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.
