Review: The Hobbit · 6:25pm Dec 17th, 2012
On Saturday morning, I saw The Hobbit, in the company of about a hundred Tolkien fanatics. We discussed it before and afterwards. If you've read the book, there are no spoilers here.
There were some new humorous touches. (Four words: Mini goblin zipline stenographer.) Did they throw something more dignified away in order to get laughs, like Lucas did when he had Yoda fight a comical light-sabre duel? LotR has a grand tone that might suffer from slapstick and silliness. But I think it's okay to have some silliness in The Hobbit. The "crack the dishes, smash the plates" song was silly to begin with, and it was wonderfully choreographed--I wonder how many takes they did and how many dishes they went through.
The gestalt, the big picture, of this film is completely wrong. Jackson wants to create a war movie about Thorin, not a movie about the character of Bilbo.
The line changes, small things that got re-written, were mostly difficult story trade-offs. The way Bilbo left the Shire is an example. In the book, Gandalf and the dwarves bullied/tricked him into leaving, by saying he looked "more like a grocer than a burglar". He got upset and said he'd make a great burglar, and suddenly he found himself leaving with them, befuddled about why he had done so. This was so it could have an arc at the beginning when Bilbo is very foolish, and you don't trust Gandalf, and you feel frightened that Bilbo may have fallen in with a bad crowd. Not all of this would work in the movie, since everyone seeing it has already seen Gandalf in the LotR movies, and won't even think about distrusting him. In the movie, Bilbo is not upset by the grocer comment but agrees with it, and makes a long, deliberate decision to have an adventure. This highlights the Baggins / Took conflict within Bilbo better than in the book. It also starts Bilbo's character arc further along; he is already mature and not easily manipulated. This is all done so that we can spend less time on Bilbo, and more time on Thorin and battle scenes.
Many changes were, IMHO, an improvement. The scene with the trolls was clever. I think Tolkien hadn't decided how powerful Gandalf would be when he wrote that scene, so he showed Gandalf as perhaps not powerful enough to confront the trolls, and using trickery instead. It was a great scene in and of itself, but stuck out when later on Gandalf is much more powerful in battle. The fanatics and I had already went over the 4 possible ways of handling this scene proposed by "Riddles in the Dark". I said all of them were bad: The original way was bad (Gandalf too weak), having a long battle would be bad because there were already too many battles, Gandalf just blasting them with magic would be boring, and the trolls just being stupid would be deus ex machina. In the movie, they gave Bilbo the cleverness instead. This rushed Bilbo's character arc a little, making him too clever too soon, so that we could spend more time on Thorin and battle scenes. But I can't think of any better way of handling the scene.
They made Radagast into an interesting character, and added a lot of movie time showing him and his animals which I found entertaining. The riddling scene was especially well-done, introducing Gollum's split psyche earlier than Tolkien did, and in an entertaining yet frightening way.
(They did not, I'm afraid, use either of the lines "It smells like elves!" or "The faggots are reeking.")
I'd never have understood some of the details my more-fanatical friends did. It seemed bizarre when Gandalf mentions the blue wizards, "whose names I cannot remember at the moment." There are 4 other wizards, whom he's known for thousands of years, and he can only remember the names of two of them? That was a dig at the Tolkien estate, who wanted to charge the movie producers considerable extra to license the material in Unfinished Tales, which is the only place where their names are mentioned. I also wouldn't have known about Figwit, who has a slightly-larger role in this movie.
The only nonsensical big change I noticed was when they held a White Council mini-meeting in Rivendell on Gandalf's arrival. That is a major fail in three ways: It means Gandalf has no reason to leave the dwarves to attend the White Council; they didn't invite most of the members; and it makes no sense, since no one knew Gandalf was coming, not even Gandalf.
Writers always tell would-be authors to read a lot, but they never tell them to watch movies. Watching movies is important for writing! Movie directors are better at thinking cinematically than writers are. See enough movies that you get a sense for the cinematic, and that how something is seen, camera angles and lighting and all, pops into your head while you're writing. There's a scene where Bilbo walks through his silent, empty home in the morning, deciding whether to go or stay. There's a scene where he sneaks up behind Gollum, meaning to kill him, and sees the terrible misery in Gollum's face, and spares him. There's a scene where the dwarves gather around the fireplace and sing that sad song about their home. If you didn't have pictures in your mind, you'd have a hard time describing in words what happened and why.
The songs, BTW, were well-done. I love the melodies in the old Rankin-Bass version, even the songs Tolkien didn't write, like "The greatest adventure" and "Where there's a whip, there's a way". (I know Tolkien die-hards hate them because of their modern sound. Bite me.) But the melodies in this one are good too, though I was disappointed that they cut "Fifteen birds in five fir trees" (due to the need to rewrite the story to change it to a battle scene that rushed Bilbo's character arc and his acceptance by the company).
The "mistakes" that I predicted were adding more battles and making the existing battles bigger and longer. There's a long battle flashback added to provide Thorin's motivation, which I would like to have seen summarized in a few lines of dialogue, but that's because I think the movie is about Bilbo, not Thorin. It was wrong for the tone of the first half of The Hobbit. The book opens pastorally, and I like that. I like some time spent travelling across the wilderness, feeling the bigness of it, slogging through the mud between sudden and dramatic fight scenes. This movie doesn't do that.
