Technological cul de sac rather than timeless fantasy

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2012)

The film did not feel as drawn out beyond its natural length as I had feared, and, refreshingly, the story has not been too tinkered with. It was notable that more of Tolkien's original dialogue survives here than in LoTR, while the plot changes felt less arbitrary, than, for instance, Aragorn falling off a cliff. The backstory has been mucked about quite a bit, with some loss of meaning, but the gist is there. There is a genuine respect for the source material, more so than in the first trilogy, as in the bold, and to my mind successful, decision to recreate the opening 'unexpected party', complete with songs.
The interpolated White Council scene feels stilted, but the magical woodland adventures of Radagast and his furry chums are not as cringeworthy as they could have been. Other changes are mostly for justifiable cinematic reasons, even if some, such as the treatment of the encounter with the trolls, are not necessarily an improvement in dramatic terms. However, the need to give this first installment a distinct dramatic focus causes tensions with the book. A dynamic between Thorin and Bilbo is sketched in which is absent in Tolkien's work, and this is resolved in a way which jarringly detracts from Bilbo's own personal character arc.
Since the ring arrested the ageing process in Bilbo, Ian Holm could strictly speaking have continued in the part, but Martin Freeman's light comedic touch actually works very well. Richard Armitage channels Sean Bean as Thorin, and is rather more broodingly handsome, and a lot younger, than I had imagined, but I guess an action film must have an action hero. A reasonable stab is made at differentiating the other dwarfs, even if the bizarre tonsorial creations and confusion of regional accents is a little distracting. I also found it odd that one of the few dwarfs to develop a distinct personality in the book, the amiable strongman Dori, is unrecognisable in Mark Hadlow's depiction of him as a rather twee old buffer. Graham McTavish's tough Dwalin and Aidan Turner's boyish Kili are probably the most successful realisations.
What fatally undermines the project is the misjudged technological gimmickry. There is the usual 3D issue of the actors looking like cardboard cut-outs in a Victorian toy theatre, so divorced from the scenery behind that it might as well be a blue screen. Worse, HFR has the curious effect of making all the interiors appear as if they were shot on video at BBC Television Centre in the nineteen-seventies. To add to the disconcertingly retro feel the prostheses and hairpieces don't really stand up to that level of high definition. Sometimes there is something to be said for grainy and indistinct. And while the CGI was often excellent, it was over-used to the point where the connection with real actors and landscapes was lost, the swirling camera work giving the action scenes in particular a distinct video game vibe.
Better than perhaps it has a right to be, given the uncinematic source material, but the of-the-moment technology makes it ultimately disposable.
PS. I note that IMDb autocorrects the spelling of 'dwarves' to 'dwarfs'. Tolkien would be incandescent.