The Hobbit: Three Hours You'll Never Get Back Again

I'm not really big into fantasy. Let me get that out there straight away. That being said, I'm certainly a sucker for great storytelling, compelling characters, and narratives packed with more than enough story to justify a long runtime. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey exhibits none of these qualities. It is, of course, inevitable to compare this latest film to The Lord of the Rings, a trilogy that I hardly fawn over, but can appreciate. Middle Earth has never fascinated me, but with The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson showed that well cast and developed characters can certainly make you buy all the silly bits in the story. Certainly with those films you cared about the overall goal. In fact, the story was pretty simple: if that ring doesn't get destroyed, we're all going to die. Okay, sure. I get it, I guess.

Enter the horribly convoluted "plot" of this first in the Hobbit trilogy, a prequel taking place 60 years before the story we all know so well. Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellan), feeling especially snotty, decides to barge in on Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) with 13 oafish, uninteresting dwarves looking to reclaim their mountain home. The Lonely Mountain was the dwarf kingdom before a gold-craving dragon named Smaug came in and snagged it for himself. Apparently the dragon wasn't much interested in using the gold to buy things for himself, because he's taken to just sleeping under piles of gold as a hobby. So, why Bilbo Baggins? Well, these incompetent and stubborn dwarves don't really get it, and neither do I. The group begins the journey and encounters endless chase scenes where danger is constantly around the corner and no one can ever save themselves.

Much like we saw with King Kong, Jackson has decided it's far more interesting to disregard character development, entertaining dialogue, and something complex like a plot in favor of episodic scenes of peril with villains that have nothing to do with anything in the long run. No doubt these scenes were added or expanded upon from the original J. R. R. Tolkien novel because it's awfully hard to make a trilogy of three hour films with a book that's shorter than all of the Lord of the Rings novels. The Hobbit is not quite three hours long, but it feels like twelve. I learned more about Bilbo in the first half hour of The Fellowship of the Ring than I did in this entire movie that's allegedly about him. Martin Freeman does a wonderful job bringing a subtle life and charisma to the character, even though he is stuck in the background for nearly the entire movie as the plot goes on without his involvement. It should be no surprise that Freeman and McKellan bring a great life to the characters you actually want to root for, but Peter Jackson has let the film focus entirely on the dwarves.

The dwarves are not characters you care about. I dare you to even name all of them. They are ugly, annoying little creatures that honestly do not deserve their mountain back if they're always as incompetent as they are here. Every step of the way, they're wonderfully successful in annoying the audience as well as Gandalf. Numerous times in the film, Gandalf gets to leave, saying, "I've had enough dwarves for one day." That's about an hour into the movie, and boy did I feel the same way. Then I remembered I still had two hours of this movie and then another six hours with them before their tale was finally finished. They don't inject the film with moments of comic relief like Gimli did back with The Lord of the Rings. All they do is create countless conflicts for themselves and prove to the audience that there is absolutely no reason why they should be able to succeed in getting their home back. I root for them to fail, because it would be so much more satisfying to see one of them getting torn to pieces by a monster than overcome their problems.

All The Hobbit proved to me about these characters is that they really have no chance of beating a dragon. For all the action scenes they get in throughout this endless movie, they are never able to successfully save themselves. Not once. Gandalf comes to they day every single time. In fact, why doesn't Gandalf just go get that stupid mountain back for them instead? It'd sure be faster. The pacing throughout this movie is legendarily bad. I honestly think film schools should show The Hobbit in a lesson on the importance of a good editor and how NOT to pace a movie. Honestly, for the amount of plot we're given in the first of this long trilogy, about two hours could have been shaved off. If this was condensed into the first forty five minutes of a three hour long movie called The Hobbit, well, it might actually have been worth watching. Might being the operative word.

Now, it can certainly be said that the flaws I find with this story are not entirely Peter Jackson's fault, but rather I'm doing nothing more than attack a flawed book. Is that so? Well, maybe, but that's no excuse for the incompetent writing and editing exhibited here, showcasing only what new toys and special effects Jackson can think of instead of telling a story. There is no excuse for the runtime of this movie. A film is not a book, the pacing simply does not work the same way. What it is clear to see is that this entire movie is simply the first act of a story that's really not that long or complicated at all. Stretching one short novel into three mega-movies would have worked if it were focused on developing the characters or the world rather than flashy CGI.

There is no payoff here, only chase scene after chase scene after chase scene with cliches here and a little cliches there. Here a cliche, there a cliche, everywhere a cliche. There is only one scene that's any good in this entire $150 million movie. You guessed it: Gollum vs. Bilbo. Andy Serkis returns with a younger and more lively Gollum than we've seen in The Lord of the Rings and Martin Freeman finally gets to show off his skills in a wonderfully constructed and entertaining sequence that ultimately paves the way for the original trilogy to take its form. If the whole movie had the same attention to performances and character that this scene did, we'd have a great movie on our hands. Returning to the dwarves is so much more disappointing once this one scene stands out.

This is an absolutely awful movie. There is no getting around that. Peter Jackson should at least be ashamed of himself as he counts his millions of dollars. He can thank Tolkien for his rescued career, but I have nothing to thank him for after this. Towards the end of the film, Bilbo states that he thinks "the worst is finally behind us." Gee, I hope so, Bilbo. I really hope so.

2/10