Friday, January 4, 2013

January 4:The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012 -- Peter Jackson)

★★★
The Hobbit is a film to see in Imax and 3D.  There’s no character development and little character to develop, but the story moves along as a series of chases and fights.  The pleasures of this Middle Earth are mostly visual, so the better you can see it, the better the experience.  And it looks great.

As I recall, Tolkien’s Hobbit is lighter fare than his trilogy, and Jackson and his co-producers reach to other Tolkien material to fill out a trilogy based on this prequel.  As a result, there’s some depth to the world that Bilbo is running around in, but the film lingers long on episodes like the dwarfs assembling at Frodo’s or having adventures among the goblin caverns.  It feels like there’s an effort here to fill out the film’s three-hour running time.  And, too, the narrative line sometimes takes a breather to give us a bit of flashback history that provides context for the action but doesn’t succeed in elevating the film’s stakes.  And the bottom line here is that we’re not very invested in the object of the quest: Foreshadowing aside, restoring Erebor to the dwarves lacks the impact of the earlier quest trilogy to save the world from encroaching evil by destroying the ring. 

Even though none of the characters is terribly engaging and we don’t feel there’s a lot at risk in the film, The Hobbit is still a load of special effects fun and lets fans linger once again in The Shire and Rivendell.  That’s not enough to create cinema with the heft of the trilogy, but it’s not a bad way to spend several hours at the movies either.

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