Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) by Ben L — 02 Jun 2015

I put it off for years, but I've finally decided it's time for me to subject myself to "Peter Jackson's Inflated Ego"...oops, I meant "The Hobbit Trilogy." This movie was everything I feared it might be and so much more. Let's be honest and say that if you were trying to make a good movie adaptation, even if you went page by page through the original novel it wouldn't take 2 hours and 49 minutes to tell the whole story. Sadly they weren't trying to make a good movie adaptation of the novel, they were trying to make a prequel trilogy (and you know how well that works.) The ridiculous thing about this whole 3-movie thing is that each film only encapsulates a handful of chapters from the book. There was so much added content it dragged tremendously. Whoever the editor was on The Hobbit should be banned from ever working on a film again, because the pacing was horrid. There was so much that could have easily been cut loose, but they just kept everything in and even shoved in more. There were scenes where I genuinely had to argue with myself to stop from fast forwarding and just watch. The most prominent of these was the meeting in Rivendell where 4 bland characters shared a tedious conversation about information we had already seen. This was just a symptom of one of the big problems in The Unexpected Journey. They felt it was so vital to tie this film into the Lord of the Rings trilogy they had to keep making references and showing us characters from those films even though they had no use in this story. It's like the film-makers are just winking at the audience saying "Hey, remember this guy? Well, he's here doing absolutely nothing of interest, but maybe he'll remind you of all the cool stuff he did in those other movies so you'll give us a pass on this crapfest.".

If only the useless cameos, and over-extended runtime were the biggest problem with The Unexpected Journey, but there's more wrong here than that. I believe the biggest shortcoming of this film is the fact that Peter Jackson was trying to simultaneously remain ridiculously faithful to the source material and connect this storyline directly as a prequel into his Lord of the Rings films. Because of this mixed mission, the tone of the film was all over the place. Within one scene we shift from life-threatening danger to slapstick comedy. It's to the point where I felt that certain characters/actors were in different movies. Bilbo and a couple of the dwarves were in a direct interpretation of the Hobbit, hence the lighter kid-friendly tone with some silly moments in an effort to get us laughing. Meanwhile Thorin, Gandalf, and a few of the other dwaves were in a hyper-serious movie that would blend right into the Lord of the Rings. This contrast of tones was never more obvious than in the scenes with Radagast. We have this wizard who literally has bird poop running down the side of his face, and he's interacting with the first returning Nazgul and a necromancer. The sad truth is that when I wasn't bored with The Unexpected Journey, I was usually laughing at it. The movie was not comedic in a good way, it was almost farcical. I also hated the framing device with bad makeup Ian Holm and Elijah Wood. Even the CGI was terrible throughout most of the film when they create cartoon eagles that look less realistic than the Smurfs. There was almost nothing that worked for me in this film, and the sad truth is that all the problems blinded me to any redeeming qualities like decent acting, Gollum who was the only good CGI, or the music. I had such a negative reaction to this film that I hope to never watch it again, unless it's with friends who will enjoy bashing on it with me.