The Hobbit is a very horrible movie, and Peter Jackson should be ashamed of himself.
Massive spoilers for those who haven’t read the books or seen the films below. Be ye fairly warned.
Rant the First: Maybe I’m just a grumpy old curmudgeon, but at what point did this massive influx of stupid humor find its way into films that are ostensibly for adults? Certainly, movie studios have a desire to cast as wide a net as possible when creating a film, and there’s nothing wrong with that per se, but there’s always a risk – especially with any film that’s based off a novel, and well-known and well-loved novel – of offending the core group of fans. I am not a Tolkien uber-nerd by any stretch. I have read the Lord of the Rings series of novels, and I have read The Hobbit. I own a copy of the Silmarillion, but aside from occasionally looking up something in the books that interested me, I never bothered to sit down and read it all the way through. It’s dry stuff, and I don’t feel as though my enjoyment of Middle-Earth is necessarily suffering because I don’t know the history of the gods of the realm. However, I do care about good storytelling, and that was certainly something that Tolkien did well. And it’s what Peter Jackson does not do well. More on that later.
The low-hanging fruit are clearly the computer graphics. The CGI in the first Rings films was amazing, and in some cases, ground-breaking. Many of the effects were subtle, but when you notice how natural a shot looks and realize its impossibility within this realm of physics, that means your computer graphics department (or whichever of the ten different effects houses worked on that particular scene) is doing their job well. Stuff that springs to mind from the first film are creature like the Balrog, which were done completely with CGI, but looked real enough to touch. Gollum is another well-known example; he only had the briefest moments of not-quite-rightness in the original films, and it was at least clear that this was due to the limitations of the technology at the time. The animators and texture artists and people who did the gorram specular reflections of his eyes clearly cared about what they were doing, and they did it to the best of their ability. There are numerous other examples: the tower of Orthanc, the incredibly beautiful and clever and seamless uses of forced perspective, the breathtaking Lothlórien or the terrifying Ringwraiths. Short version: the CGI in the original LotR trilogy looked like a truckload of diamonds, and the CGI in The Hobbit – with a few exceptions – looks like a truckload of orc poop.
The guiltiest scene by far is the Dwarves escape from the kingdom of the Wood Elves via the river. All pretense at attempting a realistic-looking sequence is abandoned here. Jackson decides to up the action by having our intrepid Dwarves pursued not only by the Elven Guard, but also a giant army of orcs. (The orcs were NOT there in the books, which is a storyline purist boo-boo, but not an intolerable one.) The Mega-Shakey-Cam appears in full force, interspersed with shots that I’m almost certain were shot with a freaking GoPro camera mounted on the barrels. The shots pan and tilt over the faces of the Dwarf actors, who are clearly standing on a green screen stage and composited (badly) into the shot. Sir-Not-Appearing-In-The-Novel Legolas and the completely invented Arwen Tauriel show up and start doing madcap pixelated antics all over the place, with every other shot of them obviously being a rather Gumby-like digital model.
Legolas, at once point, balances on the heads of two Dwarves in barrels, shooting arrows from his apparently endless quiver that all hit their mark without fail. A few moments later, an elf shoots an arrow out of the air with another arrow. Quite aside from the fact that the Wood Elves are portrayed as having the dexterity and acrobatic skill of a superhuman Cirque Du Soleil / Olympic archery grandmaster and can do anything except fly through the air outright, the care for the art of compositing things realistically went down the proverbial toilet, and with it, any chance of my giving a crap. The elves just show up and start flinging arrows into the orcs, who might be practical or digital depending on the whims of the film at the moment. A particularly egregious sub-moment happens when a barrel – and I swear I am not making this up – leaps out of the river on some sort of convenient stone ramp, and rolls down the rocks smashing orcs and the laws of physics with equal abandon. It does this for what has to be a full minute of screen time, rolling perfectly up and across logs and perfectly-shaped rock ramps, flying tens of meters through the air before finally landing back in the river – upright, of course – and continuing on its merry way. At no point in this sequence does it even look close to real. In fact, the entire river chase sequence looks like a poorly-done live-action version of Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote short. What is intended to be exciting and compelling made me and Emily laugh out loud.
What’s truly disappointing about this is that later in the movie when Smaug appears, we are treated to a digital version of the dragon that is close to the care and attention given to the Balrog in the first films. Smaug is beautifully animated – his scales and skin look real, his eyes are frighteningly reptilian, and his movements are fluid and don’t look silly in any way. The Kingdom of the Wood Elves is also rendered beautifully – the majestic sweeping columns and intricate scrollwork show care. Why couldn’t we have had this care given to the rest of the movie? Sure, budgets, whatever, but after the success of the first three movies, why wouldn’t the studios be willing to write Jackson a blank check for the effects and CGI for the next three? This remains befuddling to me.
