An Unexpected Movie

I took my 8 year old son to see The Hobbit tonight for his birthday. Truth in advertising should have required some kind of warning like "very loosely based on the novel by JRR Tolkien". I was willing to suspend judgement and let it go where it would for the sake of artistic license, but the "art" was incredibly sparse, replaced instead by an unbelievable amount of unnecessary and over the top filler that made it look like a clone of The Lord of the Rings movies and distorted the original story almost beyond recognition. I say this because the kind of movie making Peter Jackson does well, IMO, is a closer fit to LOTR than The Hobbit. Those who have read both The Hobbit and LOTR books are aware that the tone of each is very different and within this difference of tone is a consistent story that is true to its respective tone.

In this context it seems to me that The Hobbit movie has been (Peter Jackson) LOTR-ized to the point I recognized very little of the original book in it. There are whole elements in the movie that do not even exist in the book and distort the characters, disconnecting them from themselves and their place in Tolkien's overall story. I found myself liking many of them simply because I associate them with their vastly superior brethren in the book. This was most true for me in regards to Gandalf who I feel is sacrosanct in Tolkien's books and I was saddened to see him acting very unGandalf-ish at times. His interactions with the Goblin King were particularly troubling to me. The only scene that I felt was done extremely well (ie, in the full spirit of the book) was the song of the dwarves in Bilbo's hobbit hole. The riddle game with Gollum was probably the second best, but was changed somewhat from the book in a way that I felt was unnecessary.

Another criticism I have is that many elements from the book were sensationalized to the point of being utterly ridiculous. One of many examples is when the protagonists are treed by the wargs after escaping from the Goblin Kingdom. They are not just trapped in trees, but they are trapped in trees that are precariously growing on a precipice, and as if that were not enough each tree ends up falling into the next such that they leap from one to the next until all are on the one tree that happens to be at the very tip of the precipice, but it is not enough that it is on the tip of a (overhanging!) precipice but it must fall too, except it stops just where the ground would be if it weren't at the edge of a cliff so that they are all dangling out in space. It reminded me of the Scooby Doo cartoons my son loves to watch. Unfortunately there were many more scenes like this one that stretched the suspension of disbelief well beyond any reasonable breaking point.

So, if you loved what Peter Jackson did with LOTR you may very well enjoy this one as well. There are many of the same cinemagraphic techniques used to keep the heart racing and make you feel like you're on a roller coaster ride, but if you want the profound story telling of Tolkien's beloved book I'm afraid you will likely be disappointed.