It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the cinema – I think the last film I went to see was Looper – and I’m a little bit late to the game with ‘The Hobbit’ too with it being out before Christmas. Though I wasn’t particularly impressed by ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy from ten years ago – I found them long-winded and tedious, but perhaps a re-watch by my decade-old self may rejudge them – I recently ended up reading ‘The Hobbit’ as part of a book club and figured it would be nice to see it recreated on screen.
Now, I found ‘The Hobbit’ book to be an easy read, it is a children’s story after all, but found its plot lacking compared to other books I’ve read. It felt rather linear and straight-forward, as if it took the role-playing games spawned off the genre too literally, going from one battle scene to another. I enjoyed the read but didn’t feel the book lived up to the hype generated by it.
Thankfully the film is an improvement on the book, all things considered. I went into the film with low expectations on the back of lukewarm reviews, detailing long periods of nothing much happening, and I’d like to report that these aren’t entirely true. Granted it is a slightly bloated first part of a questionably bloated three-movie adaptation of a smaller children’s book and there are undoubtedly moments that are quite pedestrian, but overall it flows along nicely and covers the book well, though I’m pretty sure lots of moments could be cut out.
‘The Hobbit’ tells the story of a younger Bilbo Baggins than in ‘The Lord of the Rings’, being thrust into a quest with thirteen dwarves by wizard Gandalf the Grey to reclaim the original home of these dwarves and its treasure from the dragon Smaug.
The film twists the chronology of the book around a bit and even inserts new sections not in the original, I believe taken from other associated works. The story is told from the viewpoint of the elderly Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) recording his adventure for posterity to Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), not looking a year older than his LOTR appearance. In effect, he’s writing the Hobbit, with the famous first line making an appearance. It may, on paper, seem shoe-horned in, but fits nicely in with introducing the world and characters again though some dialogue suggests they’re aiming for an emotional end to the third part in reference to this character.
The story doesn’t start as ‘The Hobbit’ does. Instead we get the backstory from later in the book which actually sets the tale up better and makes for a far more engaging opening than there would normally be, and the first part that makes the film much more serious, adult-like and dramatic than the book, and this could be one of the first adaptations I’ve seen that’s an improvement on the story.
We do get the more light-hearted opening of the novel though as young Bilbo Baggins, played perfectly by the rising star of Martin Freeman, finds his neat home invaded by a baker’s dozen of hungry dwarves and then sets off on his adventure. There are a lot of characters in this story and though it’s difficult to name them all most make an impression on the audience.
The adventure of the story is built around some large set-pieces but doesn’t quite manage to avoid the ‘next battle’, ‘next battle’, ‘next battle’ feel of the book, as if they’re wandering in from one scrape to another. The troll scene is a great piece of characterisation, though, with some brilliant mo-cap work, and the CGI has come on leaps and bounds, though at several points in the film it does become like watching a video game as the party take on armies of trolls in a technical spectacular, but a little tedious, battle scene.
Plot-wise there is a mixture of the low-brow and high-brow, with table based discussions with elves and wizards to flesh out the plot, and there are many returning familiar faces. Gollum comes back in possibly the best scene outside of the troll one with lots of humour and some more great motion capture, and the emotion is amazingly done on the face of the ring bearer. The humour here is echoed throughout the film with many funny lines, though it does have its fair share of toilet humour as well for the kids.
Musically the film is unremarkable but does its job – no music stuck out to me but neither did it jar – and the cinematography is, unsurprisingly, beautiful. I didn’t see it in the much-maligned 48fps but in standard 2D it was a pleasure to look at.
As a film, overall, ‘The Hobbit’ was hampered by its source material which is a plodding series of battles. There were many moments of deja-vu with the team seemingly defeated only for Gandalf – who in the film feels like a pensioner wandering off with dementia only to remember to come back – to come back and save them by a wave of his wand. There are only so many times you can get excited by a chase sequence and shoe-horned in battle elements – the fight between the stone monsters in the mountain seems a little bit of a plot device to get them into the cave – but they took the book and have vastly improved it on screen.
If you haven’t seen it it’s not as plodding as people say though a little bit of time could have been shaved off, especially the last twenty minutes which felt like it was setting up a cliffhanger but the story continued, and in fact the movie ends on a positive note with no ‘must-see’ cliffhanger to bring you back, other than one line from Bilbo which fits neatly into the ‘famous last words’ camp.
A film I went in to see with low expectations and they surpassed them. It may be a little pedestrian at times and a bit trigger happy with the CGI, but the humour, key scenes like the ones with the trolls and Gollum, and the grand feel to it made this an enjoyable film that actually improves on the average book. Better than the Lord of the Rings, definitely worth a watch.
6.5/10
I also saw several trailers ahead of the film. ‘Warm Bodies’, a zombie-love story, looks interesting and funny, and worth watching. ‘Lincoln’ looks as over-the-top on the patriotism as expected but looks like a fun epic to see. ‘Pacific Rim’ is another, more popcorn-flick, I’d like to watch but it’s 2013’s example of fridge magnet movie making… let’s take a bit of ‘Godzilla’, throw in some ‘Transformers’ and ‘Power Rangers’, a bit of the ‘Matrix’, the GLADoS voice from ‘Portal’… done, got it!
0 comments:
Post a Comment