Back There Again
by Andrew Collins
Just like its villainous character Gollum, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey suffers from multiple personality disorder. Director Peter Jackson’s attempt to be true to the tale of a beloved children’s story while setting it in the context of an epic history is commendable, but he ends up treading a strange new path between an epic and a cartoon. At some points — like the opening sequence where Smaug decimates the dwarf kingdom under the mountain or during the White Council at Rivendell between Elrond, Galadriel, Gandalf, and Saruman — this film feels like Lord of the Rings revisited. At other times — like when a squeaky-voiced mountain troll reaches behind himself for a handkerchief and unwittingly blows his nose on Bilbo — I wondered if I had missed the DreamWorks logo in the opening credits.
The tension here stems from the fact that the book form of The Hobbit centered on Bilbo Baggins and made him the clear protagonist. Reading the book, we see and discover Middle Earth through the eyes of the untraveled hobbit and as informed by the narrator. Not so in the film. Clearly, the makers of The Hobbit saw too much going on in Tolkien’s Middle Earth history to limit a film to the experience of one character. It’s harder to read minds in movies than in literature, so while An Unexpected Journey is certainly about Bilbo going on an adventure, his role is subsumed under the grander narrative arcs of the dwarves’ quest to reclaim their home under the mountain, and the return of an old evil to Middle Earth after a time of peace.
The sheer genius of The Hobbit’s source material – Tolkien’s adventurous novel as well as his appendices and notes – provides enough raw character and energy to make the film enjoyable for what it is. But it cannot stand under the inevitable comparisons to The Lord of the Rings (whether it deserves such comparisons or not). That said, the same enchantment that draws one into the Lord of the Rings is present in The Hobbit. It’s intoxicating at first, treating us to beautiful, sweeping shots of the dwarf kingdom, Erebor, with its vast stores of treasure. The film then drops into Bag-End of the Shire, where Bilbo begins working on an account of his own adventures, starting with the beloved sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” When a dozen dwarves come tumbling into Bag-End and charm us with their poems and songs, we begin to feel that we’re finally in Middle Earth again with a great new story to enjoy.
If only it could have sustained that magic.
Instead, the spell of the Middle Earth universe keeps breaking down. For example, when Bilbo (Martin Freeman) starts talking about “parasites.” As the mountain trolls are about to cook the dwarves, Bilbo tells them that all the dwarves have worms – horrible parasites that would make them bad to eat. The dwarves, catching on to the act, respond in affirmation: “Oh, I’ve got parasites big as my arm!” Sorry, but the term “parasite,” especially used in this scientific sense, has no business in a fantasy world as enchanting and magical as that of The Hobbit. It jars us out of the dream, and one can only wonder which screenwriter thought it was a good idea.
A similar and perhaps more egregious flaw comes from the wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), referencing Radagast the Brown’s eccentricity. The wizard Radagast (Sylvester McCoy) has developed hazy judgment and cannot be trusted, Saruman says, because his “excessive consumption of mushrooms has addled his brain.” Here everyone in the audience laughed. Except me. A cheap throwaway reference to modern drug culture had no more place in this old-world fantasy than a set of earbuds or a Gangnam-Style dance sequence. The fact that the audience even responds to a line like that shatters the dream and pulls us out of the Middle Earth experience.
It also raises a question: Where in Tolkien’s green earth did this half-baked wizard come from? The answer is most likely from the brainstorming session of some filmmakers who thought they were very clever. Radagast verges on the unacceptably silly, carrying himself with barely enough seriousness to make us believe there’s actually a credible mind underneath the bird nest on his head. In The Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson and company made strategic decisions to deviate from the books by omitting certain events and characters. Most of the time these were sensible moves (good riddance, Tom Bombadil). The Hobbit does the opposite, turning mere sentences of the book into entire scenes and subplots. Radagast, for example, receives the briefest mention in Tolkien’s original tale, and little more in the author’s other books and notes compiled by his son, Christopher Tolkien. Yet in the film the Brown Wizard ends up helping Thorin’s (Richard Armitage) company escape from wolf-riding orcs (a danger also invented for the film and anachronistic to the fictional timeline).
In another instance of anecdote inflation, the book makes a brief mention of stone giants coming out to play by throwing rocks at each other during a thunder storm while the travelers climbed a pass through the Misty Mountains. In the film, this becomes an extensive display of spectacle in which Bilbo and the dwarves repeatedly find themselves almost crushed by humanoid rock monsters hundreds of feet tall.
