Download Movie The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey In Hindi
Delia Orlowsky
Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Social Editor Cesar Torres, Lead Developer Lee Aylward, and I will all be discussing An Unexpected Journey, the first of Peter Jackson's long-awaited Hobbit film adaptations, on Friday's upcoming episode of the Ars Technicast. In the meantime, I wanted to really examine the film as it relates to The Hobbit and also to Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, then distill the many mixed reactions I had during and after the movie into something a bit more coherent. As a fan of both, I've been awaiting An Unexpected Journey with some excitement, but more apprehension: on the one hand, it's a chance to revisit Jackson's lovingly rendered film version of Middle Earth. On the other, a much-criticized decision to make The Hobbit into three movies has only exacerbated fears that it would be a cash grab lacking in the care and craft that went into either the books or the first film trilogy. I ultimately came away disappointed in the movie, but not in the way I thought I would be.
One of An Unexpected Journey's strengths, then, is that it better integrates The Hobbit with the rest of the canon. Locations like Rivendell, identical to its Lord of the Rings counterpart, and the presence of characters not even named in the book (Saruman and Galadriel, among others, with Orlando Bloom set to return as Legolas in at least one of the next two films) make the stories feel more like they're pieces of the same whole.
Any movie that says it's going to stretch The Hobbit out into three films is going to need to take some liberties with the source material, mostly in the form of additions. Some of the changes made to the narrative in Jackson's LOTR movies broke with Tolkien's versions of events in a way that weakened the story. An Unexpected Journey happily avoids these pitfalls, even when it's filling in the blanks by inserting its own material or fleshing out events which were merely implied in the books.
Most of the changes made to the book's narrative are driven by a need to transform that book (which relies on an omniscient narrator and, often, the unseen internal thought processes of its characters) into a film. Both the book and the film are about not just Bilbo's physical there-and-back-again journey between The Shire and the Lonely Mountain, but also Bilbo's mental journey from timid, too-comfortable hobbit to a minor hero in his own right.
In the book, a large part of Bilbo's transformation is shown through internal monologue and his first overtly heroic deed comes rather late in the game, when he saves the dwarves from giant spiders in Mirkwood and then later helps them escape imprisonment by the elves who live in the forest (material that, based on the pacing of this first movie, will probably crop up in the second of the three Hobbit films).
Because this film is split three ways (and because showing a character thinking to themselves is, at best, dull cinema), An Unexpected Journey needs to make this mental transformation happen both more quickly and more obviously. To make it more obvious that the Bilbo at the beginning of the story is entrenched in his own too-comfortable rut, there's a scene where Gandalf tells him so. To kickstart his transformation from timid to heroic, it is Bilbo (rather than Gandalf) who thinks to stall the trolls until they're turned to stone by the rising sun. And to really drive home his character's growth, by the end of the film Bilbo is standing up against wolves and orcs all by his lonesome to prove his worth to Thorin and company, and to himself. All of these are changes to the book's version of events, but none of them feel wildly inconsistent with Tolkien's narrative or with his characters.
Thorin's character has also been tweaked slightly for the film. His stubbornness and pride, qualities present in the book but only really emphasized near the end (and, coincidentally, in one of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales recalling the events of The Hobbit from Gandalf's perspective), is made explicit in several scenes. The film's Thorin also has a particular dislike for elves, where the book's Thorin has no particular distaste or love for them (save after being captured and held in Mirkwood by Thranduil and the wood-elves, but even then his beef is with them specifically and not the race as a whole). These character tweaks didn't make too much of a difference in this first movie but will pay dividends later when he's captured by Thranduil (probably in the second movie) and when he's negotiating with the men and elves for shares of Smaug's treasure after the dragon's defeat (probably in the third film).
This is another change that was necessitated to some degree by the source material, though I'm not sure how it will play out in the end. The vast majority of The Hobbit is presented in concise, cut-up chapters, and while Smaug is the de facto villain, he's not an immediate threat to the heroes until toward the end of the story (and he's dispatched after only a handful of chapters). The Necromancer is likewise a threat on a larger scale, but he has little impact on Bilbo and the dwarves. A more immediate antagonist is necessary to drive the action, and Azog fills that role well enough (though as villains go he's about as one-dimensional as they get).
