An Unexpected Ramble

            So it’s been a week since I saw “The Hobbit” and I’ve finally muddled it around in my brain enough to cobble together a few definite opinions and establish a solid review, in order to answer that most terrifying of questions: “What do you think of it?”  My answer is as follows:

            It is.

            That’s all I can come up with.  There’s too much going against this movie to make it good, yet on the other hand there are too many good elements and nothing actively wrong with it to make me say it’s bad.  I did enjoy watching it, but like so many fantasies it isn’t until after the fireworks have died down that one realizes the inherent flaws, which no amount of candy-coating can completely obscure.  The fundamental problem with “The Hobbit” lies at its heart—specifically, the fact that it doesn’t seem to have one.  As I had almost pessimistically expected, this movie suffers from the same complaint as so many other franchises; it has become too successful.

            A spoiled child, if left unchecked, will eventually reach the point where parents have no choice but to give in to any and all demands; the child has lost all sense of humanity and no longer listens to reason or even passionate request.  In the same way, a successful franchise can often reach the point where outside influences no longer dare criticize the material for fear of killing the golden goose.  Two examples:

·               Harry Potter.  When ‘Goblet of Fire’ premiered, publishers were wary of its tremendous length, but the audience seemed eager to absorb as much story as possible and, to be fair, ‘Goblet’ did not disappoint.  It’s the only one I’ve actually read twice.  Having thus proved that children would read her work no matter the size, however, the author followed up with the Tolstoy-shaming ‘Order of the Phoenix’, the longest entry in the series—in which nothing of interest happens.  Seriously, was there even a story?  I remember a creaky old house, teenage awkwardness, Harry’s father is a dick and the best character dies in a confusing way.  That’s it.  By the next entry she’d begun to trim again, but the damage was already done.  If her publisher had had the cojones to say “simmer down, you’ve got way too many words there; cut it in half or we won’t print it”, we could have been spared massive disappointment.  And speaking of disappointment...

·               Everything George Lucas has done since I was born.  Everyone wondered how he would top the phenomenon of ‘Star Wars’, and somehow he did it with ‘Empire Strikes Back’.  Then the world waited eagerly for the next film that would trump this masterpiece.  It’s been over thirty years, and we’re still waiting.  Even ‘Return of the Jedi’ has faltered under critical revision, as have the Indiana Jones sequels.  I’m even lumping the beloved ‘Willow’ in here because, let’s face it, the story (Lucas’ contribution) is the weakest part.  The characters, action and visuals carry that movie.  The problem is, Star Wars was such a massive success that it made its creator rich and powerful, to the point where producers and executives would no longer question anything he did.  I’m all for creativity, but moviemaking is not a solitary art.  It requires a team working in collaboration, and sometimes the bravest of them all is the little boy who forces us to realize the Emperor is naked.  Or at least badly-written.

Ironically, Tolkein himself was forced to edit his work by a forward-thinking publisher who realized people would rather get on with the adventure than read four chapters on hobbit ancestry; that’s where the appendices came from. Peter Jackson, on the other hand, seems to be following in Lucas’ wake.  There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “The Hobbit” movie that a merciless edit couldn’t fix.  All the necessary elements are there, and they’re done rather well.  The problem is that they’re drowned in a sea of scenery and CGI.  Where ‘Lord of the Rings’ was brilliant because it created a completely believable backdrop to an engaging story, the story for ‘The Hobbit’ seems to have been strung out just so the director could film the backdrop.  That’s not just putting the cart before the horse; that’s putting the horse IN the cart and wondering why it doesn’t go anywhere.  Wait...why does that horse look confused?

Problem #1: Characters

After seeing a movie once, an important test is how many characters I remember.  I hadn’t read ‘Lord of the Rings’ before seeing it, but by the end of ‘Fellowship’ I knew there were four hobbits (Frodo had the ring, Sam was his loyal friend, and there were two interchangeable comic idiots), two humans (one was Aragon or something, and he was an unwilling king; one was Sean Bean, and he died because Sean Bean dies in everything), the wizard Magneto, an elf, a dwarf, the evil wizard Dracula, a few more elves, and a creeping shadow that they promised would be important later.

The point is, I knew these characters by sight or description.  They were all distinctive, or at least had the advantage of being played by distinctive actors.  When they all showed up again in the next film I not only recognized them, I was able to incorporate the new characters into the story.  And because I knew who they were, I cared about them and got emotionally involved in the story.

