close to the book The main characters are pretty well rounded and even the characters that have fewer than five lines in the entire film (I don't think Bombor has any lines at all) make themselves memorable by sheer appearance and behaviour. The famous casting is a bit distracting (I keep seeing Martin Freeman as "Dr. Watson" from the new BBC Sherlock and Bofur as "Jack from Ireland" from the movie The Way) but overall they nailed their parts and manage to carry the movie. The biggest plus though was the humour. Really, this movie had a surprising number of ridiculously funny parts, those goblins, once you stop taking them seriously, are so random, it's hilarious.

So in conclusion, if you haven't seen the Hobbit yet, then go ahead, be prepared to either yawn through the intro and get caught up in the epicness later. Or just go in and laugh at it all the way through.

And yes, it’s better the second time around.

So what do I think about the Hobbit an Unexpected Journey? 

In the words of Bofur:

"Well that could've been worse..."