Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit is faithful to the novel, but the epic length of this three-part production is unjustified.
USA/New Zealand
2.5*
Director:
Peter Jackson
Screenwriters:
Fran Walsh
Philippa Boyens
Peter Jackson
Guillermo del Toro
Director of Photography:
Andrew Lesnie
Running time: 165 minutes
This is one in a series of reviews including:
– The Desolation of Smaug
– The Battle of the Five Armies
During the 10 years that elapsed between the making of the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings and the three films that compose the The Hobbit trilogy, it was unthinkable that anyone other than Peter Jackson could do justice to the original novel by J.R.R. Tolkien. Jackson had created a landmark piece of cinema that melded a vast array of special effects, motion-capture technology and epic storytelling to produce films that were held together by a very strong story and dazzled us with some remarkable set pieces in the genres of adventure, drama, fantasy and war.
Perhaps it is true that Jackson was the only person who could have made The Hobbit at the same level as the Lord of the Rings films, but it is a pity he wasn’t aiming higher. In his previous trilogy, he pulled together a disparate group of individuals – four hobbits, a dwarf, an Elf, a wizard and two humans – with a dynamic sense of tension, action and friendship.
The Hobbit doesn’t reach the same level of excitement or provoke the same interest. At the beginning of the film, we see the dwarf kingdom prosper before being attacked and evicted from their own treasure-filled mountain, Erebor, by the dragon Smaug. Shortly afterwards, Gandalf the Gray (Ian McKellen) knocks on the door of Bilbo Baggins’s (Martin Freeman) door in Hobbiton and manages to convince him, with some reverse psychology courtesy of a horde of dwarves – who raid his pantry – led by heir apparent Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), to join in the journey back to Erebor, somehow slay the dragon and win them their kingdom back.
In this sense, the story resembles, in broad strokes, the quest of the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings; however, the group is by no means as interesting as in the other films. This weak spot greatly impedes our engagement in the social fabric, despite magisterial efforts by Freeman.
But there is at least one marked difference between the narrative structures of the two series. Whereas The Lord of the Rings was told entirely in the present tense, except for that exquisite prologue narrated by Cate Blanchett in The Fellowship of the Ring, The Hobbit is framed as a story written by the old Bilbo to his nephew Frodo. The cuts back to him, 60 years after the events, which for those who haven’t seen the other films or read the books spoils the story by revealing he survived the ordeal, border on the tedious, and Frodo’s appearance here also seems more like a cameo than a necessity.
There is little variety in terms of the storyline and its different groupings of characters, but the film reaches a high point when Bilbo is separated from the group of dwarves, finds the One Ring and plays a game of riddles with Gollum. Gollum, even more than Gandalf or any of the elves, is the one character from The Lord of the Rings whom we are really glad to see again, and every minute spent in his company is electric with tension and expectation.
There is one aspect of the film, however, that is groundbreaking, and this deserves to be mentioned in every review. Films are usually recorded and projected at a rate of 24 frames per second. That is the minimum amount of frames necessary to render a moving image that doesn’t suffer from the stuttering movements of early cinema. With The Hobbit, Jackson collected double the data and had many of the prints projected at 48 frames per second, a process that is called High Frame Rate, or HFR, coupled with 3-D effects.
The result is distracting as we are confronted with twice the amount of data as usual, and while things move at a more “natural” speed, it nonetheless seems to be too fast. It is effectively high-definition images, and with the three dimensions, rendered here more strikingly than in any other film this reviewer has ever seen, all pretense of fiction seems to disappear.
But, ironically, that is a problem. While the quest for so-called realism in the cinema is important for the viewer to feel somehow part of the action, there is a difference between feeling like you’re there and feeling like it’s reality.
Middle-earth is a realm of fantasy, and any illusion that the creatures are almost “real” will be easily rejected by the viewer, creating a barrier to our investment in the events, or feeling of being present.
Maybe it is merely a question of getting used to the HFR – it will almost certainly be used in the future – but this new technology would seem to benefit a documentary film much more than one set in a fictional fantasy land.
The two-dimensional version is much more palatable, and the same will be true of the 3-D version screened at the conventional 24 frames per second. In terms of tone and story, this first film, whose running time of 165 minutes is pure self-indulgence (the entire series is based on a book that is one-third as long as the Lord of the Rings supertome), is far from the success one had expected from Jackson.