Here is a result of quite a few years of on and off writing as I have continually added material from new observations, fan discussions and ideas and several revelations from Doug Adams into the text. I offer first the thematic analysis of the score with the track-by-track analysis of the Special Edition soundtrack album coming later. As always comments and observations, improvement and addition suggestions are most welcome.
The story of The Hobbit is set 60 years before the events of the Lord of the Rings and focuses on Bilbo Baggins, at first an ordinary stay-at-home Hobbit, a model of a country gentleman, who is thrust into an adventure by a wandering wizard Gandalf, who arrives one day with 13 dwarves in tow and coaxes the timid halfling from the comforts of his hobbit hole into the wide world and on a Quest to retake the dwarven kingdom of Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, from a monstrous dragon Smaug the Golden, who had pillaged it more than a century before and is rumoured to guard its wealth still. Bilbo encounters all kind of dangers and marvels on the road and in the Wilderland on his way to the far-off mountain in the East and will learn that he might not be as timid and soft as he thought himself to be and finds the qualities that the wizard Gandalf the Grey saw underneath the gentle exterior of the Hobbit, simple courage, loyalty, quick wit and the heart of a hero.
One interesting aspect pointed out by the film makers and Howard Shore himself is, that the film is nestled in the The Lord of the Rings, existing both inside and outside the larger story, as it opens with the older Bilbo writing his memoirs There and Back Again at Bag End on the eve of his 111th birthday, which is the starting point of The Fellowship of the Ring. This offers an interesting position for a composer to work forward and backward through his musical storytelling. In addition to writing new thematic material (of which there is a large collection) Shore wisely and logically employs in his thematic structure his well established themes for several places and characters from The Lord of the Rings that make reappearance in this new trilogy.
Peter Jackson has stated in a number of interviews that scoring the first film of this new trilogy was to him the hardest, because it contained so many familiar elements to it, which required a lot of references to the old thematic ideas for quite a number of well-known characters, events and locales the film was revisiting. The director gives the impression that he and composer Shore were somewhat tied down by the old call backs and that the music could not contain much new elements as the audience had to be eased back into the world of Middle-earth. While this might be partially true, Shore's original concepts which are represented on the soundtrack albums seem to be very clear and precise and he created a lot of new material that was either completely new and original or musically derived and grew organically from the previous themes featured in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In the final film the score compared to the earlier version locked down for the soundtracks is much different, stemming probably from Peter Jackson's and the film makers' difficulties in defining which elements of the story would need new thematic representations and which should be again depicted by the well established themes from the previous films. Naturally film making is a collaborative and organic process and sometimes you can't know what will work with the film and what will not until you see the sight and sound put together and this might well have happened with the first Hobbit film despite careful preparation begun well beforhand the scoring sessions.
One major change that certainly affected the music was the sudden decision to divide the films not into two but three parts, which must have caused furious recutting (and partial reshooting) of the first film that necessitated revision of the music as well. The original version of AUJ was to end well into the Wilderland with the Forest River chase in Mirkwood but when two films became three, the structure of the narrative was revised and a new ending was devised for the first film. The Special Edition soundtrack album has some vestiges of this in the bonus tracks where we have evidence of one particular scene from original film 1 that was moved to film 2. This is the music for Gandalf's visit to the High Fells in Rhudaur (titled Edge of the Wild on the album) which was then moved to film 2 and rescored in the process. But undoubtedly this shift affected the scoring process in other ways as well.
It is normal for the film makers to re-evaluate the film and its post production aspects continually and this process usually stretches to the final minute when Peter Jackson's epics are concerned, but with An Unexpected Journey it seemed to go on for unusually long. The collaboration between Shore and Jackson was very close on Lord of the Rings and Jackson himself was present at the recording sessions in London during the hectic post production schedule of these massive films. The film makers had with the previous trilogy revised the meaning of scenes through the change of music and thematic content a number of times when the film seemed to need something else, either more or less from the music, and this is very normal procedure when the composer and the director are conforming the music to the images at the recording sessions. Such recording session collaboration took place with the AUJ in a normal fashion with Peter Jackson present in London to hear Shore record his score with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Voices while also conducting the postproduction process in New Zealand.
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