Why bother?

Rating: 3/10 (10 August 2015)

I held off from watching any of Peter Jackson's Hobbit films for a long time because I was so disappointed with his Lord of the Rings films, especially when it turned out that he intended to make a trilogy based on The Hobbit. So first he mashes and squashes each volume of LOTR into a single film. Here he's doing the opposite: He's taking the much less substantial fabric of The Hobbit and padding it out until it's almost unrecognizable. The leisurely, majestic, richly detailed, LOTR trilogy he ruined by racing through it at breakneck speed. Here he takes the written Hobbit, which is much less complex and moves along at a good clip, and makes it sprawling and ponderous. The spectacular vistas and bloody battle scenes that stretch away to the horizon are absurdly overdone for the scale of the story. None of it looks any different from the LOTR effects. You get the feeling that Jackson is still feeling impelled to say, "Look, no hands!" Filming Tolkien's saga of Middle-Earth isn't like adapting a modern novel for the screen. Even a book on the New York Times bestseller list will be read by relatively few people. Filming Tolkien is more like filming Shakespeare or the Bible. The Hobbit and LOTR are so well known and so beloved that the astute director should know that however faithful as (s)he tries to be to the author's vision, whatever winds up in the can won't satisfy the imaginations of many of the rabid Tolkien fans out there who know every detail of every book as well as they know the Pledge of Allegiance. Jackson is not stupid, so he must be incredibly arrogant to think that he can out-Tolkien Tolkien. Tolkien was one person; why on Earth do you need four, count 'em, four screenwriters for this film (the same thing was true of the LOTR films)? What traces of Tolkien's plot and dialogue remain have all been chopped up and moved around. Why, for heaven's sake? Why would you undertake film dramatization of Tolkien's books if you don't intend to make films of Tolkien's books? The novel The Hobbit has been called "enchanting." Even at its darkest and most suspenseful, it's light and humorous, sort of like an Indiana Jones movie. Well, there's nothing light or enchanting about An Unexpected Journey: It's immense, bloated, sprawling, and Wagnerian in its mood and its crashing music. It has sweeping, interminable battle scenes that just make the viewer impatient to get on with the story. It has a cast of thousands, most of whom aren't in the book, and who are mostly a hindrance to the plot, or what's left of it after Jackson and his writers have twisted it all out of shape. In short, unlike the literary Hobbit, this movie is a real downer.
There are really ludicrous character contrasts: For example, Thorin, unlike his character in the book, is dark, broody, angry and combative; and yet the twelve other dwarfs in the company look and act as if they were straight out of a Disney cartoon. Martin Freeman's diffident performance as Bilbo is similar to his screen persona as Dr. Watson in the modern "Sherlock" series and as Arthur Dent in the dreadful film version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It doesn't really work for Bilbo. As played by Ian McKellen, Gandalf the Gray really is rather gray; he is tentative, uncertain, almost timid at times. And I thought I'd thankfully seen the last of Elijah Wood as Frodo, whose performance for some reason makes me cringe; but here he is, shoehorned into this movie like so many other supernumerary characters.
Maybe someday the BBC, or HBO, or Netflix, or some other creative organization will produce, say, a ten-part miniseries of The Hobbit and LOTR that will be true, or at least truer, to the plot, characterizations and dialogue than Peter Jackson. This film here is another leaden, flat-footed failure.