A Drawn-out Mess Instead of an Epic Adventure

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2013)

The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) movie trilogy ranks among my all-time favorite movies and I had been eagerly awaiting The Hobbit ever since I heard that Peter Jackson (the director of the LOTR trilogy) would be directing The Hobbit. What a let down! It seems as if Peter Jackson is trying to force LOTR fans to buy 3 tickets instead of 1 or 2, and did this through unnecessary inflation of what should not have been a lengthy epic movie. This bloat may be the worst of several problems afflicting the movie.
Excessive length. I own the extra-long DVD version of the LOTR trilogy and I just love it. It is 11.3 hours long, and it omitted two major sub-plots from the written LOTR. Had these two sub-plots been included in the extra-long DVD movie trilogy, the resulting length would probably have been about 12.5 hours. The Hobbit book is a little over 25% as long as the LOTR book trilogy. This would equate to maybe 3.5 hours for a movie that covers the written Hobbit thoroughly. With some additional, made-up material, it might be reasonable to get to 2 movies of a little over 2 hours each. Unfortunately, the first of three Hobbit movies is almost three hours long. The movie contains lots of overly long scenes plus many unnecessary scenes. The movie begins with a brief scene of an elderly Bilbo describing his great adventure to an unseen Frodo. This is OK and provides continuity with the LOTR movie trilogy. The movie then shifts to a roughly ten-minute depiction of a dragon taking over the mountain home of the dwarfs. This scene is completely unnecessary and corresponds to a fraction of a page in the book, when the dwarfs told Bilbo that a dragon had evicted them from their home. The movie then shifts back to a scene with Bilbo and Frodo talking the day before Bilbo's birthday party at the beginning of the LOTR. This scene could have been combined with the opening scene, and shortened, or maybe omitted. The movie then shows the arrival of Gandalf and the dwarfs at Bilbo's home. The movie turns a few pages in the book into a plodding 30+ minutes of meaningless blather and bad humor. This whole scene could have been done well in 15 minutes. This pattern repeats itself throughout the movie. In particular, every action sequence in the book gets drawn out interminably in the movie, with the number of implausible escapes multiplied by a factor of five or more. Moreover, the movie adds unnecessary and extraneous sub-plots not present in the book, including the entire interlude with the wizard Radagast, the battle with the orcs just before Bilbo and his companions reach Rivendell, and the grudge between Thorin and the orc Azog.
Boring/disgusting slapstick humor. The movie makes most of the dwarfs look bizarre, and there is lots of slapstick humor, much of it involving snot. None of this was in the book. Either make The Hobbit into a children's movie, along the lines of the book, or make it into serious drama, like the LOTR movie trilogy. This bizarre combination of drama, wild action scenes, and juvenile humor is ineffective.
Ridiculous escapes and chases. The entire interlude with the wizard Radagast (who appeared very briefly in the written LOTR, but not in the written Hobbit or the movie LOTR) and his racing rabbits, is utterly preposterous. Moreover, every action scene in the movie involves several one-in-a-million escapes. Every character in the movie, except maybe Gandalf, should have been killed about five times. I was not expecting a "Saving Private Ryan" level of realism, but this is so ridiculous as to be boring.
Computer animation. Computer animation added brilliantly to the LOTR movie trilogy, and was very effective in some recent fantasy movies, like "John Carter." Unfortunately, much of the Hobbit seems to exist to justify computer animation, rather than having computer animation serve the greater good of the overall story. Much of The Hobbit seems more like a video game than an actual movie.
Lack of character development. The characters in the LOTR movie trilogy were well developed and seemed very real. Some of them, like Boromir, had considerable complexity. Despite the great length of The Hobbit (about 2 minutes for every page in the portion of the book that the movie covered), most of the characters are one-dimensional or not developed at all.