Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) by Estepahead — 27 Mar 2013

I love LOTR and the movies, and I understand that different mediums cannot translate to one another perfectly, but many of my issues arise from the technical and storytelling elements. The CG in the film ranges from beautiful to just silly, every single ork and goblin are CG, while most of the time this is not too big of a deal, in combat it is clear that the actors are not swinging at or connecting with a real being.

The entire portion with the trolls is difficult to watch, with odd CG, poor "combat", the dialogue can be forgiven (i.e. gross jokes), and a set that clearly looks like a set. Peter Jackson added portions of other Tolkien books and expanded certain sections not covered in The Hobbit, but almost all of them are in odd places, and do not really fit with the story (this could just be bad editing), this is especially so concerning everything revolving around Radagast the Brown.

Pacing is very slow, which does not always equal bad, but it takes roughly 45mins for anything to happen in the film. Shooting in 3D was a big mistake, mostly because the lighting has to be so bright that many of the scenes looked odd, especially in Golem's cave, many scenes that should have been dark were oddly bright.

I saw both the regular and 3D,48 fps. I did not enjoy the 3D, 48fps version of the film, it made the movie look like one of those 3D films at a theme park, i.e. somewhat cheesy. While there are many continuity issues many viewers will only catch a few.

It seems that many of the qualities that Peter Jackson brought to LOTR (which made them great) disappeared in the hobbit. Many other issues include the pointless cameos from old Bilbo and Frodo (who has a 5 o'clock shadow), the long beginning narrative, cliched lines/characters, and odd makeup and props.

I hope the next two films are better, but The Hobbit could have been better if Peter Jackson had gone simpler, in the scope and special effects of the movie.