“The Hobbit”, by contrast, has pretty much no character development whatsoever, which is an impressive feat for a three-hour film.  Yes, I know that there are thirteen dwarves rather than multiple distinctive races this time, but damn it that’s the point of having a writer and a director!  It’s their JOB to iron all this out for us in a way that’s both clear and yet exciting.  It’s the reason we have awards, to honour those who do this best.  Peter Jackson already proved he COULD keep a hundred different characters and story threads straight in the last trilogy, which leads me to conclude either a) he forgot how to do it, or b) he just didn’t care enough this time around to do it right.

How many dwarves do you really remember?  There’s Thorin, the leader; that’s an easy one, he has most of the lines in the film (more on that later).  There’s Balin, his advisor—and I only noted that name because he’s the one whose skeleton they find in Fellowship (gasp!  Decade-old spoiler!).  I caught a few other names but absolutely could not associate them with any faces now.  There’s one with a slingshot, one with weird earrings, one who looks more like a guy than a dwarf...and eight others.  The introductory scenes in Bilbo’s dining room sum up the movie; so packed full of characters you can’t tell where one ends and another begins!

The returning characters (or will-be-returning in the older, yet-to-take-place movies) are of course instantly spotted, mostly because they’re gratuitously inserted in a tedious boardroom scene that makes little sense to those who haven’t read the book and none at all if you haven’t seen the ‘Rings’ trilogy.  Case in point: SARUMAN IS NEVER MENTIONED BY NAME TO HIS FACE.  We’re told about him earlier, then he shows up and (of course) we all recognize him from the previous trilogy and “oh, neat, he’s a good guy here because he hasn’t betrayed them yet”, but this novelty wears off fast and we’re left with ambiguous dialogue delivered in perfect elvish monotone about some ghostly necromancer who’s reportedly haunting an empty fortress.

A “menacing phantom”, if you will.

We also set up this “mystery blade” of some “Witch King” and by this point even I, a guy who loves movie in-jokes and ret-conned foreshadowing, am thinking enough already.  We get the point, bad things are coming in the future.  In the novel, all these scenes take place in the appendices and we hear about them second-hand.  By all reports they were only added to THIS film to pad out the running time.

Which leads to problem #2: Length.

There was absolutely no need for this story to be cut into three movies, and even less need for them to be three hours each.  I happily accepted Return of the King (with all of its endings) because there was a lot of story to tell, and frankly I wanted closure on the various characters.  When I first heard the Hobbit would be two films, I accepted it because it would allow more detail than cramming everything into one.  But ‘An Unexpected Journey’ just feels bloated; scenes run too long, and at the same time nothing significant happens in most of them.

The opening is great, hearkening back to ‘Fellowship’; we set up Middle-Earth, the conflict, the heroes and the central enemy.  This is narrated by Bilbo Baggins, who is just starting to write the book of his adventures that he’ll finish in ‘Rings’ as Frodo goes to wait for Gandalf, an unnecessary but cute tie-in to the start of ‘Fellowship’.  Then we jump back via smoke-ring-cut (original, I admit) to Bilbo’s first meeting with Gandalf and the dwarves.  Again, I’m not sure how they accomplish this, but they drag this out for over half an hour and yet never tell us anything relevant.

Why exactly IS Gandalf making Bilbo join the dwarves?  He put the mark on Bilbo’s door, but how did they all know to look there for it?  Many of them haven’t seen each other in years, if ever, so how did the message get out for them to congregate there?  Then Gandalf explains the plot a second time (remember, the one that was just explained at the opening, except instead of action we now get to look at a map.).  Then Bilbo decides not to join.  Then he wakes up the next morning, they’re all gone—and he runs off to join them! 

And yes, thanks to the actor, I understand he wanted excitement and new things...but couldn’t we have spent a bit more time on that? The dwarves spend five minutes singing to a fire, while Bilbo takes five seconds to do a complete one-eighty and decide that perilous adventure IS what he wants to do.  Anyone else see a confusion of priorities here?  The song is lovely, but character development is more important.  By Tolkein’s own admission, “Hobbit” was a much simpler story for a younger audience than the later “Rings” tome, so drawing it out to three 3-hour movies only emphasizes the plot holes.

And while we’re on the topic, let’s hit problem #3: The Hobbit.

