Pity.

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2012)

A basic comparison of the opening film of the near-perfect Lord of the Rings trilogy and this opening film for The Hobbit films reveals the problem at the root of this unpolished movie: urgency. We begin Fellowship with a clear sense of what needs to be done: a ring must be destroyed. The first Hobbit shares this: the Lonely Mountain must be retaken. These are pretty meaningless motives for a non-Middle Earth audience to consume. What engages us is why these things must be done. Fellowship: to prevent evil from destroying all that is good in the world. The first Hobbit: to return some dwarfs who we barely care about to their vast wealth (which is justly theirs?). In short, in Fellowship, we cared; in the first Hobbit, we couldn't care less, despite our determination to love the film. There is nothing driving the story here, no urgency: we don't really care what happens and, I suspect, the writers didn't really either. This was not a great attempt to adapt a difficult book to cinema, it was a sell-out: Tolkien wrote it that way so let's just use that as our excuse if it doesn't work. Why put in the effort?
Is it fair for me to blame the writers? After all, Lord of the Rings is certainly far more conducive to cinema than The Hobbit and they were certainly true to the book. Regardless, there was a (pretty obvious) alternative way to frame this story and create an urgent, powerful story. In the mini Council of Elrond scene, we learn that a new dark power could be rising. One of the points that is briefly made is that, if this new power got hold of Smaug, they could be invincible. All that is good in Middle Earth could be gone. It would, perhaps, be impossible for Frodo to destroy the ring 60 years later. This framing narrative (with a bit of artistic licence) could have transformed this film. In the prologue, Gandalf could have heard about this new power, he could have learned of its interest in Smaug, he could have found the dwarfs, rallied them up with some patriotic rhetoric about getting them to reclaim their homeland (hiding the fact that he was concerned with the possible fate of middle earth) and then we could have got round to Bilbo. By doing this, the audience would care, there would be a point to the story: potentially saving middle earth or at least making sure Frodo would have one less great obstacle in his way. Not only this, there would be a framing device that would structure the whole film: it would be unified, instead of messy; purposeful, instead of hesitant. A much better film could have been made.
It goes without saying that this film is still worth viewing. All of the elements of the film are superb and the riddle game with Gollum revived my faith in Peter Jackson's story-telling abilities, albeit briefly. This is one of those films that simply needed a day or two more thinking at the script stage and a bit of Rings-style confidence. Unfortunately, effects and 48fps seem to have been of more interest and the writers were too afraid to take Tolkien off his mythical pedestal. Structuring the story is 90 percent of the job in cinema: get that right and it's hard to go wrong. Unfortunately, they didn't and it went wrong.