The Hobbit

Rating: 6/10 (25 December 2012)

There is a great film within this film. If Peter Jackson comes to his senses, perhaps he will create a "Shortened Director's Cut" instead of an "Extended Edition." And if not, once the die-hard fans come to their senses and stop hailing it as a 10-star masterpiece, perhaps one of them will re-cut it.
The Good: The 48 fps clarity is beautiful, although viewers accustomed to more ancient material will have to get used to it. Freeman steps into Holm's shoes perfectly, and Serkis, McKellen etc. are excellent at reprising their roles. The goblin king is great fun to watch - his double-chin is a character of its own. Speaking of character. One cannot fault the film for characterizing among the dwarfs only Thorin (Armitage), and to some extent the youngsters Fili and Kili: Tolkien's book does exactly the same! Jackson's photography is sweeping, with the fly-throughs and majestic landscapes viewers have come to expect. All in all, the story hews close to the book, with a few excellent cinematic add-ons: the prelude explaining how the dwarfs lost their home, without revealing the true shape of Smaug the dragon by using the device of a kite; the aside on Gandalf's councils with other elders, implied in the book (and chronicled in the Appendices to LOTR), but not part of Bilbo's limited point of view.
The Bad: the Hobbit is a whimsical adventure tale, not meant to be on the scale of LOTR, and the film loses this flavor entirely with plodding, totally unnecessary, add-on action scenes. Between Trolls and Rivendell, our heroes are gratuitously beset by orcs. Mountain giants (akin to Ents of Stone in the book, but much larger here) fight around them without obvious motivation. The underground cave of the goblins is turned into a contrived roller-coaster ride reminiscent of the disastrous "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." At a crisp 48 fps, elephant-sized goblin kings falling on characters from great height without killing them, or burning trees toppling like dominoes create a video game atmosphere, where the player simply uses his next "life" and goes on playing. One of the central rules of Fantasy is flaunted here: that what happens to characters should obey common sense physics and psychology as much as possible, so the reader or viewer can truly believe in the fantasy. It is easy to imagine that a dragon can fly. It is much harder to imagine that an elephant falling straight on you will elicit nothing but a grunt and an annoyed remark.
Cutting about 45 minutes out of this film will turn it into a vibrant 9-star adventure, which lies in waiting just like a statue inside Michelangelo's block of marble.
PS: Like Tolkien's human editor, the IMDb editor does not like dwar-ves