The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(USA/New Zealand, 169 min.)
Dir. Peter Jackson
Writ. Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh,
Philippa Boyens, Guillermo del Toro.
Starring: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellan, Richard Armitage,
James Nesbitt, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Hugo Weaving, and Cate Blanchett.
What is worse: 48 frames per second or literal fidelity?
Neither one is desirable, yet Peter Jackson serves up a double-edged conundrum in his disappointing return to Middle Earth, The Hobbit. Jackson must
have spent the past few years washing his hair in New Zealand, since his
direction is essentially that which is offered by a bottle of shampoo: Rinse
and repeat. Aside from the laborious lathering, Jackson offers two notable changes
in his realization of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy world: 3D special effect captured
with an ultra-high frame rate and a script that follows Tolkien’s book down to
the letter. Both additions are to the film’s detriment. The Hobbit ultimately betrays the first Lord of the Rings trilogy because it privileges the source text
over the magic of cinema.
The experiment backfires entirely because The Hobbit just looks weird in 48fps.
Bilbo’s skin has never looked so porous, as if one is talking to him face to
face, and the scenery looks spectacular when it’s captured in a static shot;
however, any instance of motion—whether by a character or by the camera—utterly
betrays the escapism of The Hobbit because
it accentuates the rapid-fire rendering of the action. Bilbo moves like Sonic
the Hedgehog and the camerawork has the jerky effect of a high school production.
Even worse, though, is the overall aesthetic of the high-frame rate, which
strips Middle Earth of a sense of artistry. The
Hobbit looks cheap and artless even though it has a budget of almost twice
that of The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring. (It has a price tag of an estimated $180 000 000 versus
an estimated $90 000 000 for the first LotR film.)
What is the point of going to such trouble to create an extravagant fantasy land
only to remove the fine sheen that makes it look so sumptuous?
The first Lord of the
Rings trilogy delivered three visually stunning films. Jackson and his team
took special effects to a new level by combining astonishing visual work with top-notch
production design and atmospheric cinematography. The booming success of the
trilogy could largely be attributed to the team’s laudable success in taking the
fantasy genre and turning it into art. There is a sense of enchantment to the
early films, if not a glowing lustre to the heavenly folklore of the fable. The Hobbit, though, lacks the
fantastical ether of the Lord of the
Rings films since it emphasizes its reality through the high frame rate. It
results in a comically detached effect as opposed to the thrill of escape. It’s
like watching a bizarre Brechtian mash up of Tolkien and Coronation Street.
Jackson is by no means bound to remake his first trilogy
with the Hobbit trilogy, but since so
much else in the film follows its predecessors, it’s strange that the result is
much a misfire. One might want to see the high frame rate out of
interest—die-hard film geeks probably should—if only to end up on the ‘nay’
side of the debate. The mode of twenty-four frames per second has served the
cinema well for decades: it isn’t broken, so why fix it?
The philosophy of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” extends
to the film’s true detriment: the script’s needless fidelity to Tolkien’s text.
Regardless of the frame-rate in which viewers choose to see the film, they will
probably feel taxed by the overstuffed and tedious narrative. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey offers
only the first part of Tolkien’s book. The
Hobbit has been split into three parts, presumably for the reason of
cashing in on audience returns. The choice to make a trilogy can surely not be
for the sake of enhancing the story, since one could easily enter The Hobbit’s journey in Part Two without
missing any essential details.
An Unexpected Journey
is essentially three hours of exposition. Aside from a few details about the
ring and Gollum, which were covered in the first trilogy, this film offers
nothing that is required viewing. It includes two musical sequences and an
endless string of action sequences that should have been left on the cutting
room floor. The film amounts to a string of team-building exercises for Bilbo
and his troupe of dwarves, but it never connects narratively or emotionally. Whereas
the films of the first trilogy ended with a sense of closure as well as a sense
of continuity, The Hobbit: An Unexpected
Journey offers nothing but an unnecessary prologue.
There is no good reason for The Hobbit to be as overdrawn as it is. If one compares it to,
say, the Joe Wright/Tom Stoppard adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, one sees that filmmakers need not be so reverential
to a text in order to do it justice. Anna,
an 800-odd page behemoth, loses about three quarters of its prose in the
unexpected journey from page to screen. Plot lines disappear, characters vanish,
and chronology shifts, but the themes and lessons of Anna Karenina survive unscathed.There is no necessity for Joe
Wright to make Anna Karenina 2 since
all was said in one film. The Hobbit, on the other hand, seems to contain every character, detail, thread, and scene of the novel, yet it essentially says nothing. There is no morale, no lesson, or no point to An Unexpected Journey. Moreover, Anna
refashions 800 pages of literature into a 129-minute film whereas The Hobbit transcribes 300 pages of
literature into three feature length films, one of which is almost three hours
long and the other two, given the director's oeuvre, are presumably are of similar length.
If Peter Jackson had adapted Anna
Karenina, it would have been split into four exhausting installments, one
of which would have likely featured nothing but Levin shearing wheat for three
hours.
The mind-numbing fidelity to the source text is The Hobbit’s fatal flaw. Seeing it in
48fps might add an extra distraction, but the film feels so redundant that one
cannot recommend seeing it for all the impressive visuals and performances it
contains. By spreading the story into three thin slices, Jackson does Tolkien a
disservice because many viewers could likely be too exhausted by the end of Part One to feel bothered to continue with The
Hobbit’s journey. I, for one, will not.
Rating: ★★ (out of ★★★★★)
The Hobbit: An
Unexpected Journey is now playing in wide release.