a brilliant start to the trilogy

Rating: 10/10 (10 December 2014)

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is not a direct adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien's beloved children's story The Hobbit. And if that's what you want, you will be disappointed. This is a prequel to the movie trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Something that became apparent within the first 15 minutes of the movie. It's clearly framed as that. If you didn't like those movies... you won't like this one.
It is not a stand alone story. If you want something that is complete in and of itself... you won't like this movie. On the other hand. If you enjoyed The Lord of the Rings movies and you like spending time in that vision of Middle-earth there's no reason why you wouldn't enjoy the prequel. Visually this is clearly the same place and while the tone is lighter you can see how it would progress to the darkness of LOTR.
A lot has been made of the fact that a small children's book has been turned into three movies. To be honest I always thought it would need two in order to be done thoroughly. Because the Hobbit at some 320 pages (depending on the version you have) is not actually that short. Most movies if directly transcribed would really only make up a short story.
One of the pleasures of An Unexpected Journey was that everything was there. It was frustrating to me in the Lord of the Rings movies that so much had to be either skipped or rushed (and I'm not even talking about Tom Bombadil who I don't particularly care for). That isn't a problem here in fact the humour and lightness of The Hobbit is actually present in the film, particularly in the earlier scenes. Complete with songs. And yes we get Dwalin, Balin, Dori, Ori, Nori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur, Fili and Kili and of course Thorin Oakenshield all introduced in suitable and largely comic fashion.
And it's a huge credit that despite the huge number of dwarfs, many of who are not terribly distinctive even in the original text and who in some cases only get a few lines of their own, each of them does seem quite distinctive but what Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philipa Boyens have done is to blend those lighter elements into the grimmer back story. We get to see what was going on while Gandalf was not with the dwarfs. And this isn't just made up. It is based solidly on the material in the appendices from The Lord of the Rings. I should know, I read them often enough.
Perhaps that is why I enjoyed the movie as much as I did. I love that material and I loved the time it got here. I loved that they were able to finally slot Radagast in after he was removed from the original trilogy speaking of Radagast the Brown, he had some of my favourite moments in the movie despite that being perhaps the biggest stretch from any actual Tolkien text. Yeah maybe they over-egged the drug user references with both the pipe-weed sequence and the mushrooms comment, but Sylvester McCoy honestly did some of his finest work in this movie.
The introduction of the additional material actually helps the narrative considerably. In truth The Hobbit is a story about a bunch of random events that are tied together with references to luck and fate. By emphasising the back story we get an enemy and something driving the plot forward.There are some liberties taken with characterisation. Probably less than in The Lord of the Rings but the dwarfs in general and Thorin in particular are less incompetent than they were in the book.The same is true of Bilbo here who by the end of the movie actually stands up for himself.
In terms of acting, Ian McKellan is of course always brilliant. And of the dwarfs Kenn Stott as Balin in particular just nails his role. In fact if I had seen this first I would have been much more affected by the tomb scene in Fellowship of the Ring because you can feel a connection between Balin and Bilbo and you can see why he's respected. James Nesbit as Bofur, Aidan Turner as Kili, Dean o Gorman as Fili and Richard Armitage as Thorin all excel in their roles as well. And of course there is Andy Serkis returning to the role of Gollum.Which brings me nicely to Bilbo Baggins himself. As portrayed by Martin Freeman. Freeman gets to use his comedic chops throughout the movie, but also has to dig a bit deeper for some scenes. And while some of his mannerism, the same ones we saw in The Office and Sherlock are there, within the first 40 minutes I was watching Bilbo Baggins not Martin.
This is a long movie. The running time is 169 minutes. So almost 3 hours. I can see that in the cinema I might have found that too much. But sitting in the comfort of home with the ability to stop whenever I wanted to get a drink or use the bathroom, I had no trouble with the length at all. The movie kept me interested the whole time.
I loved the movie. Enjoyed all of it. Purists will hate it. People who just wanted The Hobbit will hate it. Some people may well find it too long and just not be as interested in the Middle-earth background as I am.