“Bilbo Baggins, I am looking for someone to share in an adventure."

Hello Everyone :-)

Welcome to 2013! I know it’s probably too late to wish you a happy new year but I’ve had some techno-trauma (my laptop died) and this is the first chance I’ve had… so Happy New Year :-)

I’m not usually fond of New Year, it’s all a bit expensive and there’s so much pressure to have a good time (having said that, it was not the case this year, I genuinely had a good time on New Year’s Eve) that I usually have to reconcile myself with an annual family outing to the pictures. This year’s chosen film; ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ (just ‘The Hobbit’ from now on).

If you’ve been living under a rock since 1937 ‘The Hobbit’ is an adaptation of the children’s book by J.R.R Tolkien that centers around Bilbo Baggins (initially Ian Holm but mainly Martin Freeman), a respectable Hobbit that lives in the Shire. Bilbo’s sedate existence gets interrupted by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) who enlists our hero for a quest. The titular Hobbit gets wrapped up in an adventure with a group of Dwarfs, lead by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to reclaim their stolen home.

There are so many points to make about this film it’s hard to decide where to start…

I have seen and heard ‘The Hobbit’ get a thorough pasting in some reviews which I think is unfair. I’ve seen it twice; it is undeniably over-long and certain sequences use references to the LOTR trilogy as a crutch with which to prop-up the film but none of that diminishes the joy of being back in middle-earth.

Jackson has used a great deal of poetic license and has invented a brand new antagonist, The White Ork: Azog the defiler. It’s quite a bold step to take but I think Azog gives the story a more immediate antagonist. The problem with Smaug (since when has ANYONE pronounced the ‘a’ in Smaug?!?!) is that he’s very remote and has very little to do with things until the dwarves and Bilbo get to the Lonely Mountain, the inclusion of Azog spurs the action on which, I think, can only be a good thing.

There are some fun references to LOTR. When Bilbo falls backwards and the ring slips onto his finger it is very reminiscent of Frodo in the Fellowship/Prancing Pony Inn scene and I liked that kind of visual cue which would only chime with people that know LOTR inside-out.

What I was less keen on was the desperate attempts to keep the audience interested by constantly linking things to the LOTR trilogy. There is a ‘Lord of the Rings: The Reunion’ style meeting where Galadriel, Elrond, Gandalf and Saruman have a conflab in Rivendell about the Necromancer. This scene made my eyes roll so much anyone watching me would have thought I was trying to look at the inside of my own head. To my mind this aside exists purely to foreshadow the events of the existing trilogy and that is not enough of a reason for me to have to endure Kate Blanchett’s super-annoying Galadriel. I put it to you dear reader, in a film that is 2 hours 49 minutes long, why have they decided to include this gathering when it doesn’t advance the immediate story in any way, shape or form?

As for Frames Per Second (FPS) I saw ‘The Hobbit’ in the standard 24 FPS and it looked sublime to me.  The effects are great, especially on Gollum. Two Towers is 11 years old this year (I know… THAT MAKES ME FEEL SO OLD!) so the effects are a little dated now, but in this most recent incarnation Gollum looked so real; I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

Helping keep the film afloat are some nice performances from the cast. Ian McKellen is back as Gandalf and appears to be having a hoot. Gandalf is a lot less pressured in this film (the stakes of the quest at hand not being as big as in LOTR) which makes him quite a fun, breezy influence.

Martin Freeman is obviously the most talked about member of the cast prior to the films release and rightly so, he is the titular character after all. As we all suspected Freeman takes to the role like he’s been playing it all his life. He has brilliant timing and is the king of the comic reaction. I look forward to his involvement in the new two Hobbity installments.

Freeman’s scene with the Middle-Earth stalwart Andy Serkis is the highlight of the film. Serkis is the darling of performance capture and the improvement in this technology over the past decade makes his brief turn all the more captivating. Freeman and Serkis bounce off each other like a Tennis ball at a wall. It’s great.

Somewhat unexpectedly this turns out to be Thorin's film and Richard Armitage does well as the regal and pig-headed dwarf. Whether or not this should be Thorin’s film is up for debate but I think he does a good job.

If I was to give any advice to Peter Jackson it would be to get a new editor. I know nothing about films (as demonstrated numerous times in this blog) but when a simpleton like me says something isn’t working then it really must be broken.

Peter Jackson has a long-standing relationship with editor Jabez Olssen (the pair have worked together on LOTR: Two Towers, King Kong The Lovely Bones, amongst other things) and that may well be part of the problem. What ‘The Hobbit’ needed was someone to sit in the editing room with Jackson and objectively say “I really don’t think it’s necessary to have an extended scene in the middle of the film that foreshadows future events” or “They need to spend less time at Bilbo’s house, let’s shave a few minutes off that scene”. I’m optimistic enough (or maybe naïve enough) to think that this all comes from a good place; that Jackson desperately wants to show us every facet of middle earth and dragging the story out isn’t for financial gain but, whatever his motives, the end result smacks of a director that has given in to self-indulgence.

Another thing that makes me suggest ending the Director/Editor collaboration is that this film is 11 minutes short of being three hours long. It’s like the Good Doctor Kermode is always saying: In ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Stanley Kubrick goes from the dawn of man to the birth of a new species in 142 minutes, if you can’t tell your story within that space of time you’re not trying hard enough. The fact that we have two more installments of a similar running time to come in this series is damn near insane. You can talk all you like about prologues and footnotes; the simple truth is that the LOTR books are hefty tomes and, as such, are entitled to run as long as they do. ‘The Hobbit’ is over 200 pages shorter than the first book in the LOTR series and yet is only 9 minutes under the running time of ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’. I’m admittedly crap at maths but even I know that that doesn’t add up.

  

Owing to the fact that this is a Peter Jackson film, it comes with an inbuilt quality level below which it will not fall, whether that is good enough remains to be seen. ‘The Hobbit’ is it’s own beast (a Dragon to be exact) and Jackson needs to treat it as such. I don’t want to be too down on ‘The Hobbit’ because there are lots of things in it that I liked, especially Martin Freeman.

As far as prequels go it’s not ‘Phantom Menace bad’ but it’s not ‘Batman Begins good’ either, it falls in the middle somewhere. Middling results from the latest episode of Middle-Earth… how appropriate.

After all that I fancy some…

Reasons to be Cheerful…

1. I spoke about this AGES ago but now the first trailer for ‘Warm Bodies’ has been released! It looks highly amusing and, in a stroke of Valentines based scheduling, is due for release in the UK on 8^th February.

2. The new series of ‘Black Mirror’ is imminent and we have some details about the episodes and cast! Have a look if you want but there is a part of me that thinks it would be better to go in cold to this series. I watched series 1 with no prior knowledge (save for Charlie Brooker’s involvement) and those episodes totally floored me… in a good way! I’ll just say that with people like Daniel Rigby, Jason Flemyng, Lenora Crichlow, Domhnall Gleeson and Hayley Atwell involved I am super excited about it! If you want to catch series 1 it is available on 4OD now.

That’s enough rambling for today!

Goodbye till next time :-)

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