Lately, Peter Jackson movies feel like being presented with an enormous buffet stuffed to the brim with rich, tasty delights… and then having the waiter pull a gun on you and making you eat all of it. It’s undeniably tasty but past, say, the third course you stop tasting the food and just focus on shoveling it down to get this done.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, unfortunately, is not a change in pace.
Here’s the problem with the first Hobbit movie: It’s three hours long and covers maybe 100 pages of the book.
Worse, most of it is unnecessary. Funny, engaging, well-made, but an hour of this movie could be dumped on the cutting room floor and nobody except the most hardcore fan would ever miss it. This movie should have been an hour and a half, if Warner Bros. was forcing Jackson to turn out a trilogy to make more money instead of just the one damn movie this needed to be. There will, in fairly short order, be entire scenes of this movie with Monty Python’s “GET ON WITH IT!” bit cut in all over YouTube.
It must be said that The Hobbit is not the greatest book ever written and this insistence on staying true to the word of the book brings that into focus with a vengeance. The story suffers because Jackson is unable or unwilling to just get his ass in gear.
Or perhaps this is Peter Jackson getting revenge on every fussy nerd whining about Tom Bombadil not being in the first movie. You can practically imagine him, sitting there in his editing suite, thinking “Criticize me, will they? Whine about how I made a crappy movie because it’s not literally page to screen, will they?! I’ll show them! Here it is, you nitpicky little trolls! EVERY! LAST! WORD!”
That said, it is nice to see Jackson’s facility with comedy hasn’t atrophied; this is often a very funny, if sometimes slapsticky, flick. Part of this is Martin Freeman, who ably anchors the film and in fact shows a sprightliness and cheeriness he almost never gets to deploy. Bilbo is an intelligent, fun-loving kind of guy here, and Freeman is part of the reason the movie never drags.
Overall, it’s a fun movie but it’s not the revelation the first Lord Of The Rings film was. It’s a good movie for a lazy Sunday afternoon, so if you’ve got one of those coming, plan accordingly.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/569/thumb)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/gammasquadeuropareport-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/gammasquadlegobatmanmovie-150x150.jpg)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/star_trek_into_darkness-150x150.png)
![[image]](http://cdn.uproxx.com/wp-content/thumbnails/130/110/2013/05/BG_Cv20_ln7ukuafvl_-150x150.jpg)
Should I pay to see it in a theater (and sneak in packages of red vines and twizzlers [I call it the pocket wars]) or just wait until it’s on Blu-Ray and watch it on a lazy Sunday afternoon?
That really depends. If you’ve got a theater with a great setup and a good projectionist, I would say go see it there if for no other reason than the movie is, as expected, gorgeous. If you don’t, Blu-Ray is probably the way to go.
Also, on the Twizzlers tip, the theater near me sells Pull N’ Peel exclusively for some baffling reason. Yeah, that’s easy to use IN THE DARK. Great idea there.
What was your take on the 48fps fiasco? Friends have complained and others have recommended. What did you think about it?
I saw this last night in the 48 FPS, and while they did an incredible job with the 3D, I felt like I spent more time trying to pay attention to the movie than enjoying it. Kind of like you were watching a “Making Of” special that was the actual movie.
I think “fiasco” is a little strong. The cinematography and effects don’t suffer for it, but I also saw it in 2D on a non-IMAX screen.
I saw it on IMAX 3-D and its a pretty good spectacle at time you get lost in the scenery and they could probably shave 30 mins from the film just by limiting the “swooping” landscape shots.
Things I’d rather do than watch the Hobbit: shove a piece of barbed wire up my pee hole, share needles with Magic Johnson, re-read The Hobbit (which would actually take LESS time)
It’s not THAT bad. It’s a fun movie. It’s just… well… really goddamn long.
I really wanna see it but I hate sitting in a theater for more than 2 hours or so. My ass gets super sore and then I look like I have hemorrhoids as I wiggle around in my seat for the rest of the movie.
Bring an ass donut. That way, you can get the hemorrhoids assumption out of the way up front!
So not as good as the first three which were boring as all hell? Pass.
Yeah, if you didn’t like the first three, this isn’t going to change your opinion.
I enjoyed the movie more than the Lord of the RIngs movies.
Well even though it sounds like it suffers from some problems no matter who’s reviewing it, I hope I lean more towards Dan’s opinion than Vince’s.
Maybe, hopefully, it will be the kind of movie that’s improved by the next two, since this one did all the legwork (although Fellowship was great and it pretty much had the same task).
So far a lot of the (very) negative reviews seem to tend toward, “I hated ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and I hate this as much.” These are people who are bad at deciding which movies to see.