1. The movie spends over half an hour introducing the dwarves, yet doesn’t give a single reason to care about any of them. It’s hard to even keep them straight. I remember the king, the fat one, the old one, and the one with the stupid hat. Beyond that, I don’t remember them and don’t care. By any standard of characterization quality, this movie compares poorly with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. At least I knew what to think of Grumpy.
2. Somewhere in this great big world, there is a movie that successfully combines musical numbers, snot gags, and rampant violence. The Hobbit is not that movie. The plot retains the cutesy qualities of a children’s adventure, but with incongruous levels of violence. Though now that I think about it, this is familiar territory for a comics blogger.
3. PG-13 violence is remarkable, and not in a good way. The movie has decapitations, eviscerations, multiple stabbings, and a body count in the hundreds, yet there is very little on-screen blood and the camera never lingers on the gruesome consequences of violence. The Hobbit is too gory to be cartoonish yet too tame to be explicit. It’s the uncanny valley of violent entertainment.
4. The action scenes are not exciting. Several reviewers have noted the video gamey quality of the action, particularly the big battle/chase sequence with the goblins. There is shot after shot of indistinguishable dwarves killing indistinguishable orcs. Noah compared it to a “body count video game,” which sounds about right. While body count video games can’t be defended as good art, they can at least provide a base level of entertainment and a pleasurable empowerment fantasy. But watching The Hobbit is like watching someone else play a video game, which is never fun.
5. Every scene is about 10 minutes longer than it needs to be. It’s bad enough that such a short book was split into a trilogy. But there’s no conceivable reason why each installment has to exceed 2 hours. Though now I can’t help but wonder what sort of scenes were cut from the theatrical release. And what will be included in the extend cut DVDs? No doubt there are many more thrilling scenes of characters sitting around tables and explaining the plot to each other.
6. The film is tragically lacking in hobbit feet close-ups. Why even make The Hobbit if you’re not going to showcase hobbit feet?
7. To harp on the 3-D again, it adds absolutely nothing to the movie experience. 3-D is just a silly gimick, so if you’re going to use 3-D you might as have some fun with the audience (for a great example, see Friday the 13th part 3, which is all rats and marijuana and eyeballs in the third dimension). The Hobbit doesn’t have any fun with the 3-D, so it feels suspiciously like an excuse for theaters to jack up the ticket price.
7.5. Speaking of ticket price, two tickets cost me $38. Thirty eight fucking dollars.
There was some gratuitous 3-D gimmickry wasn’t there? Butterflies fluttering about in your lap and so forth….
Otherwise…watching someone else play a video game is about right. Though I have to admit that all the 9 year olds I know loved it, fwiw.
Right, I forgot about the butterflies. Still doesn’t amount to much though…
I don’t have kids of my own, so I have no idea what level of violence is appropriate for a 9 year old. Guess it depends on the individual kid, etc., etc.
I enjoyed it more than Django Unchained. I thought the world it explored was pretty interesting. And I liked the tone it struck a lot more than the previous 3 movies which I loathed. The song they sang was dope. I didn’t really think about the violence. The violence is what you would expect in a movie like this. I thought the scene with the Trolls and then the scene with Golem and Bilbo were terrific. I also dug the scene with Gandalf and the Elf lady. I don’t really understand why the Lord of the Rings movies rode a wave of almost universal acclaim despite being boring as hell, and this film which was relatively taut by comparison has gotten all of this ire. I feel like people secretly agreed that those movies sucked, and this is their pent up rage from sitting through two really lame movies about walking.
I also enjoyed the Orcs with their werecats. They should make an orc stain spin off. I thought the Orcs, Goblins, and Trolls were the most interesting races.
I mean, I can only speak for myself…but I’m watching the LOTR films again, and really enjoy them a ton. Whereas I never need to see the Hobbit again, ever.
I guess it depends on what you find boring? I found most of the Hobbit fragmented and uninvolving; like Richard, I couldn’t have cared less about Thorin or his relationship with Bilbo, and certainly didn’t care about Bilbo self-actualizing at all. Whereas, for instance, I found Eowyn’s grief and fear and determination and her unrequited crush on Aragorn incredibly moving and powerful. Boromir’s death scene — “our people! our people!” — that always makes me cry.
I just found the characterization, the conflicts, and the narrative much, much more emotionally involving in LOTR. The Hobbit just seemed like one special effects bounce fest after another; there wasn’t a reason to care or think about any of it. For me.
The one exception was the riddle game, which was closely adapted from the text. That’s a great scene.
Yeah, I haven’t watched the LoTR movies in a while, but I liked each of them more than The Hobbit. Peter Jackson did a good job with the LoTR movies because, while he didn’t do a literal scene-by-scene adaptation (which would have been unwatchable), he clearly understood and appreciated the source material.
In the case of The Hobbit, it felt like Jackson was working against the strengths of the source material so as to fit it into a Hollywood blockbuster mold.
Tolkien was a guy who saw war in the trenches, then wrote a book about how to be a gentle person in a violent world; how to contend with brutes without becoming a brute oneself. Jackson brings all his love for big goony cartoon violence to the story and tramps all over that original theme.
One of the few things I was looking forward to seeing in this film was the old “Elves as jerks and dwarves escaping in wine barrels” bit, but that got replaced with a half hour of Renfaire C-Span, which sucks no matter how much Great Acting from Great Actors you pour onto it. It made me feel the same way I feel when I see a symphony orchestra saw its way through Jingle Bell Rock or something to keep the bills paid.
“While body count video games can’t be defended as good art, they can at least provide a base level of entertainment and a pleasurable empowerment fantasy.”
Except for games like Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock, Half-Life, Bastion,ect.
On topic, this movie doesn’t hold a candle to Lord of the Rings.
They cut some riddles, which is kind of annoying. It’s the best scene in the book…and they pad all kinds of crappy stuff onto other scenes, but that scene, the best one, they trim down.
And isn’t the barrel-escape a retreat from a different set of elves? In Mirkwood? My memory of the book is a bit hazy on this…but I think the barrel escape is still to come.
Yeah…barrel escape still coming. It’s after Beorn (who should be first up in the second film) and after the trek through Mirkwood…so they’ll probably get it in the second one, would be my guess.
http://minimoonstar.tumblr.com/post/39826827758/upon-rereading-the-hobbit
Since I have not read The Hobbit, I can’t comment on this, but PJ being a Tolkien nerd and Tolkien not having fleshed out any of the dwarves in his book does go a ways toward explaining Point 1.
Subdee – true enough, but Tolkien wrote a more plot-driven and less convoluted story. Tolkien didn’t try to flesh out the dwarves because character interaction was not that important to him.
However, character interaction is an important part of the movie’s plot, probably because Peter Jackson needed to pad out the run-time and male bonding is a common way to do that. Tolkien didn’t expect us to care that much about Thorin or the dwarves, but Jackson wants us to care, but largely fails at his task.
The LOTR movies were competent enough, no doubt. But I don’t know about Jackson’s later work. King Kong falling off the Empire State in broad daylight? How weird.
I saw about ten minutes of King Kong and had to stop. It was really egregiously bad.
Meet the Feebles, on the other hand, is genius. I think it’s the single most disturbing film I’ve ever seen.
Heavenly Creatures is really good too, for that matter….
I liked it more than I expected, but then I expected not to like it at all, so anything upwards of that…and I’m a big fan of the LotR movies, too (yeah, yeah, even with all their many faults). The end of that Smaug scene at the start made me laugh — there’s a shot of the dragon’s tail going into the dwarf hall that wriggles in this blatantly artificial, unlifelike way — it’s got to be some kind of nod to Ray Harryhausen, even though I couldn’t tell you where in particular. I got a kick out of how predictable the was fight at the end — you know, where Thorin’s arch-nemesis takes him down like a punk, to set up the rematch in film 3. So: didn’t totally suck as much as we thought it would. Yay?