Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

I first saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, as most people did, in the theaters last year.  My first impressions of the film weren’t all that great, so I decided to go back and give it another try, if only to understand why I didn’t really like it.  As it turns out, I loved the first two-thirds of the film.  It was just the ending that really left me rolling my eyes and wanting to walk out of the theater.  The story of The Hobbit, when stretched into the 9+ hour presentation that the three movies will eventually be, loses a lot of what makes it so great.  I blame Peter Jackson and, perhaps more relevant, I blame the audiences that think it’s okay to support adding random crap into something already great just for the sake of following the acceptable Hollywood formula.

If you don’t know the story, here’s the rundown.  A hobbit named Bilbo is recruited by a wizard named Gandalf to accompany a bunch of dwarves as they head out to defeat an evil dragon.  Along the way, they meet elves and escape from trolls and fight their way through hordes of goblins.  It’s a classic fantasy tale through and through.  With the adaptation from book to movie, however, they add some stuff.  We see material from author J.R.R. Tolkien’s other books pop up, mostly for background and story development purposes.  We also see completely random crap show up that makes the story worse, like the presence of an albino orc whose only purpose is to serve as a foil for the leader of the dwarves.  Oh, and Bilbo meets up with Gollum and manages to accidently end up with The Ring of Power, which becomes incredibly important during the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

And that’s all I’m going to say about plot and story.  If you haven’t read the original Hobbit book, you’re a bad person and you should go try to correct that right now instead of reading what I have to say.

While the movie played out excellently most of the time, there were some key changes that screwed it.  The final confrontation with the goblin king was atrocious.  Characters are falling and rebounding off of stone walls and not one of them gets even so much as a bruise.  The whole chase is like a roller coaster ride, meant to entertain without any real substance.  There’s a certain amount of suspension of disbelief that I can handle, but this was way over the top.

And again I’ll mention the white orc.  There was no need for this guy.  He didn’t add anything to the story except to give the dwarven leader a nemesis.  Isn’t the enemy supposed to be the dragon?  I guess since we have to wait until the next film to actually see the dragon, they felt the first film needed spicing up.  They were wrong.  Combined with just a few too many “action for the sake of action” scenes throughout the movie, it all added up to making me frustrated by the end.  Rotten Tomatoes has the movie scored at a moderate 65/82%, though I would put the number more towards the middle of that scale.  I enjoyed it, but this is not a movie I will watch over and over and over like I do with the Lord of the Rings.  Maybe, if we’re lucky, the next one will be a little cleaner and have less catering to Hollywood producers with hard-ons for useless action and slapstick.

Photo Credits -           

An Unexpected Journey courtesy of fanpop.com