Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) by Aleks D — 15 Dec 2014

Can The Hobbit be as good as the previous trilogy by Peter Jackson? Yes. Was it? No. The Hobbit follows a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins as he is taken off on a adventure, something quite unexpected. Jackson comes back to bring the prequel to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and his direction is good.

The acting is good in this picture with a great performance coming from Martin Freeman who plays Bilbo. Freeman is very believable as Bilbo and gives some good comic relief. The other person who does good is Andy Serkis who reprises his role as Gollum.

Like in the book, the scene with Gollum is the best part of the first third of the book. The biggest problem with this movie is not that it makes changes from the source material. That is fine as long as the story is still good on its own.

The problem with this film is that a 1/3 of the film are additions to the story. Theses additions take up time and lead to the real problem with this film. The story is quite simply stretched out to a point that it is pretty slow going to the point that you really can tell that this movie is 2 hours and 50 minutes, and you can really feel all of those minutes.

The film got a lot of publicity for being shot and projected in 48 frames per second, which is two times faster than a normal film. Really I did not even notice anything different. At some points in the film it did seem to look different but really it seems to be more of much ado about nothing.

One other flaw is that this film focuses on CGI a more that the other film did and it takes away the epic nature that the other trilogy had. Overall The Hobbit is not a bad film, it is just not as good as it could have been due to a story that is too expanded for its own good.