And then there’s what can only laughingly be called “the story”.
Where this fails is in the unnecessary plot elements that keep popping up all over the frelling place, and the obscenely stupid humor. This problem plagued the Star Wars prequels with gems such as C-3PO’s “I’m quite beside myself!” and now it’s infecting The Hobbit. For the love of the Shire, can we dispense with this notion that a film need to appeal to the humor level of the youngest person watching it to be relevant? Here’s a quote from about two-thirds of the way into the film: the Dwarves, having been smuggled into town by Bard, are making their way into his house…through the toilet.
Bard’s daughter: “Daddy, why are Dwarves coming out of our toilet?”
Har har. Because poop. (Also, I wondered, do they poop directly into the lake in Laketown? The movie seems to imply this. Ew.)
It doesn’t get better. The number of times I laughed at the movie instead of with occurred in a very unfortunate ratio. While it is true that The Hobbit was written by Tolkien for children, he apparently thought that children were perfectly capable of understanding words as spoken by adults. This is not simply me being an angry old man yelling at these kids for using the word “literally” in its colloquial sense. Tolkien’s use of language is as important to the story as the characters that inhabit the worlds that he invented. When the characters speak, their word choice is reflective of who they are and what they do. The Dwarves are important Dwarves, the book goes out of its way to tell us, and their speech reflects that in the novel. Thorin speaks eloquently. He is a king, and he sounds like one. Bilbo speaks in slightly halting sentences, he often references his old life and thinks about his warm Hobbit-hole. The most entertaining moments of dialogue in the film are the ones lifted directly from the book – Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug – but the problem is that that is the only time anyone speaks like that, and so it feels remarkably out place. Tolkien relished language, he luxuriated in it. Peter Jackson has the cast schlepping around dialogue with the skill and dexterity of a drunken frat boy in a closet, his untrained hands groping ineptly toward the eventual disappointment for everyone involved.
What is even more disappointing is the drivel that’s shoehorned into an already two-and-a-half hour movie at the cost of the main plot. After the Dwarves are captured in Mirkwood, we are introduced to a love triangle between Legolas, Kate from Lost, and one of the unimportant Dwarves. Kili? Fili? We are given no reason to care about this love triangle, it’s just filler while Bilbo sneaks around off-screen and figures out how to get them out of the prison.
The entire forty-five minutes of screen time that Lake Town occupies are just as misspent. In the book, the Dwarves basically walk up to the front door of the city – Bard isn’t seen until much, much later – and are given a hero’s welcome. None of the silly political crap happens, the only thing the book talks about happening in Lake Town is that the Master of the town worries about the effect that harboring fugitives of the Wood Elf King will have between him and their kingdom, since they rely heavily on trade with them. However, this is less than a paragraph in the book, and is hardly given another thought. The film spends considerable time developing the narrative of the town’s oppressive political climate and malevolent apathy of the Master of the Town, played by the ebullient and genuinely fun-to-watch Steven Fry. Is this possibly a critique of the policies of contemporary governments? I don’t know, and whether it was or was not, it was misplaced. It’s clear that this is a setup for Bard leaving and taking many of the townspeople with him to start his own kingdom, as happens at the end of the novel, but the political stuff was unnecessary, especially considering all the other crap they shoehorned into the story.
Consider the running-around-and-fighting-Smaug sequence that happens beneath the Lonely Mountain. I almost would have been okay with the concept for the sake of movie pacing, but for the ridiculousness of the fight. Film and books are two different mediums, and I understand that – pacing for a book is much different than pacing for film, and that’s okay. In the novel, the Dwarves never met Smaug, in fact, they don’t even go inside the mountain until long after Smaug has flown away to terrorize the village. (And is, in fact, dead, though they are unaware of this.) In the film, the Dwarves and Bilbo run around, playing a game a fire-breathing-cat-and-mouse with Smaug. Eventually, Thorin has an idea to light the fires of the forges (what?) and hatches an extremely convoluted Rube-Goldbergian plan to 1) lure him to the forges, 2) trick him into lighting them with his fire breath, 3) melt several thousand tonnes of stone-cold, solid gold, 4) lure Smaug into an as-yet unseen hall way where stands, for untold reasons, a giant stone mold of a Dwarf, with a spout for the molten gold to pour into, and get him, through Episode-II-Yoda-style flipping around to pour the gold into the mold, then knock the chains away before the gold has solidified, thereby(!) causing the molten gold statue to crash back into liquid, presumably…hurting Smaug? Who laughs off the attack and flies away.
