The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey spurns around the old philosophy of journey for truth and justice

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2013)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is an adventure film with fantastic elements in it. If you liked the fantasy of Lord of the Rings, then you are surely going to love the fantastic elements of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The first part of Hobbit acts as a prequel to the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson has now walked back to cozy crevices of Middle Earth. Landscapes and scenery are majestically captured in celluloid by Andrew Lesnie, the cinematographer of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The story line reverberates around the same old quest and journey of finding out lost things of past. But the director has forgotten to pour in the hyperactive energy that his late eighties movies used to have. But still the game of the movie has not been presented so badly! Thirteen dwarfs, the hero Bilbo and Gandalf, the wizard march past Erebor to get back what they have lost. Smaug, the monster has robbed them of their rights and they are all set to reclaim their lost things. The battle scenes of the movie are long and tedious, without showing much detail of the battle. The whole battle will resemble the formatting of a video game and the audience, after watching the film for twenty minutes, will soon realize that they have to move on for another one and a half hour, tediously.
But The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has got an exciting story line may be because it is taken from J.R.R. Tolkien's novel The Hobbit. The movie may turn out to be a bit irritating for people who did not like to watch The Lord of the Rings. The dwarfs are talking in English in Celtic accents and the elves who are played by actors of Australian origin speak in Standard English accents. The spooky and highly mountainous land, where the movie has been directed, becomes extremely horrifying as the movie advances. The dialogues of the movie have simplicity of folktale and the narrative technique is more or less straight, devoid of any kind of avant-garde narrative techniques.
Gandalf's statement to Bilbo, "The world is not in your books and maps. It's out there!" reminds us of the drudgery and pity of the post World War Britain. The above quoted statement reminds us of the fighter J.R. R. Tolkien who engaged himself with the First World War and knew that the real essence of life resides in fighting for your cause, a noble cause. The movie reverberates the romanticism of the philosophy of existentialism that tells us that a man has to go on fighting in order to establish himself in life. It is the journey and the struggle for life which is of utmost importance and not the achievement itself.