HOBBIT BEGINS EPIC JOURNEY THROUGH MIDDLE EARTH
Long haul through Middle Earth gets off to slow start in The Hobbit
Peter Jackson’s new edifice of lore and special effects, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey — or, as I like to think of it, Much Ado About Orcs — is an epic project about relatively modest material. Jackson, who turned J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy into a brilliant series of fantasy films that used elves, dwarfs and wizards to tell us something about men, greed and warfare, has now taken on the sketch for Tolkien’s masterwork.
The Hobbit is the introduction to the world of Middle Earth: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” Tolkien wrote in 1937, starting an industry that would eventually test the bladders of a generation of film-goers.
The Hobbit is a slim children’s book, but Jackson has turned it into a trilogy whose first episode barely gets started before it’s over, a mere 2 3/4 ours later.
It’s not that things don’t happen in The Hobbit. It’s a 3D spectacular — I know because I wore the 3D spectacles — that includes savage battles with frightening trolls, vicious orcs on beast-back who go to war against brave and hearty dwarfs who would rather fight than eat, although they sometimes choose to eat rather than fight, and a monumental underground confrontation on precarious wooden footbridges that includes a giant goblin (voiced by Barry Humphreys) with a chin wattle the size of Santa’s toy bag. He looks like Jabba the Hutt after he really let himself go.
At the end of it, though, we’ve barely gotten started on the Hobbit story: just six of the book’s 18 chapters that tell the tale of how a hobbit and a bunch of dwarfs try to vanquish a dragon and steal back the gold he has taken.
Not that this is nothing, mind you, but it does seem a bit daunting that it will be 2014 — and approximately nine hours of screen time later — before we get safely home.
The Hobbit begins in the fantasy village of the Shire, where Bilbo Baggins (a perfectly cast Martin Freeman), a tiny being who ideally represents the greengrocer notion of the English character, is recruited by the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) for a journey. Bilbo would rather sit in his tiny home and watch the world go by, and he refuses Gandalf’s offer of an adventure.
“Nasty disturbing things,” he calls them.
However, Bilbo is pretty well press-ganged into it. The first 45 minutes of The Hobbit are mostly taken up with a raucous dinner party at which 13 uninvited dwarfs, led by the fear- some Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), crash into Bilbo’s house, eat everything, throw dishes and thus show him the delights of leaving his comfort zone. He will join them as their burglar — hobbits are good at not being seen — and help them retrieve their gold from their stolen homeland.
Once again, Jackson proves adept at capturing the tone and feel of Middle Earth, and the film takes us along familiar trails to meet some of our old friends, including Hugh Weaving’s Elrond the elf and Cate Blanchett’s ethereal Galadriel.
A spindly Christopher Lee also shows up as Saruman, the white wizard whom we ring-watchers know will show his true colours later.
The most welcome guest is Andy Serkis, the human behind the special effects creation of Gollum. He’s a thin, ingratiating creature who drops a gold ring — wonder if that will figure into the story later — that is picked up by Bilbo, with consequences we’ll learn in the next 23/4 hours, perhaps.
It’s a long haul, however, and not helped by the introduction of Jackson’s innovation, 48 frames-per-second film speed. That’s double the usual, and the result is that everything looks sharp, clear, and artificial.
The faster speed smooths away the creases, the beautiful imperfections of film, so that The Hobbit has the videotape look of some TV shows. Digital technology has already robbed movies of their warmth — the subtle flicker that made the movies into “flicks” — and The Hobbit accentuates that. In some scenes, it has the plasticized feel of early motion capture technology.
However, Jackson insists it will become the standard.
“The worst is behind us,” Bilbo says at the end of The Hobbit — he must be referring to the dinner party scene — but the new look of cinema may be just starting.