"Thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread"

Rating: 7/10 (12 December 2012)

I have high respect for Peter Jackson for managing to direct three great films based on the Lord of The Rings (abbreviated as LOTR from here on) by J.R.R. Tolkien, a fantasy epic that some deemed unfilmable. So, years ago, I was naturally excited to hear that Jackson had decided to produce adaptation of another Tolkien masterpiece, LOTR prequel "Hobbit - there and back again", and had chosen Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy films, Pan's Labyrinth) as the director.
Del Toro worked on the film for a while but apparently thought it was too big a challenge and left the project. Peter Jackson saved the production by once again taking the role of director, and at first intended to make a two film adaptation of the Tolkien novel. Whatever the reason was for Jackson's initial refusal of sitting on the director's seat - perhaps he was busy with King Kong or tired as he mentions many times in the DVD extras of the latter two of the LOTR films, or just thought Hobbit was best left for someone else - I think it would have better been a decision to keep.
With the "Hobbit - an unexpected journey" it feels like Peter Jackson is trying to play safe by bringing us a very LOTR-feeling experiene, with similar grandiose music playing to similar helicopter shot imagery of a fellowship travelling through majestic landscapes, and what seem to me be dwarf versions of Aragorn (Thorin) and Legolas (Kili). The film lacks distinct creative spark and soul, and it seems like it's trying to suck the soul out of the LOTR films. I think Peter was very uninspired, perhaps because of tiredness, and he uses LOTR as a director's reference point far too much. To me, "An unexpected Journey" is a dwarfed down version of the first LOTR film in many respects.
Instead of two films as originally planned, we get three. Tolkien's Hobbit is a relatively short fairytale, shorter than any of the novels in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Three 3 hour films are justified for the Lord of the Rings, but not for the Hobbit. At 169 minutes, "Unexpected Journey" is just too long. "There and back again" feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread, to quote Bilbo Baggins from the first Lord of The Rings film.
For the first hour or so, not much happens in the way of plot advancement: A hobbit named Bilbo Baggins receives thirteen dwarf guests and one wizard and they eat. The high points of the first hour are a prologue about the Dwarf kingdom and a dwarf chant. The rest of the film is mostly about chases, cliffhangers, charges, and yells. They are delivered with pompous instrumental music and sinister visuals that would have perhaps worked if Tolkien's Hobbit was an epic with apocalyptic tones like Lord of The Rings. However, Tolkien's Hobbit is a fairytale about thirteen dwarfs and a hobbit and a wizard on a way to reclaim a treasure and home from a dragon.
Tolkien himself has stated that he created the Lord of the Rings because there was no national epic for the Great Britain. Hobbit, in contrast, is more similar to the fairy tales he created as bedtime stories for his children. The Hobbit story does have epic elements but for this film at least, it is my opinion that there is a mismatch between content and execution here.
One of the big challenges for the Hobbit was to make the thirteen dwarfs of the tale work cinematically. The Dwarf challenge is similar to the one Walt Disney faced with the Snow White. With major film length limitations and lots of dwarfs, Disney decided that the film would get a boost of liveliness if each of the dwarfs were given a distinct personality, a caricature, and named after their characteristic.
As with Disney's Snow White, the dwarfs of Hobbit are very distinct from one another, but two major issues arise, at least for me. First is that they don't match my mental image of "dwarf". Regarding features like body language and mentality, the dirty dozen just feels too "human". I think Jackson missed a comical gold mine here. What is supposed to be fun in this film is that the dwarfs are really hungry, but that doesn't quite cut it, especially since there's no "second breakfast" kind of funny quips as with the hungry hobbits in the first LOTR film.
The second major issue has to do with the simple story of Tolkien which the film stays true to. As distinct as the dwarfs here are, it is all the more harrowing that the differences between the dwarfs that cost a lot of introductory time to establish, don't shape the story at all. Now if i watched the film carefully enough, the truth is that there are no twists or turns that would depend on the individualities of the dwarfs, except for one of them. For a short children's animation like Snow White that's not a major issue, but for a three hour film that's a major negative.
Basically all of the dwarf characters could be rolled into one, preferredly Thorin Oakenshield, the Aragorn of dwarfs and leader of the gang, without creating a need for Gollum-esque divided personality.
I have to balance the criticism by saying that Peter Jackson, a true craftsman and a technological innovator, is a perfectionist when it comes to creating worlds. Certain aspects of the film are really impressive when judged on their own, especially the visual design and it is also the reason why people who are not Tolkien fans might think this is a film worth seeing. I'm planning on watching the film for a second time in theatre with HFR technology to see if that brings a new level of immersion to an already impressive looking film.