Good but far from perfect

Rating: 8/10 (14 December 2012)

Timid Hobbit Bilbo Baggins is recruited by wizard Gandalf the Grey to accompany a dozen dwarfs on a quest to wrest their home back from a usurping dragon called Smaug.
Peter Jackson revisits Middle Earth with some new friends and not a few old ones, in a film which recaptures much of the visual impact of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. So, right from the start, it is possible to say that if you didn't like those films, you are definitely not going to like this one, because it is pitched right at the same target.
After a prologue explaining Smaug's arrival and the displacement of the dwarfs, here is Howard Shore's music, with the familiar Shire and Ring themes, taking us through the front door of Bag End just before Bilbo's eleventy-first birthday party, thus linking us right at the start with the previous trilogy. This is all very pleasing and comforting. Bilbo's recollections take us back in time to the arrival of Gandalf and the dwarfs, and after the conference (an amusing sequence which, nevertheless, takes far too long), the expedition is off.
I can't say this film is too long, because I enjoyed every minute and it held my attention throughout. What I can say, though, is that the source material is much more slight than LOTR, and that shows through: there is a sense that the material has been extended, inflated, perhaps even bloated, to create a trilogy where one film or, at most, two would have been adequate. In LOTR, a long journey was necessary in order for the debilitating effect of the Ring to be demonstrated: there is no such justification here, and there is a sense of characters being marched through video game sequences.
That isn't all that's wrong with it. Some of the humour - welcome after the relatively humourless LOTR - is woefully contemporary in its delivery. Some of the CGI is simply off - just a bit, but it somehow fails to completely convince (the Goblin King, in particular, fails on both these grounds) and there are times when CGI is used where Jackson would have not used it in LOTR - orc and goblin facial articulation in particular - where the physical version would be better than the cybernetic. Sometimes the sizes of characters mismatch, but LOTR was guilty of that, too. The dwarfs all look like men in prosthetic makeup. And sometimes the set pieces don't work in the way they did in LOTR because the stakes don't seem as high - the Balrog sequence in Fellowship was intense, exciting and emotional because we knew the characters and cared for them: here we hardly care at all when 9 million goblins chase a dozen identikit dwarfs through their caverns in an overblown sequence. And the 3D, in the 24fps version, at least, is hardly noticeable much of the time and sequences which should have sung in 3D remain almost dull. For me, a 3D fan of vast enthusiasm, the 3D here was a major disappointment.
After those criticisms, it is only fair to report that the film is mostly fairly exciting, Ian McKellen and (especially) Cate Blanchett nail Gandalf and Galadriel again (McKellen's Gandalf is subtly younger and less serious), Martin Freeman's diffident everyman personality is perfect for young Bilbo, and Gollum is superbly realised in the Riddles In The Dark sequence.
This isn't the triumph it should have been, but I must reserve my final judgement for the next two years until I see how it fits into the trilogy.