The Hobbit

So, I am a nerd generally and a Tolkien nerd specifically. I have read the Lord of the Rings...more than once and seen the Peter Jackson movies...also more than once. I have never liked the novel The Hobbit as much, it's essentially a fairy tale, written for a very young audience. It's shorter, the language is simpler, the narrative less sophisticated and the themes less dark. Nevertheless, I was excited to hear that The Hobbit was going to be made into a movie. I was shocked to hear that it was going to be made into three movies. It is not a long or complicated saga and could easily have been brought to the screen in a normal 2 hour film run time. But I am, as aforementioned, a nerd, so I was pretty excited for the first movie to be released, because any Tolkien is better than no Tolkien.

Now that I have seen The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey I am...concerned. It is 2 hours and 45 minutes long and could easily have been cut by at least a half an hour with  nothing lost. There is an abundance of tiresome battle sequences, worst of all the battle between two stone giants that adds nothing to the story and does not appear in the book at all. It is a silly Godzilla-esque vignette which was, quite frankly, embarrassing. Also the CGI burdened sequence in the goblin city is grotesque and time consuming. In many scenes, especially early on in the film, there is so much on screen it is hard to know where to look. This amounts to so much visual clutter that I found it to be a bit dizzying. (I don't understand why directors find it necessary to throw millions of dollars at the screen in the form of confusing, extraneous CGI)

Peter Jackson must have listened to the complaints of the legions of LOTR fans when crafting The Hobbit because he is leaving nothing out. Much of the dialogue is verbatim from the text and he is even adding things he omitted from the first three movies-Radagast the Brown Wizard most notably-which do not even appear in The Hobbit. There is some back story about the history of the Dwarves and lots of foreshadowing about what is to come in the LOTR...which of course everyone has already seen.

But, it's not all bad, it's not even mostly bad. The company of dwarves is charming, there are lots of intimate shots of Bag End-the Bagginses home in The Shire-Bilbo himself is sweetly understated and humble, Rivendell is as lovely as ever and the Riddle Game between Gollum and Bilbo is amazingly tense and engaging  (those may be the best scenes in any of the four movies). Hopefully,  between now and the release of the next film, Jackson will listen to the fans and critics and trim some of the pointless battle scenes in favor of more character development and moments in the quiet countryside as the company makes its long, slow way to the Lonely Mountain.