Review: "The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey"

Peter Jackson (Dir.); written by Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson and Guillermo del Toro: “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” (2012), New Line Cinema/MGM/Wingnut Films

The world is full of choices and the ones that we make outline the paths that we follow. When it comes to a film adaptation, it’s the choices that the director makes which drag us in his wake. This is definitely the case with this movie. (Or directors actually, since del Toro jumped ship early on, frustrated by MGM’s fiscal woes.)

Tolkien’s tales are wide-ranging and constructed on a mythic level. Keeping all of that world-building and history-construction in check relies on one simple technique: allowing the reader to view the universe through the eyes of a sympathetic everyman, with whom we can relate. When the spectacles appear, when the visual and emotional drama peaks, the reactions of these characters are our own reactions; their responses, ours. The bucolic race of Halflings is the medium whereby we discover the world, and their explorations of Middle Earth allow the author to carefully dole out the revelations of the universe that he is devising.

In The Hobbit, the everyman character is Bilbo; in The Lord of the Rings, the scope of the plot means that we need more ‘everymen’, so we have Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin. Along with this important task of learning things on our behalf, they serve the purpose of leavening the drama and horror of the story, by occasionally doing silly and goofy things: they bumble and trip and sometimes make stupid gaffes; this we relate to also, because it’s highly likely we might make the same errors if we were in their place. As well, it means that when a hobbit is drawn to make an eloquent and heartfelt response to some act of heroism or nobility, because it comes from a place that we relate to, it feels more powerful.

And Peter Jackson misses this point completely.

The moment he saw “dwarf” he thought “dwarf-tossing” and this became a running gag throughout the “The Lord of the Rings”. Rather than being a prince of a noble warrior race, awe-inspiring in battle and devastating on the battlefield, Gimli became a boorish, burping, beer-swilling, farting, huffing-puffing, joke. But that’s not what the dwarves are there for; the hobbits are supposed to be the comic relief. While there were a lot of things that were truly great about these films, for me they are interspersed with moments of teeth-grinding irritation.

In “The Hobbit”, therefore, the problem takes a quantum leap forward: dial up the number of dwarves, dial up the cheesiness.

I watched the online “Hobbit Diary” that Jackson posted during the year and I thought at the time that the appearances of the dwarves were somewhat ludicrous. Even taking into account the rationale that each dwarf had to be visually distinct for the film to work, the make-up and costuming was just way too over the top. I mean, one of them has a goblin axe-head lodged permanently in his forehead: seriously? Roughly half the dwarves are minimally encased in latex and hair and are relatively normal-looking; the rest are goofiness incarnate. It’s not hard to tell the ‘dramatic dwarves’ from the ‘comedy dwarves’, which begs the question of what does Bilbo get to do? I guess Jackson felt that all of his Christmases had come at once.

And we get all of the food-fights, beer-swilling and burping to go along with it. Dialled up to 11 (or 13, if you like).

And if it were just the dwarves, I guess it would be alright; but the silliness rubs off on everything else as well. We get to see ‘Dame Edna Goblin-King’ and her accompaniment of tittering minions, and a woefully-debased Radaghast the Brown, “mushroom-addled” and with a head covered in bird-crap. Teeth grinding again. I mean, there’s a limit to how much goofiness you can pack in, right? Apparently not.

The other hesitation I had going in to this film was the pronunciation. There’s a chapter in the back of The Lord of the Rings that explains clearly how to speak both Elvish and Dwarvish; I read this material when I was - oh, I don’t know, twelve? - and I wrote up my own little phonetic guide and lexicon. From this I learnt that, in Dwarvish, there are no diphthongs; ‘th’ is pronounced the way you would say it as it occurs in the word ‘boathouse’, and ‘kh’ as you would say it in ‘backhand’. It’s right there, in black and white, in Tolkien’s words. So why do we get “Thor-in” and not “T-horin”? And “Oyn and Gloyn” instead of “O-in and Glo-in”? I mean, they got to the part about how “Smaug” is pronounced “Sm-OW-g” so why not go the whole hog?