That’s the title of the movie and, presumably, its focus.  As ‘Lord of the Rings’ was about a powerful magic ring for which people would fight and die, so ‘The Hobbit’ should be about...a Hobbit.  At the risk of repeating myself, the novel strictly follows Bilbo’s journey and everything else is told via anecdote or appendix.  Although not a warrior, we could at least hope the movie would treat Bilbo as a common-man POV character, through whom we experience the fantastic surroundings (like Frodo and Sam in the previous films).  Instead, the focus flops—unevenly—between Gandalf, Thorin, and Bilbo, with no warning as to when one story will take over.  ‘Two Towers’ seamlessly mixed three different journeys into a climactic whole, but ‘Unexpected Journey’ is all over the place.

We follow Bilbo until he joins the dwarves on the road, then he’s just comic relief as we move to Thorin.  Thorin is central until they reach the trolls, when suddenly Bilbo becomes prominent again.  At one point he asks Gandalf about wizards, and Gandalf mentions Radagast the Brown.  We know absolutely nothing about this character, yet we immediately watch him give CPR to a hedgehog, fend off giant spiders, and enter a creepy castle.  Then we’re back to the dwarves.  Wait...that was ten minutes of Radagast.  Who is he?  What was the point?

They escape the trolls and meet Radagast, who shows Gandalf a sword and mentions a necromancer and again says nothing about himself.  Then he offers to lead pursuing orcs on a roundabout chase while the dwarves escape.  This is clearly a duplicate of Arwen’s escape in Fellowship, but we don’t care as much because he’s just some guy on a bunny-driven Santa-sled (I cannot make this up) and not Liv Tyler.  Worse, both he and the pursuing orcs are so clearly CGI it’s almost insulting.  Wait...when did orcs chasing them become the focus of the story?  I thought they were after a dragon.  Who’s this Captain Hook-orc guy?

So they get to Rivendell, where the DWARVES now become comic relief and Gandalf’s little enclave is the focus.  The ‘Rings’ characters show up to wave and wink at the camera, and then we’re back on the road with the dwarves.  The ‘tall persons’ (for lack of a better term) just spent ten minutes talking about a necromancer who we’re supposed to assume is Sauron (though they never say so) and look at the evil blade Radagast found...and again, in all this, no salient plot points emerge.  And none of it matters anyway, because we’re soon back on the road, leaving Rivendell for a totally unnecessary scene of giant fighting rock-monsters.

I think the moment is ripe for problem #4: Middle-Earth

For whatever reason, I could not connect with this world the way I did ten years ago.  Middle-Earth no longer looks as real as it once did.  The Shire is too quiet; where are the bustling hobbits that made the opening of “Fellowship” come alive?  It doesn’t take long to show, just a few seconds of rural life to show what Bilbo’s leaving behind.  Rivendell looks like a matte painting, the goblin mine is a blur, and every CGI creature (except one) looks unfinished.  The orcs don’t look real, the goblin king doesn’t look real, the rock monsters don’t look real...half the time even the HEROES don’t look real, because they too have been digitally inserted into an unfilmable scene.

“Lord of the Rings” was popular because (unlike the concurrent Star Wars films) it used live actors and real sets, or at least real miniatures, whenever possible.  “The Hobbit” is a computer-generated free-for-all, and for the life of me I can’t understand why.  Did they throw out all the set pieces from the previous movies?  When the fellowship climbed the mountain, Saruman caused avalanches and they had to leave before they froze.  That was a real situation that centered on the characters.  Now, they’re just bystanders in an unrelated fight between rock monsters.  Sure they almost die, but no one cares because we don’t really know who they are in the first place.

This leads to problem #5: Repetition.

Trolls.  Orcs on wargs.  Rock monsters.  Goblins.  The orcs again.  These crises come in rapid succession (the last two LITERALLY one after the other), and each time it leads to a much-too-fast, much-too-animated, much-too-long fight-slash-escape scene.  When they got out of the mountain and had that moment of reunion I thought “OK, we’re at the end”.  Then the orcs attack and I thought “Oh, okay, we’re going to end with them being chased by orcs and pick up next film with their escape.”  They LITERALLY hang off the edge of a cliff, but that’s not the end...there’s a tree...and then there’s some flaming pinecones...then Thorin fights the boss orc...and fails...and Bilbo saves him...

And then comes problem #6: THE DAMN EAGLES AGAIN

I loved “Lord of the Rings”, but I really got tired of justifying the eagles.  It’s a sadly obvious and very reasonable question... why don’t we save everyone a lot of trouble and just FLY to Mount Doom?  I know all the defenses...the air was unbreathable, the ring-wraiths would have caught them on their flying dragons, eagles are just as susceptible to the Ring as any other creature, they aren’t taxis, they only come when they feel like it...the problem is, no one should HAVE to defend it.

