Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) lives the quiet life of a Hobbit until the wandering wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) volunteers him to host a gathering for a band of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their homeland from a dragon. The otherwise careful hobbit lets curiosity get the best of him and he sets out across Middle Earth into places and dangers he never imagined. Surrounded by orcs, elves, trolls, and the forces of darkness, Bilbo tries his best to earn the respect of his dwarf companions while keeping himself alive.
Having read The Hobbit several times, I was fully prepared for the lighter story being told. While The Lord of the Rings is an epic drama with sprinkles of humor and wit, The Hobbit has always been more popcorn friendly. Bilbo is setting out on a treasure hunt, not to save the world. Sure, the quest means everything to the dwarves he travels with but to him and to the audience, the journey to the Lonely Mountain is but a wide-eyed adventure. For the most part, that is exactly what you get with this film. It looks pretty good, it’s exciting, and it’s quite a good bit of fun.
So what holds this film back? More than a little, sadly. For starters, The Hobbit is a much shorter book than The Lord of the Rings, so Jackson runs the risk of spreading this tale far too thin over the planned three films. As all first films must, An Unexpected Journey introduces the main characters and sets the wheels in motion. We start out with a prologue narrated by an older Bilbo (Ian Holm from the LOTR series), which seems to run a tad long but also frees up a lot of time later on by dumping a pile of exposition on you first thing.
Two critical story elements throw a perpetual wrench into the film’s narrative. Even in the book, I felt there were too many dwarves in Thorin’s company. It is cumbersome to try to differentiate and involve that many characters in one story. The fact that they are all dwarves doesn’t help much either. Kudos to Jackson for trying to make them all look different but the end result is remembering only three or four out of the thirteen of them by name.
In an attempt to spread out the story, Jackson pumps quite a bit of expository filler and tangential scenes that form as a loose bridge to the events of The Lord of the Rings. I can understand the desire to throw some foreshadowing into the mix but because most people saw the LOTR trilogy first, much of the foreshadowing feels unnecessary. Perhaps future generations that watch the Hobbit trilogy first will think more highly of those tangents but to me it feels forced. It is wholly unrelated to the story being told and slows the film down. Tolkien fanatics may disagree but to casual observers, it’s a bit of a drag at times.
The biggest filmmaking flaw is the overuse of CGI. The Lord of the Rings flicks crossed the line occasionally but The Hobbit seems to ignore the fact that there is a line at all. Wide shots look pretty good for the most part but when Jackson launches the camera through the action to follow characters around or spin and pan between characters instead of cutting, sequences begin to look almost like a video game instead of a movie. Case in point, much of the scenes involving the Goblins inside the Misty Mountains don’t cut it.
Overall, I was pretty pleased with how An Unexpected Journey turned out. I didn’t mind the songs (a major turnoff for a number of people for some reason), Middle Earth still looks pretty spectacular, and the film sets things up pretty well for the rest of trilogy. The problems with this film largely stem from Jackson’s indulgence. He had some tight budget restrictions on The Lord of the Rings films but takes full advantage of budgetary carte blanche here. I would have been happy with fewer LOTR allusions, quite a bit less CGI, the total absence of Radagast the Brown, and a better ending point (they should have ended with Thorin’s company entering Mirkwood), but I can live with what we got.
RATING: 3.5 out of 5
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