Further, the liquid gold, which is rendered as a goofy shiny gold surface which inexplicably glows, is portrayed as melting within a minute of the furnaces being turned on, despite the fact that the vats of it are huge, the size of large swimming pools, and have clearly been in a solid cold state for a long time. Further, the appearance of the gold is silly on two fronts: gold is only shiny AND liquid (not glowing) within a very narrow temperature range. The gold in the movie is portrayed as flowing around outside the furnaces for several minutes of movie time, over cold stone surfaces and troughs, while maintaining its appearance and molten state. And in many of the shots – particularly when Thorin jumps onto a metal (!) shield to float down the river of molten gold (several physics facepalms in that sentence alone) the liquid gold looks incredibly fake – as though it were rendered in Google SketchUp. It frankly looks like a very silly OpenGL screensaver version of molten metal.
Granted, the physics gripes are pretty nickpicky, but the entire plot to turn on the furnaces to create a giant sculpture that would melt on Smaug at the exact right moment was just so asinine that a few minutes in I was completely uninterested in the outcome of the fight. At one point, Thorin, doing more Cirque Du Soleil antics over a pit on a chain, stands balanced on top of Smaug’s nose, in a little setpiece that felt more like How to Train Your Dragon than Tolkien’s world. It was a slaptick farce, and a slap in the face to any person over the age of ten watching the film. The whole sequence just throws overdone action upon ever more contrived situations, culminating in a moment of truly stunning meaninglessness.
Many other reviewers have mentioned Bilbo’s lack of character development and use throughout the film. He sort of bumbles around in the background, never really speaking much, and never referencing the massive changes in his world that happened in the novel. In the book, he constantly references his now-former life as a cake-loving Hobbit who never did anything adventurous, and had a rather cushy life. In the film, he just…becomes heroic, snapping off one-liners and being a combat badass without so much as a nod to the fact that he used to be far more concerned with the status of his larder than his newly-acquired sword Sting. This tension between what he felt he was and what he was becoming is a large part of the book character’s charm, and the film version of Bilbo misses it completely. Except for a few moments where the book shines through – such as the aforementioned discussion with Smaug – his character is perfectly happy to swing swords around, killing spiders and figuring out how to help the Dwarves escape from the Elves (offscreen), without so much as breaking a sweat.
There’s so many other small details that take the detailed, rich world that Tolkien wrote and turn it into a loud, obnoxious over-the-top live-action cartoon. The Black Arrow is now a magical, old, dragon-killing MacGuffin. Bard already knows that the dragon is missing a scale, instead of being a member of a race that can talk to larks, because that’s too fanciful for audiences to understand or something – so the clever dialogue where Bilbo smooth-talks Smaug into showing off his underbelly never happens. Bilbo is never shown sneaking around in the Elven kingdom, he just appears out of nowhere with a plan on the same day they’re captured. There’s a Wormtongue-like-character simply to give us someone to hate. What about Hobbits’ natural resistance to the power of The Ring? Why is Bilbo ready to go into “My precious!” mode after wearing it twice? Gandalf, in another complete departure from the novel, actually magic-fights with Sauron’s Shade. What happened to the Maiar (Istari) who were forbidden to match Sauron’s power with power? Why does Azog the Defiler exist? Why is he named like a 14-year-old boy’s fantasy wet dream fanfiction? (He’s mentioned in one line from the novel, simply as “Azog”, and he’s dead by the time the story takes place.) In a major plot hole at the beginning of the film, the partys being carried (presumably) many miles by The Eagles doesn’t throw the orcs off the trail of the party, so in the opening scene they bafflingly still have the orcs hot on their trail. The Dwarves kept getting their weapons back after smashing them all to bits on the rocks trying to get the mountain door open, and this is never explained. The characters are idiots, simply saying standard action-movie or love-triangle things in gussied-up Ye Olde Fantasy English that is supposed to make things sound mysterious and old, but is just a crumbling veneer over the stupidity.
As a whole, the film is somewhere between middling and terrible. The art direction is beautiful. The high frame rate that the film is shot in is something I didn’t even notice unless I was trying to. But the story, the characters, the dialogue, the stupid crass humor, and the introduction of so many elements that dont’ fit within the framework of the world that JRR made is vigorously disappointing. It’s not even the sort of stupid where I can simply put my brain into neutral and let it roll down the gentles slopes of the film’s aggressive un-funniness and silly plots. Adaptation drift happens, but what’s the point of saying that the movie is an adaptation of a book if it throws away all the best elements in favor of loud, obnoxious Hollywood thrashing about and elements that simply don’t exist in the original? This is a literary work that I like, and in Jackson’s blundering hands it’s just another Hollywood action movie with some dragons and Tolkien’s name slapped on.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks