Not a Masterpiece for the Ages

Rating: 6/10 (28 December 2012)

Well. That was certainly... something.
This is a first reaction to the film having just seen it, and I may be moved to revise it later. Right now, though, I'd have to say that having just been through a total onslaught on the senses, I find myself curiously underwhelmed. (It seems important to specify, given the negative responses to the HFR version of this film which may be a side-effect of a misguided technology, *which format* one has seen it in. I'm reviewing the 3D but non-HFR version.) I was willing to give the Hobbit the benefit of the doubt, despite that I had a hard time seeing how one would stretch this story to three films. But it seems to me that the stretch-marks are all too evident, and the sense of wonder -- of seeing a much-loved story come to life -- that the LOTR films reached at their best is all too rare here.
In part there's just a fundamental mismatch in tone between LOTR and the light-hearted children's book being rendered here, such that the project of trying to make this a portentous prequel to the War of the Ring falls flat. As in the LOTR films, there's a great deal of effort spent on trying to bring out the sombre and melancholy tones in Tolkien's Middle Earth; but unlike that trilogy of films at its best, the broad-stroke comedy that's integral to this tale just doesn't work as a result, and nor does much of the heroic posturing that it's counterpointed with.
Jackson's LOTR wasn't entirely without such problems -- especially in The Two Towers, whose dwarf-tossing japes and visual one-liners often seemed out of place -- but it's worse here. Much worse. I could tell that the opening dinner party sequence was meant to be funny, for example... but I had to fight to keep from dozing off during it, and likewise for the dwarfs' encore comedic turn in Rivendell. Material like that seems to undercut the sombreness Jackson tries to bring to the dwarfs' quest, and the weight he tries to add to it with cameos from Saruman and Galadriel, so much that Thorin's stern heroics ultimately fail to convince. In the end, no amount of swelling music and actors looking pensively off into the distance can make this tale feel solid enough for what Jackson is going for -- nor can any amount of slapstick and cute costuming make it feel light-hearted and funny. No matter that the composer recycles virtually every theme used in the LOTR trilogy, no matter that the director furiously padded the story with every bit of Unfinished Tales arcana he could manage (even working in a reference to the Blue Wizards), this just doesn't feel weighty enough to be a prequel or to be a three-film epic.
In a way the LOTR benchmark was so high that the inevitable comparisons may seem unfair: Jackson soared to such heights that now we take those heights for granted. And to be clear, I don't think this is a *bad* film. There are good elements and moments. Freeman brings Bilbo to life very convincingly, the portrayal of Thorin is just as good, the visual effects are as sterling as ever, the original cast do fine (if sometimes seemingly superfluous) work, the riddling scene with Gollum is spot on, Azog's enlarged villain role is reasonably entertaining, the encounter with the mountain trolls is truly fun to watch.
But it's not a great one either. There's just too much padding and ill-fitting material. Radagast played for laughs with a sledge of "Runcible rabbits" and birdshit in his hair leaves a rather bad taste in the mouth. The pacing feels off and leaden, especially in the early going. The bulk of the action set-pieces feel like they're covering up a lack of substance with pure bombast (especially an inexplicable and over-the-top literalization of the "battling giants" reference in the original book); as usual, where Jackson departs radically from Tolkien's vision and calibration of the action, he goes badly wrong.
In the end, this left me with no desire to go out and see the two films meant to follow it. I had a choice between this and Jack Reacher, and left the theatre feeling pretty sure I chose wrong.