The Hobbit Lives

[TKz]

I like to think of it as, in The Hobbit, there's still this sense of wonder in the world, it's still a brighter place. By the time Lord of the Rings rolls around, the mystery and magic has started to fade. Which fits in with the whole Age of Men thing, the fantastic elements of the world start to disappear. It's a theme during most of Lord of the Rings, stuff like The Ents all becoming trees, how rare Trolls and Goblins have become, the wizards and the Elves leaving and the Dwarves almost dying out.

I was hesitant about the film at first, but now I really can't wait for the next two.

[Skummy]

I liked it a lot. If I've got any complaints, though, it's that none of the dwarfs aside from Thorin got any real characterization. It was just "Here they are, here's there names, Thorin's the leader". I'm hoping that the others are more fleshed out in the upcoming movies.

It's been a while since I read the book, but that's all I ever took from it as well.

"Yes...dwarves...lots of them...okay."

I'd argue that this is true of 90% of Tolkein's characters. He never had a skill for character development.

Incidentally, I'm going to see this tonight. I've not read the book since I was about eight or nine years old; I enjoyed it then, but I really dislike Tolkein now. I didn't like the Lord Of The Rings films, but I'm going in somewhat optimistically, though the cynical cash-in of stretching a book of fewer than 300 pages into a nine hour trilogy does make me question that optimism.

[Sousa]

You won't like it because you are Skumfrog and you hate everything that is good and fun.

Also The Rock is in it.

[Skummy]

I liked it for what it was. It was overly long, and it was flawed, but they were largely flaws that existed in the book itself.

It could (and should) have been heavily edited down; I felt that the Gollum scene was far too long, and presented as something far more important than it seemed in the book. In fact, in general I didn't really like how much it was presented as a "prequel" to Lord Of The Rings, with some gratuitous lingering "you've seen this place before!" shots and callbacks. If you'd never seen Lord Of The Rings, the entire Gollum scene would have been baffling. It doesn't help that I'm not a fan of the character, and the irritating tricksy Tolkein wordplay he speaks in the first place.

There were also a bunch of scenes that just dragged - escaping from the goblin/troll lair, Bilbo chasing after the dwarves, the stone giants...and things which simply could have been cut out. The entire introductory scene to Radagast could have been cut out, with the character's first appearance being when the heroes meet him, and it wouldn't have hurt the film one bit. Similarly, Radagast luring the Orcs away could have been dealt with much more quickly. To be honest, the entire character could have been cut out and the story wouldn't have been compromised for it. And there's a lot of this; it's not just that they've dragged a book of fewer than 300 pages out into three (presumably) three hour movies; as an individual movie, it's still too long. I hate the prevailing attitude in modern film-making that longer equates to more "epic", and more "epic" equates to better. I could have done without the amount of songs; I guess there's an argument to be made that if you're trying to really capture Tolkein's world, you need to incorporate his mock-folk song nonsense, but it just always felt forced, and like it came out of nowhere.

I'm also not a fan of the whole framing device of Bilbo writing the story to Frodo. That could have been dealt with in under two minutes, instead we end up with a bunch of un-necessary nonsense of Bilbo gibbering on about his relatives and throwing a party that serves to do nothing but crowbar in Elijah Wood.

What makes it worse is that it draws so much attention to this plot device that when Bilbo reads the opening lines of the book, describing a Hobbit Hole, you wonder why he's bothering, considering that it's just been established that he's writing this to Frodo. Who is a Hobbit, and even if all Hobbits somehow aren't aware of Hobbit Holes, we've literally just watched him talk to Bilbo in that exact house. The same mistake is repeated moments later, with Gandalf telling the Dwarves that "a Dwarf Door is invisible when closed" - something which, as Dwarves, they presumably would already know.

I also find it odd how the words Troll & Goblin were used more or less interchangeably; I'm not sure if that's true of the book or not, I can't remember, but it just seemed needlessly confusing for me, and would have made things easier to follow if they just stuck with one or the other.

There are a lot of other issues I had with some of the characters, the script and the plot, but they were all to be expected, as they're issues I have with Tolkein's writing, so they're flaws that existed in the book itself.

So that I'm not just being Skumfrog Who Hates Everything, on the positive side, it was, as with Lord Of The Rings, a fantastic looking film, with the size difference between the human and dwarf and Hobbit characters never seeming forced, and with only a couple of shots where the over-reliance on CGI was particularly obvious; Gollum, as ever, was a masterful piece of CGI work. The film as a whole had much more of a sense of fun than Lord Of The Rings ever did, and was more enjoyable for it - largely because the book itself is a lot less po-faced and serious than Lord Of The Rings. Despite having said earlier that he could have been cut out without impacting the story, Sylvester McCoy put in an absolutely superb performance as Radagast, and Ian McKellen as Gandalf was the highlight of the whole film. He injected more personality just through facial expressions and slight nuances than every other character combined, and he was an absolute joy to watch - moreso than he ever was in any of the Lord Of The Rings films. Martin Freeman was good fun, too, and played Bilbo suitably without pretension or any kind of foreshadowing of the hero he would become. Christopher Lee, as ever, did a lot with very little and added some necessary gravitas at a point when the story wasn't much more than "settle down here, oh no monsters" repeated ad infinitum; though his age and lack of mobility made it perhaps a less dynamic scene than it could have been.