The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey - 2.5 Stars

Rating: 5/10 (12 January 2013)

Let me get things straight first. I enjoyed "An Expected Journey" as I was viewing it. From the film's first half hour, I could tell that it wasn't going to be an event as grand and glorious as any of the "Lord of the Rings" movies, which was just fine by me. Though weighed down by several substantial flaws, I felt a mild satisfaction when the credits started to roll. The verdict of a movie reviewer should always be based on the immediate experience, and on that notion I should label "An Unexpected Journey" a success. But my later convictions overruled the other, and I realize that I cannot award a positive rating to a movie that could have easily been great but chose not to.
The three volumes that comprised Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" were made into three different films. That's over 1,300 pages translated into nine hours of film. And while "An Unexpected Journey", 2013's "The Desolation of the Smaug", and 2014's "There and Back Again" are the components of another planned trilogy, there are all based on a single Tolkien novel, 1937's "The Hobbit", which is only around 300 pages long. Does Peter Jackson really have enough material for a trilogy? We don't know yet, but judging on this first installment, it seems that he will stretch his way to his second billion-dollar franchise. Every single sequence in this introductory film is prolonged, and several other scenes feel unnecessary. The story itself is compelling, but the deadweight pacing prevents us from being compelled.
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