Unbalanced but mostly enjoyable

Rating: 5/10 (28 December 2012)

The Hobbit: One of the oddest films I've seen. To start with it couldn't settle on a tone between dark fantasy epic, and annoyingly broad slapstick comedy with two musical numbers in the first hour. It was irritating to me.
The way it's filmed is unusual. While it's clear it has a massive budget, it oftentimes looked like a fantasy TV show at best, and an FMV scene from a mid-90s PC game at worst. It somehow looked cheap - and not just because the High Frame Rate shone a harsh spotlight on the CGI as I'd heard. I thought the CGI held up mostly fine. Something about the framing and acting seemed TV soap-opera-ish. This, coupled with slow pacing at the start meant I found the first hour and a half quite difficult to sit through. However, all of these things seemed to improve as the film went on.
The 3D and high frame rate is very immersive and worth the extra dollar I'd say. It sometimes felt like watching live actors - particularly when they appeared about life-sized on screen. Maybe this is why I think it looked cheap.
That said, I really appreciate that this looks and feels different to any other film I've seen. It had sections that looked gorgeous and breath-taking, and I suspect its style will be aped and that this film will, in years to come, have shaped film-making forever.
I don't remember the book well enough, but this film does not have much by way of character development, even for Bilbo. There are too many characters in it to become attached to any of them on any real level, and far too many handy coincidences and obvious set ups. For example, Thorin doesn't accept Bilbo until that same Bilbo that has complained about not being ready for this journey, the same Bilbo that has never handled a sword, somehow becomes a mighty warrior just when it would be handy. That's not well-written drama, it's lazy writing. Whether it's on Tolkien's part or the film-makers', I don't know. Also, the sense of peril wears off as the film goes on, and several of the main characters have taken falls and beatings and cookings and squashings with narry a scratch. As the film goes on, these characters seem more and more immortal and that just means that as the film goes on, each next moment of suspense or peril loses more of its edge. As the characters fall down a ravine, you know that no matter how many rocks they bounce off on the way down, they'll just dust themselves off at the bottom. The film felt over-stuffed. Bits are added in from Tolkien's other works and to me they felt added in and superfluous. They didn't gel in with the main story and felt like so much padding. I couldn't decide whether they felt a bit too smug in a "Look how much of Middle-Earth we can fit in!" way, or greedy in a "Look how many films we can squeeze out of making a film ostensibly based on one popular book!" sort of way.
Overall, I think I liked it, though not as much or as immediately as The Fellowship of the Ring. I enjoyed it for the visual spectacle but I think the character development, plotting, pacing, and dialogue could do with some work.