That's a problem with this Hobbit: Too many battle scenes, and too many characters spending too much time hanging over precipices. It has the pacing of an action movie. The action segments were overdone and unbelievable. The long, LONG fight scene inside the goblin mountain was so ridiculous, I had to look away--what with each dwarf killing dozens of goblins, despite being outnumbered about a thousand to one, and falling hundreds of feet onto rock with no ill effects, not once, but twice--that's twice per dwarf--I felt I was watching the Keystone Kops. Thorin uses a ladder as a shield against archers, and all their arrows conveniently lodge in its rungs. Later, they're caught in five or six devastating rock slides and crushed between two mountains slamming against each other, but no one is injured. That's the level of ridiculousness. I can't fear for these dwarves anymore; they're obviously made of dwarfonium.
(My fanatical friends did not mind the unreal fight scenes, but were upset at the implied rate of travel possible over the Misty Mountains via bunny sled. This probably says something about the geek psyche.)
The other problem with this Hobbit is that Bilbo peaks too soon. We've only gotten to the end of the first movie, and he's already become heroic and finished his character arc (in an added, unrealistic fight scene). I said this to someone else in the group, and he thought that Peter Jackson didn't think The Lord of the Rings was about Frodo; he thought it was about Aragorn. Likewise, Jackson probably thought The Hobbit was about Thorin.
That does explain a lot about Jackson's version of LotR. Still, I laughed at the idea that anybody would spend hundreds of millions making a film of a book called The Hobbit and put it in the hands of somebody who thought the story was not about a hobbit--until someone read out loud part of an interview with some of the development team, who said that The Hobbit was really Thorin's story. Ugh. Hollywood.
Some speculated that this Hobbit will have conflict between Bilbo and Thorin when Bilbo becomes a leader in Mirkwood. In the book, Thorin throws his weight behind Bilbo and tells the dwarves to obey him. It's hard to imagine this Thorin doing that so easily.
I kept being struck by how much Tolkien re-uses the same themes and plot elements in the Silmarillion, the Hobbit, and LotR. He plagiarizes from himself. This didn't bother me as much in the books, which were about Bilbo and Frodo, who are strong enough characters to carry a book. But with the movies instead being about Thorin and Aragorn, neither of whom are interesting enough to support one movie let alone three apiece, the similarities start to annoy me. The Arkenstone, the rings, the Silmarils--they all serve similar story functions. Bilbo and Frodo are variations on a theme, as are the company of dwarves and the Fellowship of the Ring. I don't even remember how many kings seeking to restore their kingdoms Tolkien has. He has two dwarven kingdoms carved out under a mountain that the dwarves were driven from after their riches attracted enemies.
One good thing about highlighting Thorin early on is that it fixes one of the book's major failings. The book opens with the dwarves being nasty money-grubbers who are all about the gold, and around chapter 10 it drop-shifts into being a king's quest to reclaim his kingdom. The movie introduces the king's quest right off the bat.
At least Thorin isn't as dull a character as Aragorn becomes once he leaves the Shire. This raises the issue of character flaws. You might think Aragorn is dull because he has no flaws. I've said on this blog that writers who tell you to make your characters interesting by giving them flaws are wrong, and I stick by that. Aragorn is dull because he speaks and acts the way we expect noble warrior kings to. Gandalf, on the other hand, also has no serious flaws--you could even accuse him of being a Mary Sue, if he weren't absent so much of the time--yet he is a very interesting character. He just has his own way of doing things. You need a flaw to have a character arc, but you don't need flaws to make a character interesting.
We discussed what it meant to the story for Thorin to be young instead of old. Most of us thought it was just to draw women to the movie--I asked why they couldn't have made one of the dwarves into a hot babe for my sake, then--but someone turned up an interview with someone on the development team who said it was to allow Thorin to fight more energetically. IMHO, a key consideration is how it makes you feel when Thorin presumably dies in the end. In the book, Thorin's death was sad, but, honestly, the guy was pretty old already, and so instead of being a tragedy, it was more of a "circle of life" moment, and an "at least he saw his home again before he died" moment. If this young Thorin dies at the end, it will change the tone of the story.
The movie was filmed with the Red digital camera. That's interesting, because the Red is a cheap camera (as movie cameras go!) The 48fps video was nice, though only rarely noticeable. There's a scene where Gandalf whispers to a moth. At 24fps, its wings would have just been a blur. At 48fps, it looked real. People who say it "looks fake" mean it "looks real, and I'm not used to things looking real". Get over it.
If I have any complaint about the video, it's about the 3D. I have avoided 3D movies. The 3D looked a little fake, but it may have done as much good as bad. It didn't give me a headache or motion-sickness. It was only a big problem in the outdoors scenes, because 3D movies are dim. I wanted Rivendell to look bright, and it can't when you're wearing glasses that block half the light.
