Lower your Hobbit expectations just a bit

Few movies are as cherished by a generation — other than the first Star Wars trilogy, perhaps — than Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. And now that entire generation has to prepare itself for a little disappointment. Not a lot. But enough to produce a noticeable rattle against their plastic swords and staffs as they exit the theater.

Jackson, after a long trudge through development hell, returns to Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien’s other fantasy epic, The Hobbit, which takes place 60 years or so before Frodo’s adventure to destroy the One Ring. The book was originally supposed to be one movie, but then it was split into two. Later it was cut up again to make three movies, because if you have a machine that prints money why would you turn it off? Each is around three hours long. With nine hours of film to play with — first with An Unexpected Journey, next year’s The Desolation of Smaug, and 2014’s There and Back Again — Jackson threw every comma, semi-colon and period from Tolkien’s book into the movie. More on that later.

The film opens, like Lord of the Rings, with myths and whispers. A dragon named Smaug has sniffed out a cancerous greed within a society of dwarves, who have hallowed out a mountain to store their precious metals. Smaug lays waste to the surrounding valley and claims the peak, the Lonely Mountain, as his own, sending the dwarves scampering into the wilderness. A generation later, Thorin Oakenshield — named after his ad-libbed defense with an oak branch — has decided to mount a raid on Smaug to reclaim the dwarves’ homeland.

The meeting to plan the attack is held at the underground home of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a curious hobbit who had no clue that Tuesday was Plan-a-Suicidal-Attack-Against-a-Giant-Dragon Night in his living room. Bilbo is neck deep in some ale and a seedcake when wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), Thorin (Richard Armitage) and a caravan of other dwarves descend on his little hobbit hole. Gandalf, it seems, wants to recruit Bilbo as the fellowship’s resident burglar, a role that Bilbo first refuses and then accepts with hesitation.

Besides the wizard, the hobbit and leader Thorin, there are a dozen other dwarves in the group: Balin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dwalin, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Fili and Kili. It’s a tongue-tying list of fantasy names, but fear not because you’re not expected to remember them, although I frequently recognized Bombur, whose round body has the physics of an overfilled water balloon.

Jackson and his writing team — including Rings veterans Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, and original director Guillermo del Toro — include everything they can from Tolkien’s source material, including a 10-minute dish-washing segment and several songs ripped right from the book’s pages. They even include material that isn’t even in The Hobbit, but from appendices within other Tolkien books. It’s a comprehensive effort, and an accurate one, but it dilutes the potential of The Hobbit. To paraphrase The Lord of the Rings, it “feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” I find it odd that The Hobbit, smaller than any single book in the Rings trilogy, gets three three-hour movies. If we were to apply the same math to Rings, that trilogy should have been 45 hours or more. The upside to this is that fans of the book will get a generous serving, with lots of meat to chew on.

The Hobbit, just as visually rich as Jackson’s other visits to Middle Earth — with all of New Zealand’s beauty, real and CGI, on display — is slow going for the first half as Bilbo and his troupe of dwarves trek through mossy forests, across rock-strewn plains and up treacherous mountains that come to life during thunderstorms. There is constant danger, first from a trio of hungry mountain trolls and then from a roaming pack of goblins, but the plot seems to meander along as Bilbo questions who he should follow: the easily disgruntled Thorin or wise Gandalf, who got him into the mess to begin with. The movie marched forward, though I was never sure where it was marching: A secret door into the Lonely Mountain? A battle with Smaug? The formation of an army? The mission’s goal was muddled and confusing, even after a visit to Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), who caution Gandalf concerning the long-dead Sauron and a mysterious Necromancer, material for one of the next Hobbits.

The second half of the movie, though, is a treat as the company is trapped in a goblin mountain, with a bloated tumor-pocked goblin king. Tolkien’s world — and by extension, Peter Jackson’s world — is a remarkable place, and it is richly detailed and realized. This goblin kingdom is proof to that, with caverns of matchstick-like huts teetering on jagged cliffs, and inhabited by foul, contorted goblins. It’s in this setting that The Hobbit finds its greatest scene, one featuring the triumphant return of Andy Serkis as Gollum, who, by this point in Tolkien’s tales, has found the One Ring and become crazy from its power. Gollum’s scenes are small, but they are powerful in the way that they validate the adventures in The Hobbit. Gollum, more so than even Bilbo, is the link to Rings, and here he performs with bravado as he twitches and babbles about his “precious” during a game of riddles. I found myself missing Gollum as soon as he was absent from the screen.

The Hobbit is a marvelous feat of filmmaking, but I only wish that its story were more accessible. Frodo’s journey enveloped us right from the beginning, but Bilbo’s struggles to hook us right away. Compared to Rings, The Hobbit is just not as focused, which is understandable since it has more layers and many more references (footnotes included) to the source text. Rings fans will adore it, but I also think they’ll either crave more or, like me, a little less.

A final note: if you have the chance to see the film in 48fps — or 48 frames per second — then skip it. The technology is impressively sharp, but it gives the film an unnatural look compared to the usual 24fps, like it was shot on the set of a soap opera. It also makes movement look slightly sped up, which makes action look more realistic, but the effect can play tricks on your eyes to the point of distracting you away from Jackson’s film. Overall, it just doesn’t look cinematic.