Movie Review - “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey”

By Bob Garver

One should take my opin­ion of “The Hob­bit: An Unex­pected Jour­ney” with a grain of salt because I’ve never much cared for the “Lord of the Rings” series. It is no secret that I con­sider the entire fran­chise to be non­sen­si­cal, con­fus­ing, and over­long with poor spe­cial effects. At the same time, I am aware of the mas­sive pop­u­lar­ity, both crit­i­cally and com­mer­cially, of the pre­vi­ous films in of series. Clearly there are many fans that see some­thing in these films that I do not. These same peo­ple may see the same things in “The Hob­bit: An Unex­pected Jour­ney”. But I say that the new film is non­sen­si­cal, con­fus­ing, and over­long with poor spe­cial effects.

The film is the first of a tril­ogy that pre­cedes the “Lord of the Rings” series. Young Hob­bit Bilbo Bag­gins (Mar­tin Free­man) is cho­sen by great wiz­ard Gan­dalf the Grey (Ian McKel­lan) to help a troop of Dwarves led by deposed prince Thorin (Richard Armitage) reclaim their lost king­dom from an evil dragon named Smaug. Gan­dalf intro­duces the Dwarves to Bilbo by invit­ing them to a din­ner party at Bilbo’s house with­out telling him. The Dwarves are crude guests and Bilbo is under­stand­ably flus­tered by the ordeal. I’m not sure why Gan­dalf would think that impos­ing host­ing duties on Bilbo would entice him to join the jour­ney (as opposed to invit­ing him to a properly-planned din­ner party to prove that he takes care of his friends), but inex­plic­a­bly it works, and come morn­ing Bilbo decides to leave his com­fort zone and join the team.

Through­out the rest of the film, the Hob­bit and the Dwarves encounter Orcs, Trolls, Elves, and Gob­lins. All these offen­sive words for short peo­ple are rep­re­sented as dis­tinct races. We get cameos from famil­iar “Lord of the Rings” char­ac­ters like Elrond (Hugo Weav­ing), Gal­adriel (Cate Blanchett), and Saru­man (Christo­pher Lee). The story is told in flash­back, so we also briefly see an older Bilbo (Ian Holm) and even a quick appear­ance by Frodo (Eli­jah Wood). But by far the best return­ing char­ac­ter is Gol­lum (Andy Serkis), who shows up for a creepy stand­off with young Bilbo that results in the well-documented loss of His Precious.

The motion-capture effects on Gol­lum are well done, prob­a­bly because Serkis is such an expert with the tech­nol­ogy. I can­not say that the rest of the visual effects are han­dled so expertly. At no point does it look like the major­ity of crea­tures are any­thing other than bad CGI. The absolute worst char­ac­ters, how­ever, are the laugh­able rock mon­sters that endan­ger the heroes on a nar­row moun­tain path. These crea­tures swipe at each other clum­sily while the actors shield them­selves from debris thrown at them from off-camera. Hon­estly, the film should never have both­ered with the rock mon­sters, as they aren’t impor­tant to the story. I also could have done with­out the trolls, who do lit­tle more than behave grossly, and the gob­lins, who are about as inter­ested in self-preservation as a slice of lemmings.

As “An Unex­pected Jour­ney” is the first chap­ter of a “Hob­bit” tril­ogy, it depresses me to think that I’ll have to see two more of these lousy movies over the next two Christ­mases. I sup­pose I should be grate­ful that it’s only two more, since these movies make a ton of money and the powers-that-be would surely churn out more hope­less sequels if they could. To me, the film is as painful as all of the films in the “Lord of the Rings” series. But then again, I’m seem­ingly one of very few who con­sider the “Lord of the Rings” series to be painful. So I’m per­fectly pre­pared for fans to once again tell me that I’m wrong. But if you loathe the film as much as I do, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

One and a Half Stars out of Five.

“The Hob­bit: An Unex­pected Jour­ney” is rated PG-13 for extended sequences of intense fan­tasy action vio­lence, and fright­en­ing images. Its run­ning time is 169 minutes.

Con­tact Bob Garver at rrg251@nyu.edu.

Posted by Bob Garver on Dec 17 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.