BTW, Peter Beagle was there, and he mentioned that there will be a live-action version of The Last Unicorn within a few years. He told me that Tolkien was not much of an influence on him, but James Thurber was, and he mentioned two stories in particular: "The White Deer" and "The 13 Clocks".
Great review! I liked the bit about the blue wizards, that's really neat to know that!
It's been a good while since I've read the book, but definitely in the film it seemed clear that Gandalf was deliberately leading them via Rivendell, so everyone turning up there wasn't odd. Also wizards have magic powers, don't forget.
I'm seeing a lot of doom and gloom with the reviews of this movie. I guess I'm easy to please because I loved it.
I liked the added bits with the orcs. I liked the exposition at the beginning explaining the dwarven kingdom. I liked that Radagast's character was expanded upon. I liked that we'll get to see more of the Necromancer rather than be shoved into the background. I even liked the 48 frames per second version.
I thought the dwarves surviving the moving mountains was a bit much though...
I'm looking forward to the next movie already. It's just too bad I have to wait a year to see it.
This is just my opinion, as someone who isn't nuts about Tolkien, but lives with someone who's a total Tolkien geek:
I feel like Peter Jackson is repeating what I see as Tolkien's 'mistake.'
I thought that The Hobbit was an enjoyable, fast paced fantasy novel. It was successful, and Tolkien decided to write LOTR. I felt like LOTR (the book) was long winded, went off on tangents, and generally needed an editor or fifty.
Jackson, due to the studios not really trusting him and the fact that people are not going to watch five hour movies, had to be that editor that Tolkien needed, and made LOTR accessible and interesting to a much larger audience. But then he became Peter Jackson, so for the Hobbit they gave him free reign (and probably even encouraged him to make it longer.) He made it long winded, went off on tangents, decided to throw in the Necromancer, and took what could have been a fun movie or two and tried to make it into a three
novelmovie epic.I was also distracted by the lighting and CG. We saw it in 48 frame 3D, and I felt like the lighting made it feel like a video tape, and the realism of the HD made CG effects stick out like a sore thumb. Even the realistic ones felt kind of old Hollywood to me, like I knew it had to be a special effect so I lost my suspension of disbelief. The wargs were especially bad in that respect (and they kept coming back!)
There were absolutely too many fight scenes, and worse then that they didn't have enough weight behind them. I'm not a fan of fight scenes in general, but I credit LOTR with my two favorite battle scenes- Helmsdeep and Pellinor Fields. But that's because those had weight behind them, I really felt that something was at stake here. Actually, every fight scene in LOTR had at least some weight, thanks to the four hobbits- there was a feeling of innocents that needed protecting. I think I'm a sucker for that. (And the only fight scene in LOTR that I thought was boring was Moria, probably because they lost that for the scene and had the hobbits as active and effective participants.)
I also totally agree that the movie shows that Tolkien was retreading the "lost king" plotline, and I don't feel like it's as effective here. I don't know if it's because LOTR came out first, if Thorin is a less sympathetic character than Aragorn, or if Viggo Mortensen is a better actor than Richard Armitage, but something there is falling flat for me.
I do want to watch it again without the HD and 3D, and possibly not at one in the morning. (I might finally be too old for a midnight release.) But my first impression wasn't that great. I'll see the next ones, but so far I'm getting a "Star Wars prequels" vibe off this.
The Rankin Bass tune for 'Over the Misty Mountains Cold' is permanently stuck in my mind, because it was totally awesome. I agree. I even thought that the tune used in the Hobbit movie sounded, to me, like a twisted version of that brilliant old tune... as thought they had wanted it, and couldn't get it, and changed the pitch of every third note just enough to count as 'different'. There was happy familiarity there.
Made me wish the Rankin Bass tune had been used, actually. Damn that was a cool song. 'Goblin Town', too.
You are the only other person I have ever heard willing to admit those songs were cool.
Awesome.
Finally! A well written review that isn't full of bias. Now I want to see this move even more. Thanks for telling me everything I needed to know, and quelling the fears that every other dumbass reviewer made me believe (most see change as evil, and it seems cool to talk bad about popular things nowadays. So many paid reviewers are so pretentious...). And I'm glad to see that the 48 fps didn't ruin the movie.
Too many ginormous blogposts today...
THANK YOU.
It seems to me that most changes really are a result of the LOTR already existing. Hell, the version of the Hobbit everyone is most familiar with is actually a re-write to help it conform more to the world Tolkein had built when he wrote the LOTR. I can say though, that I loved this movie, warts (and massive chin-fat
) and all. Pretty much like how I feel about the Lord of the Rings movies really. For the (hipster) record, yes I had read the books (even the Silmarillion 
) first, and the movies all gave me multiple fangasms nonetheless.
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Rankin/Bass. Represent.
I think I like this version of Misty Mountains better, but the RB version was chill inducing as well. Makes me want to go on an adventure.
I'm almost entirely sure the dishes were CG at every point where they weren't sitting still
also, the 3D wasn't an issue for me...I'd say it felt natural, but it's kinda the opposite from your moth wings point - it only felt natural because everyone's so used to it being jarringly overdone