The Hobbit - Missing the wood for the Ents

The Hobbit's predecessor/sequel (damn this prequel confusion) The Fellowship of the Ring was an exciting and elegant introduction to the world of Middle Earth and the story of the One Ring. It had a host of memorable characters, suspense-filled action and a genuinely moving finale. It was brilliant.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has none of these things.

Despite my low expectations, The Hobbit still disappoints with erratic pacing, impenetrable exposition and kinetic, confusing action.

Spoilers, of course, follow.

The Fellowship of the Indistinguishable

The Fellowship of the Ring benefited from a steady introduction to the company's number. Frodo and Sam set off and soon acquire fellow hobbits Merry and Pip. The rest of the group join them at Rivendell. This incremental approach allowed the story to get started relatively quickly, and for characters and relationships to be established before more additions were made to the group.

In The Hobbit however, the audience meet the entire band of dwarves almost all at once, with the bulk of them of them literally falling through Bilbo's door in a heap. Unfortunately many of them never escape that figurative heap o'dwarves. At the film's disappointingly cheesy ending, I was still spotting members of the company and thinking, "Gosh, I don't think I've seen that particular follically endowed, vertically challenged chap before."

A long dinner sequence follows their first appearance (with two songs for crying out loud!), but such is the dwarves' number and the speed with which they are introduced that it is near impossible -- despite the film-makers' best efforts -- for the audience to appreciate their individual characters and the relationships between them. This robs the adventure that follows of the required sense of danger and purpose -- it is difficult after all to care about the desires and fates of characters you have barely met.

To be fair to the film-makers, the original source material put them in an unenviable position. No modern film would countenance so many similar characters. When a film requires one character to count up others not once but twice during its running time it is surely a sign that there is a problem. But what could they do? Cut dwarves? Kill some off sooner? A braver adaptation may have done. Behind each of Gandalf's tallies you can almost hear the exasperated voice of the film-maker crying, "Yes! We know, too many dwarves!"

The Two Tones...and other problems

Without the time to give proper scenes to every dwarf, Jackson et al valiantly try to distinguish the band through character design. Each dwarf sports a unique blend of beard and hair, accent and age, weaponry and weight. Yet there are still thirteen of the little bastards (I think? Were there more? You see the problem? I just don't know).

Increasingly cartoonish character designs are embraced to mark one from another. But this clashes with the relatively "grounded" Middle Earth previously established, undermining the richness and consistency of that world by doing so. I watched The Lord of the Rings and could escape into a fully formed fantasy world. That consistency of tone acted as a shield, defending the more mockable story elements from audience mirth. But when that is broken by jarring juxtaposition or uncertainty of tone, the illusion is destroyed and escapism becomes impossible. I never engaged with The Hobbit as I never believed those characters could have existed in that world. Further alienation from the story inevitably followed.

And what of the story?

The dwarves certainly have a clear aim -- to recover their homeland from Smaug the dragon -- but that alone cannot sustain dramatic momentum at this early stage of the story. It is simply too far in the distance.

The Lord of the Rings faced a similar problem of course -- Frodo had a long walk ahead of him to deliver the ring to Mount Doom. However, even when that eventual aim was still half Middle Earth and two films away, the main characters always had a current goal to pursue -- beat the Black Riders to the ferry, reach Bree, cross the mines of Moria etc. There were genuine risks and serious stakes of failure -- each of these staging posts gave the films momentum. Crucially the audience could also see the connection between these mini-aims and the overall quest -- these were no random diversions but obstacles that had to be overcome.

By contrast, The Hobbit meanders. Its on-the-road episodes (some inserted from elsewhere in Tolkien lore) do not so much propel the story forward as bog it down -- they have little connection to the overall narrative, while the characters stumble in and out of danger without any sense that escape has brought them any closer to their overall aim. Not that they are ever in danger. Despite their number it is apparently forbidden that any dwarf be harmed in the making of this film. This saps the action scenes of any suspense, no matter how impressively choreographed those sequences may be. (How to design a meaningless scene -- have characters you don't know or care about performing outlandish actions whose purpose is unclear, facing hordes of disposable bad guys, with no apparent risk of death whatsoever. Welcome to the goblins underground scene!)

Iconic though the scene with the trolls is, for example, it never feels more than a temporary diversion, an inserted "adventure" scene designed to keep the audience from getting bored. Although Bilbo does try to manufacture an escape, the group must still rely on the convenient reappearance of Gandalf at a crucial moment to survive. Sadly this is not the only time a sudden deus ex machina appears to save the day -- the finale of the entire film turns on the appearance of giant eagles, their imminent arrival sucking any sense of danger from the preceding scene.

Compared to the Fellowship of the Ring, by the end of the first part of The Hobbit we have barely begun our journey it seems. Think back on the 2001 film. Think how much had happened by the end of the film. The fall of Gandalf. The death of Boromir. The emergence of Aragorn as a leader. The breaking of the fellowship. But here? Umm. They are a bit closer to the Misty Mountain.

That's it.

The Return of the King

Actually I tell a lie. Some things do change. The film-makers make a stab at significance with the arc in the relationship between Bilbo and the leader of the dwarves, with the latter banishing his doubts of the former with a big manly dwarvy hug. But it feels forced, tacked on to give purpose to the end of the film. 

This is a shame because it detracts from the more effective arc to Bilbo's character that does exist. Through the story he learns or proves the skills he will need in the fight to come -- cunning (in facing down the trolls), thievery (in stealing the ring) and bravery (in his attack on the pale orc in the finale).

Martin Freeman is a delight to watch and the picture noticeably sags when he is lost among the dwarf-schtick or shunted off-screen by the makers' obsession with stuffing every last word from every Tolkien appendix into the film. In reaching for significance and resonance with the wider saga in this way, Bilbo's story is obscured. This is a shame, for in fact it is in his story alone that the connection to the Middle Earth of the previous films feels most believable. The irritating adventures of Radagast and the antics of Balin, Dwalin, Oin, Gloin, Groin, Bon, Ron and Tron are distractions. It is no coincidence that Freeman's scene with the brilliant Andy Serkis as Gollum is by far the film's best.

So overall The Hobbit goes down as a big disappointment in my book. Despite that, I know come next year I will still be lining up to see part two. Peter Jackson is a supremely talented film-maker, responsible for some of my favourite movies. I must have faith that he will build on the positives in this film (however hidden) and that he will deliver next time.

Here's hoping.