The fact is, Peter Jackson wanted to make the movies ‘realistic’.  That’s why the wizards’ duel in “Fellowship” is so kick-ass.  No fireworks or lightning, just two old guys beating the crap out of each other.  But the eagles completely destroy any ‘realism’ by their very presence.  There were other ways to get Frodo back from Mordor once the enemies were wiped out.  And don’t give me “that’s how it went in the book” because the writers had no problem changing dozens of other elements from the book that didn’t work in a film setting.  Again, that’s what made the movies so good.

Then the eagles show up again and it’s almost a slap in the face, because not ONLY do they save them from certain death for no reason, and not ONLY did they not show up sooner so the dwarves could bypass the damn mountains altogether, but they only take them partway to their destination and LEAVE THEM ON TOP OF A MOUNTAIN!!!  So the movie is basically saying, “Yes, the eagles could make everything a lot easier, but they aren’t going to and we aren’t even going to bother telling you why.”  One line from Gandalf would be enough.  The movie’s already three hours; would one line be padding it out too much?

“They owed me a favour.”

Done.  Is it perfect?  No.  But it’s better than nothing, which is what we get.  No explanation, no character development.  Just backgrounds and poorly-rendered CGI.

And finally problem #7: The End?

When all this orc-and-eagle nonsense takes place, keep in mind we JUST finished a long escape from the goblin mines, where they fought off a hundred goblins and killed the goblin king, then slid down a mountain on a broken bridge.  Keep in mind also that the director of this movie specifically said, when making the Helm’s Deep sequence in ‘Two Towers’, “We can’t overdo it; I don’t want the audience to get battle fatigue”.  News flash...when we get five seconds of breath before the next unrelated crisis rides down on our heroes, that’s EXACTLY what happens.

Meanwhile, please recall that the most important scene in ANYTHING MIDDLE-EARTH-RELATED has just taken place, between two characters in a dark cave...with no fancy backgrounds, no mind-numbing action, and the best use of CGI since the inception of the technology.  It is the best scene in the movie; this is not just my opinion, almost everyone is saying so.  The suspense is palpable, and I believe it’s because you can feel the dedication in this scene.  The actors know how important it is (it’s Any Serkis’ only part) so they put everything into it.  The director made “Hobbit” primarily so he could shoot THIS SCENE, and he does a phenomenal job.

This, in the end, is the most unforgivable thing.  The filmmakers have proved themselves able to take Tolkein’s work, slim it down without losing the substance, set up a world we feel could really exist, and take us on a journey both profound and complex without us ever getting lost.  They did it three times a decade ago and there’s enough good stuff here to show they still know how to do it.

Instead, we get a cluttered mess.  There’s no clear hero; three undeveloped characters spend equal time in the spotlight.  There’s no clear villain; it’s supposed to be a dragon, but we won’t see him until the next movie.  Instead we get a rehash of “Fellowship” (natural enemies and a tracking party of orcs).  Middle-Earth no longer looks ‘lived-in’; rather, it looks painted on.  It’s impossible to follow the subplots if you haven’t seen the “Rings” trilogy several times.  Put simply, it’s all shine and no substance—lots going on, but nothing of emotional interest.

            So why don’t I come out and say the movie was bad?  Because at the end of it all, what I wanted was something on par with “Lord of the Rings”, and I’m disappointed that this fell short.  But “Rings” was a masterpiece, so perhaps (right or wrong) my standards were set too high.  It’s a fun action movie aimed at younger audiences, just like the book...though in that case it should be shorter with all the subplots winnowed out (as kids wouldn’t understand them anyway).  The actors are excellent and make the most of their characters, doing with their faces what the director apparently refused to do with words or pacing.  The music is still epic and New Zealand is a beautiful country.

            But again, what ultimately makes this film not-bad?  Four words: “Riddles in the Dark”.  That one scene is worth admission.  It’s worth the two-and-a-half-hour wait.  Gollum is back just as we remember him; distinctive without being annoying, animated yet deeply human.  As he argues with himself, tries to play as a child while constantly tormented by an inner demon, ultimately breaks down at the loss of the one thing in the universe that mattered to him (evil or not), the emotion is as real as a movie about goblins and dragons could hope to get.  More so.  As that solitary tear ran down his cheek, I almost did the same...for the movie that could have been.