Every cliché in the book.

Rating: 2/10 (1 May 2005)

I read "The Hobbit" in school. Even as a twelve year old I thought it was childish. Obviously I never read "Lord of The Rings". I have no problem with fantasy. As other posts of mine on this site show. The problem with this, book or film, however, is that it is accorded such status as implies it to be worthy of regard as in some sense a "serious" work of art.
Concentrating here on the film, I found the whole enterprise grindingly y tedious and even quite objectionable. From the unending, detailed narration at the start onwards. As we jump to Hobbiton we are accosted by the jeepy-jerky lilt of the cliché movie-land "Oirish" folk music. Every moment of this struck me as a dreadful lie. I may not have read LOTR but I know some things about it's background. Tolkien used as his source paradigm for the "Shire" references to the culture of South-West England, particularly around Somerset. That is WHY it is called the flaming "Shire" ( like Wilt-shire, Hamp-shire, Gloucester-shire ) for Pete's sake. Where the hell does all this yip pity-yo line-dancing soundtrack come from? Not to mention the smattering of characters with ginger hair and American-Irish accents! It is as though the need was felt to accommodate the kind of American audience for whom bucolic innocence is only conceivable in terms of the Hollywood "Old-Country" of "The Quiet Man".
These people are anyway nothing like Hobbits. They resemble regular Caucasians with pointy ears and a bit of hair on their nearly-normal sized feet. They are too clean. Hobbiton here positively gleams with newness. Cleaner than any place I have been to in the real world ( as I have not visited Switzerland ). Bilbo's palatial warren has the gleaming un-lived look of scenes in a furniture catalogue. No dust, no dirt and no wear or tear in sight. This is more the subterranean show-home of an environmentalist billionaire than the modest under-hill burrow of an impecunious hominid ground-hog that it is supposed to be.
The music get's even worse. For one thing the repeated cheaply manipulative interjections of a few sentimental bars of Sibelius. For another the kind of dreadful fake-liturgical choristing that we associate with films such as "The Omen". This even employs an old, oh so VERY old B-movie technique of patterning lines of music to sound like lines of text. Most famously evident in Lon Chaney's "Werewolf" in which the orchestra sounds like it is saying "The were...wolf, the were...wolf, the were...wolf." Here it comes up to grating effect when the Black Riders appear and the fake Latin choir seems to sound like "The evil, it's here, the evil, it's here, the evil, it's here..."
Clichés, clichés everywhere. Take the design of things, resembling as it does the kind of Celtic and Gothic clichés one sees in the work of tattoo parlours. These past twenty tears. Liv Tyler's pendant that she waffles on about at length in awed terms looks like something you would buy for a fiver in the high-street comic-shop. The architecture, festooned with ridiculously useless points and wings seems to come straight from the doodlings made by a bored schoolboy during Friday afternoon chemistry class.
Then the over-blown battle scenes. If there are that many creatures willing to go to their death in Middle Earth, where the Hell are they the rest of the time? The place seems to be empty until a war starts when fifty million CGI battle-fodder suddenly show up to do service, from nowhere. As if by...magic.
More grating, irritating features: Elisha Wood's perpetually perplexed look after a while really begins to irritate a part of my anatomy beginning with a "T". The "action" is mostly talk. The story positively d..rrrr..aa....g.g.g....sssss along. When something happens, it is usually more talk.
However, the film is not simply tedious, boring and unimaginative. I find that it is positively distasteful. The story is presented as some kind of vehicle of wisdom and morality. But it is precisely there that it is at it's weakest. The world we are shown revolves around magic, but contains no religion. The creatures fret continually about spells and invisible forces, yet they appear to have no moral framework, no compass of ethics, no churches and no worship. Good and Evil are presented as self-evident, like day and night. The evil are ugly. Ugly people are evil. Is that wisdom? Questions of practise are reduced to arguments about tactics. Obviously the convention of "White Hat, Black Hat" is customary in the cinema. But usually presented only as escapist entertainment. Here it is implied that we should attach some significance to proceedings. Such significance being the very attitude that plagues politics in the U.S and Western Europe, where followers of one ideological camp see anyone who disagrees with them as self-evidently stupid, misguided, even, evil and worthy of death-threats.
LOTR hit the big time in the Sixties as an unofficial "Green-Book" of Hippiedom. This is at the heart of it's vision, as here found in the film. In this story, only the bad-guys, the evil ones, use technology. We see this asserted in the patently industrious mien of their kingdom, all forges and furnaces and cauldrons brimming with production. Contrasted to the bucolic, literally airy-fairy aspect of the lands of the "good". In fact, that world of industry, having forged the Ring is implicitly asserted to be the very source of all that is evil in the world. This film proselytises for a Rousseaesque fantasy of pre-lapsarian innocence and moral virtue. An attitude that refuses to accept the harsh truth's of nature, renounces Humanity's tools of advancement and abrogates the harsh responsibilities that are necessary for survival. This is the very mind-set that is today, in the real world, threatening the survival of Western Industrialised Civilisation. The only civilisation with the leisure and free resources to indulge in such a fantasy.