The Hobbit is an unexpectedly long journey to nowhere

Wow, has it really been nine years since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was released? It really doesn’t seem that long, but it does seem like it’s been an eternity since the wheels started turning on production of The Hobbit, what with the rights feuds, a studio bankruptcy, and a director withdrawing even before the first frame was shot. But now it’s here, at least the first of three chapters, and the big question is: was it worth the wait?

The answer is neither yes nor no, as the first chapter in the new trilogy is resoundingly average. I remember being enraptured by the first Lord of the Rings movie from the very beginning; the look, the style, the music … everything about it just drew you into the world of Middle Earth. Since we’ve all been there, settling into a viewing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, should be like settling into a comfy couch. You certainly know what to expect style-wise with Peter Jackson once again behind the camera, and even the story should have some familiarity to it, since we’re re-connecting with some characters we already know from the previous films (even though this one takes place sixty years earlier).

Unfortunately, what Jackson has done by taking a simple, single-volume children’s story and turning it into a nine-hour epic has made the movie overly bloated and episodic, especially during the first hour when we’re meeting the thirteen dwarfs and getting side stories that sometimes do not have any bearing on the main story at hand. For instance, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) tells the story of another wizard, Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy) and his discovery of a necromancer destroying nature all around him. This side story intrudes on the main story, as Gandalf brings news of the necromancer to Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), and Saruman (Christopher Lee) who dismisses it as just a man playing with magic. Of course, the necromancer will obviously play into the story, as Benedict Cumberbatch was cast in the role (and he’s credited, but never seen in the movie).

The main plot of the book is there, though, between all of the extra stuff Jackson has added. Bilbo Baggins (a terrific Martin Freeman) is enlisted by Gandalf to join a band of dwarfs on their quest to regain their homeland — and gold — from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they have to battle orcs, goblins, and trolls, and after getting separated from the group during an underground battle with the goblins, Bilbo meets up with a strange creature, Gollum (Andy Serkis), and comes in possession of that magical, golden ring. It’s here that the movie finally kicks into gear with Serkis’ amazing performance. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences really needs to rethink their acting categories to include motion capture performances like this, because even though the actor is replaced by a fully realized CG character, his performance is just stunning (and the advances in CG rendering since the last movie have grown by leaps and bounds, making this the most realistic Gollum yet).

Unfortunately, the movie ends just as it’s really getting started with the band of travelers seeing their destination for the first time off in the distance. What The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ends up being is a three-hour origin story that we have to wait a year to see how it pans out. Another problem I had was that the whole thing felt like Jackson was just indulging himself. It took a while for the LOTR films to show us some major battles, but The Hobbit has at least three! The effects are incredible, but it all seemed like a bit of overkill and padding. The story has gotten completely lost amongst all the pageantry. More time should have been spent getting to know the dwarfs, the camaraderie, the journey, instead of just throwing one battle after another at us (and don’t get me started on the pointless rock giants fight scene that only served to show off more CGI wonders). As it is, by the end of the movie, you really don’t care one way or another about Thorin’s (Richard Armitage) quest to get back to his home, and with most of the plot points from the book already included in this movie, you have to wonder how much more padding is to come. I fear that the Hobbit trilogy is going to go down in film history as the new Star Wars prequels trilogy.

Another point that needs to be made – at least for those planning to check out the film in the new High Frame Rate 3D edition – is that despite what Jackson and the studio have to say about the process, it really did not serve the film well at all. Yes, the picture is probably the sharpest and clearest you’ve ever seen on a big screen, and the CGI characters all look more real than ever before, but it just looks like you’re watching a big screen version of some old BBC video production from the 1970s (and a modern video game during the battle scenes). The original trilogy had a beautiful look and depth to them — a truly epic scale — but the 48 frames-per-second of video (film normally runs at 24 fps and video at 30 fps) actually makes the movie look cheap and flat, even in 3D! There’s a shot of the band of dwarfs, Bilbo and Gandalf looking across a chasm at Rivendell and it looks like they’re staring at a painting. I don’t know how this will all look when projected at a normal frame rate on film (or in IMAX), and I can appreciate Jackson’s attempts at trying something new (and I shudder to think what Avatar 2 will look like if James Cameron can get the frame rate up to 60 fps), but I think the experiment is a failure (and it doesn’t help if you’re prone to motion sickness … I was still dizzy six hours after leaving the theater and had to resort to Sea Bands to keep from hurling my popcorn about twenty minutes in). Hopefully Jackson can fine tune the effect over the next year and bring a little more depth to the film overall when The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug hits theaters in 2013. The opening chapter, though, is just a bit meh.