Review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) by James M — 16 Feb 2017

Clearly, Peter Jackson is a huge fan of J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth novels and he does the authors work justice with his vision of the fictional land, but where such meticulous attention to detail served Lord Of The Rings well, this segment to The Hobbit trilogy seemed strung out beyond it's story and seemed to take an absolute age to get going and build momentum. It would have been interesting to see the originally intended director, Guillermo Del Toro's take on this.

Nevertheless, Jackson clearly cares for the original source material and the characters within and wants to make the big screen transition as faithful as possible, whilst also tying into his Lord Of The Rings trilogy.

Ian McKellen, reprising his role as Gandalf The Grey, was always the perfect choice for the great wizard and Martin Freeman does well as a young Bilbo Baggins, even Andy Serkis is back as Gollum. The visual effects are as good as ever and the recreation of Middle Earth is perfect. It's just a shame the narrative dragged heavily in places.

I still look forward to the next in the series.