In my experience, there are two distinct camps when it comes to Tolkien fans – those who love The Hobbit; think The Lord of the Rings is a good sequel; and The Silmarilion? Meh: take it or leave it. The others treat The Silmarilion as evangelical gospel; think The Lord of the Rings is worthy history; and wince when The Hobbit is referred to, like it was some kind of embarrassing distant relative. As far as I can tell, this movie is going to annoy both sets of fans.

There is another beef I have with the film and that’s probably not based on any one intentional decision by any particular person involved with the filmic process. There are clear moments in the source material which have to be addressed and the movie response sometimes makes these appear ridiculous. One instance of this from “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” was the hobbits’ ability to take out the malevolent Uruk-hai through the simple expedient of a chucked rock; in “The Hobbit”, the warg-killer of choice is the flaming pine-cone. I know it has to be pine-cones, because that’s canon, straight from the text. But in the face of the monstrosities that Weta Workshops has devised, it appears more than a little silly. Yes, the bad guys have to look bad; but in these films they look like they out-gun the good guys at every turn. We learn that ‘mean-looking’ means anything other than ‘tough’ and that Middle Earth is populated by a bunch of paper tigers.

There’s a bit of this in the action sequences too – physics seems to be taking a holiday during most of the epic fight scenes, to the point where credibility is more than dangerously stretched.

I have a final criticism before I get on to the things I actually liked about the film: it’s that of reiteration. There’s an assumption with this movie that, if you’re seeing it, you watched “The Lord of the Rings”. There are a series of ‘call-backs’ to the previous material which become perplexing if you’ve not seen the earlier stuff, and irritating if you have, due to the ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ means of their delivery. These are quite different in their way from the prefacing discovery of the petrified trolls in “The Fellowship of the Ring”, which was just cute. Most of these annoying bits occur right at the beginning in setting up the story (newcomers could be forgiven for wondering who that Frodo fellow is), but there’s an instance at the end that heralds another glaring problem with the whole series: stuck up a pine-tree, Gandalf does his party trick with the moth and summons the ‘Eagle Boys Taxi Service’ to deliver them from danger. This begs the question – as it did with the first series of films – why did we bother with all this hard trekking (to either Mount Doom or Erebor), when we could have just whistled-up some overgrown parakeets to fly us there in the first place? I’m talking, a loophole you could drive a lorry through...

I’m sure other fans will be grinding their jaws about the chopping and changing of the narrative material to streamline the plot; me, I’m not so precious about this, just as I wasn’t with the “The Lord of the Rings”: the shift from text to film requires some massage and, so long as the intention is preserved and the material honoured, it doesn’t bother me. There were significant problems with Faramir in the first films, but that’s a small quibble on balance. On the whole, this tale is heading in the right direction and all of the beats are being hit, so that’s a plus. What I really appreciated, is how the writers have incorporated a sense of foreboding, tying the action in with the coming smack-down of Sauron that The Hobbit presages. The creeping menace in the Green Wood (soon to be Mirkwood), the enigma of the Necromancer, and the Riddle of the Morgul-blade; these were all nicely-highlighted elements and helped to contextualise this particular story as the semi-final preamble to the final face-off at Mount Doom (get ready to RUMBLE!).

In line with this, I really liked the addition of the “pale orc” character, as the nemesis of Thorin Oakenshield. I presume that his menacing presence is going to be a kind of connective tissue throughout the three films and I’m cheering his journey along – ‘can’t wait to see him show up for the Battle of the Five Armies! And thankfully, Jackson knows how to treat a villain and didn’t discard him out of hand, the way that Lucas (grrr!) did with Darth Maul.

What’s left? Well, the visuals are stunning, the pacing is good, the music and sound quality are impressive. Part of me feels like most of the fireworks have been set off in the afternoon, but another part is excited about where we go from here. A lot of this movie instalment is establishment – a bit reiterative if you’re already a fan – but a good base to build from. If you leave this film feeling that it was familiar territory and not exactly new, you’d be right; but I’m also guessing you can’t wait to see the next chapter!

Three tentacled horrors.