The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey Reviews

[Teena Ruiter]

"Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps because I am afraid, and he gives me courage."

And not only did I read and reread The Hobbit, I put myself square into the story. I imagined myself along for the quest with Bilbo Baggins, 13 dwarves and a wizard. I daydreamed about how I would react in the predicaments the characters got themselves into, what I would need to take with me on the journey and even what weapon I might prefer (I decided that instead of a sword, bear shot and my Remington 12-gauge shotgun might prove quite effective against orcs).

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

In addition to additional backstory, the movie also features additional characters not found in the book. One of these is the wizard Radagast the Brown. I find it interesting that while he was a character featured in the book The Fellowship of the Ring, Jackson chose not to include him in the movie of that book. Nevertheless, while Radagast is mentioned in only one sentence of The Hobbit (as a cousin of Gandalf), his character is prominently featured in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

If the movie feels just too long, I found that there is at least once small consolation: just about every scene is visually stunning. I will never begrudge having too look too long at Middle-earth; I only wish it wasn't for the reasons described above.

Overall, I liked the movie, but not perhaps as much as the three previous films. And even though this film and the two that follow it are designed to set the stage for the films already made, I really do believe that these will be the ones that the casual fans will have a greater difficulty embracing.

Although I admit that I was afraid that if I left before the credits were over, I might miss a scene in which Nick Fury steps out of the shadows and offers Bilbo a chance to be a part of the Junior Avengers.

Thanks for a very informative review, providing a satisfying level of detail. My wife has a nice hardback cover copy of THE HOBBIT in good condition and now I am tempted to re-read it. It will be at least the 8th time. I no longer have a burning desire to see the movie yesterday!

Great review, and I agree with most of your points. I saw the movie in 24fps 2D and I must say, I was disappointed that Jackson appears to have moved to completely CGI orcs/goblins instead of the great practical effects we saw in the LotR. Maybe seeing it in 3D HFR will change my mind.

Overall I really enjoyed the movie, perhaps more than most, although a lot of the added content pulled from the appendices came across as more like fan service than something faithful to Tolkein's original work, but Jackson's done worse (I'm looking at you, Sam/Gollum in Return of the King!).

I really enjoyed the movie just as much as the LOTR Trilogy. I was prepared not to, since it had gotten only 6.5 at Rotten Tomatoes, so I was pleasantly surprised. The length didn't bother me and I thought the story moved along just fine. The special effects were stunning. I am very excited about the next two.

He doesn't, actually. He bizarrely inserts words to the general effect of "that means good food, something something, and comfort" into the end of the quote. And it's actually a fairly famous quote. It would be like someone making a film of Hamlet and saying, "To be or not to be, that is the question I really want to ask myself..."

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).

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