The stone giants, Radagast the Brown, and orc hunters bring a fun flair of high adventure, but after part one of a trilogy already accused of bloating the story to increase the number of films, they leave us wondering — how much do we really need these new elements? Could The Hobbit have been better without them? I think so.
The film ends with Tolkien’s signature deus ex machina – rescue by eagle. We accepted this twice in The Lord of the Rings, and we let The Hobbit get away with it this time too. The cheese in the rest of the film, however, is not so easy to overlook. Everyone understands it is based on a children’s book, but there are ways of getting the dwarves in and out of the goblin cave that don’t involve sending them sliding down tunnels and falling hundreds of feet down a ravine in cartoon-like fashion. Likewise, one would think there would be a way to portray Thorin as a noble, kingly figure without having to pit him against a super-orc who fits the flat, well-worn “bad guy” trope far too well.
A word about the “HFR” (high frame rate) and “LFR” (low frame rate) designations. Many theaters showed The Hobbit in both 48 frames per second — which the film was shot in — and the cinematic standard 24 frames per second. For a technical explanation of what is going on here, see this article in PC Magazine. Prior to seeing An Unexpected Journey, I had concerns that 48 fps would take viewers out of the “dream” we are accustomed to entering when we watch a film. After seeing the film in both frame rates, I found this fear to be partially founded.
The higher frame rate works if we watch The Hobbit primarily as an adventure. It takes viewers much closer to video game speed of 60 frames per second. This adds a smooth, lighter quality that highlights the adventure sequences like the escape from the goblin caves and the dwarves’ encounter with mountain giants. This also means that the picture is much clearer, particularly in motion shots, than what we are used to in film. This makes the film an aesthetic joy to watch, especially with the dressings of IMAX and 3D. The elf-haven of Rivendell, for example, easily matches our best imaginations of Tolkien’s lavish descriptions. The house of Elrond glows in the soft, warm air of twilight while the streams glitter with crystal clear water. The downside to the high frame rate, ironically, is that with such fluid motion it makes The Hobbit feel like a video game infused with epic drama. It’s hard to see how this contributes to the cinematic experience, because we see video games as much more artificial and much less emotionally engaging than film.
At both frame rates, many of the creatures of Middle Earth look like they stepped out of a Warcraft game. The goblins come in a much greater variety of shapes and sizes than the ones encountered by the Fellowship in the Mines of Moria. Most are about as large as a dwarf, with a hunched posture, short legs, lanky arms, and pointy ears, but they range in size from a tiny goblin-scribe (think Star Wars’ Salacious B. Crumb) to the Jabba the Hutt of all goblins, the distractingly obese Great Goblin (fittingly voiced by Barry Humphries, who also voices the great white shark, Bruce, in Finding Nemo). This monstrosity of a villain looks like the idiotic Gungan King from The Phantom Menace and serves a similar role. The Hobbit admittedly takes place in a much more wild, enchanted Middle Earth, but the earthy realism — the blood, sweat, and grime that followed heroes like Aragorn and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings — is gone, replaced by a lot of makeup and computer animation. The dwarves don’t even look dirty, and they’re dwarves! These thin layers of artificiality add up, subtly blunting the film’s emotional appeal and contributing to the video game effect even more than the high frame rate.
Most of The Hobbit‘s shifts away from the Lord of the Rings universe toward the juvenile would have been much more effective if the entire story had also shifted to revolve around Bilbo. As cliché as it is to say that the movie should have stuck closer to the book, this time it’s true.
But purists need not despair entirely. Perhaps the greatest delight of the film is the characters returning from The Lord of the Rings. Andy Serkis once again showcases his talent as Gollum in the famous riddles-in-the-dark scene. Flitting one moment to the next from sinister to playful to pitiable and back again, he and a half-perplexed, half-terrified Martin Freeman do full justice to a classic moment of Middle Earth lore. Best of all, Ian McKellen returns as Gandalf the Grey with a fresh supply of biting wit and uncanny foresight, thanks in part to several memorable lines pulled directly from the book. “Good morning,” Bilbo greets him in the opening scene. “What do you mean?” Gandalf replies. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?” It makes a delightful companion line to his opening statement in The Fellowship of the Ring: “A wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
And as always, Gandalf displays his timeless wisdom. Tolkien infused his tales of Middle Earth with instances where the miniscule and seemingly insignificant becomes pivotal and infused with purpose. Ever the author’s spokesman and philosophical voice, the Grey Wizard speaks with an honest, grandfatherly tenderness that reminds us why films like this still resonate with us nearly a century after they were penned:
“I found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay…small acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it is because I am afraid, and he gives me courage.”
