A Tolkien nerd's thoughts on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey The first Hobbit film is true to the books, but has more flaws than virtues.

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A Tolkien nerd's thoughts on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The first Hobbit film is true to the books, but has more flaws than virtues.

by Andrew Cunningham - Dec 17 2012, 6:10pm EST

Before going forward, an important spoiler warning: this article assumes that you've seen An Unexpected Journey and have read The Hobbit, and takes no pains to avoid spoilers for either. As such, it will spoil not just the movie and the book, but probably also many elements of the next two Hobbit films. If you haven't read the books and want to be surprised by the next two movies, do not pass beyond this point.

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit when I was no more than eight or nine years old. The Lord of the Rings trilogy followed when I wasn't much older than that. I continue to make a point of reading through all of the books (and their appendices, at least the ones that aren't concerned with Elvish grammar) at least once every couple of years or so—even making it through The Silmarillion two or three times. I haven't read every posthumously published scrap about Middle Earth that Tolkien's son has seen fit to compile and publish, but my credibility as a Tolkien nerd should go unquestioned.
Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Social Editor Cesar Torres, Lead Developer Lee Aylward, and I will all be discussing An Unexpected Journey, the first of Peter Jackson's long-awaited Hobbit film adaptations, on Friday's upcoming episode of the Ars Technicast. In the meantime, I wanted to really examine the film as it relates to The Hobbit and also to Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, then distill the many mixed reactions I had during and after the movie into something a bit more coherent. As a fan of both, I've been awaiting An Unexpected Journey with some excitement, but more apprehension: on the one hand, it's a chance to revisit Jackson's lovingly rendered film version of Middle Earth. On the other, a much-criticized decision to make The Hobbit into three movies has only exacerbated fears that it would be a cash grab lacking in the care and craft that went into either the books or the first film trilogy. I ultimately came away disappointed in the movie, but not in the way I thought I would be.

Cut from the same cloth

An Unexpected Journey better integrates the events of The Hobbit with those of The Lord of the Rings.

Wikipedia

Let's start with the good stuff. The Hobbit was first published in 1937: 17 years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955, before much of the world-building that Tolkien did for those books and the posthumously published The Silmarillion had been thought out. Despite numerous (and sometimes quite substantial) edits for the book's second and third editions, this means The Hobbit at times feels a bit disconnected from the rest of the Middle Earth legendarium. There are hints of things wider and deeper sprinkled throughout the book as it exists today—there's a mention of Moria, and the Necromancer who factors into some of the book's subplots is in fact Sauron himself. However, where the events of The Lord of the Rings are often tied directly to people, places, and things from bygone Ages, the world of The Hobbit is significantly smaller.
One of An Unexpected Journey's strengths, then, is that it better integrates The Hobbit with the rest of the canon. Locations like Rivendell, identical to its Lord of the Rings counterpart, and the presence of characters not even named in the book (Saruman and Galadriel, among others, with Orlando Bloom set to return as Legolas in at least one of the next two films) make the stories feel more like they're pieces of the same whole.
The tone of the movie is also a step forward in this regard. The events of The Hobbit occur on a much smaller scale than in LOTR—the fate of the world hangs in the balance in the latter and it's hard to have higher stakes than that. The movie versions of The Hobbit's events are rendered with an epicness consistent with the LOTR movies. The integration and fleshing out of narrative threads that either appear elsewhere in Tolkien's work or are only summarized in The Hobbit itself—the war of the dwarves in Moria, the threat of the Necromancer—make the story feel more significant. There are some parts of The Hobbit that aren't really built to support all of this added weight, but we'll get into that more in a bit.
Characters who would go on to appear again in LOTR are also lighter in the earlier book—The Hobbit's Gandalf is more flighty than his LOTR counterpart, and LOTR's ever-somber Elves are merry to the point of silliness in The Hobbit. The movie version again smooths out these inconsistencies, bringing the Hobbit characters who appear in both books more in line with their LOTR renderings.

A sense of place

Enlarge / Hobbiton, which was built in New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings films and still stands as a tourist attraction today, is but one of Jackson's beautifully rendered Middle Earth locales.

Flickr user Culix

Another strength of An Unexpected Journey— and Jackson's Tolkien adaptations in general—is its rendering of Middle Earth's locations. The movies take locations like Erebor (which by Tolkien's descriptions seems like little more than a few dark, cavernous hallways and the treasure room inhabited by Smaug) and make them into huge, beautiful set pieces that look worthy of the significance placed upon them by the narrative. They look lived-in, and in almost every case they're superior to the mental images that I've formed over the years that I've been reading these books.

Doing right by Tolkien

Any movie that says it's going to stretch The Hobbit out into three films is going to need to take some liberties with the source material, mostly in the form of additions. Some of the changes made to the narrative in Jackson's LOTR movies broke with Tolkien's versions of events in a way that weakened the story. An Unexpected Journey happily avoids these pitfalls, even when it's filling in the blanks by inserting its own material or fleshing out events which were merely implied in the books.
Most of the changes made to the book's narrative are driven by a need to transform that book (which relies on an omniscient narrator and, often, the unseen internal thought processes of its characters) into a film. Both the book and the film are about not just Bilbo's physical there-and-back-again journey between The Shire and the Lonely Mountain, but also Bilbo's mental journey from timid, too-comfortable hobbit to a minor hero in his own right.

Enlarge / Bilbo's transformation from stay-at-home hobbit to unlikely hero is by necessity more rapid and more overt in the film.

Warner Bros.

In the book, a large part of Bilbo's transformation is shown through internal monologue and his first overtly heroic deed comes rather late in the game, when he saves the dwarves from giant spiders in Mirkwood and then later helps them escape imprisonment by the elves who live in the forest (material that, based on the pacing of this first movie, will probably crop up in the second of the three Hobbit films).
Because this film is split three ways (and because showing a character thinking to themselves is, at best, dull cinema), An Unexpected Journey needs to make this mental transformation happen both more quickly and more obviously. To make it more obvious that the Bilbo at the beginning of the story is entrenched in his own too-comfortable rut, there's a scene where Gandalf tells him so. To kickstart his transformation from timid to heroic, it is Bilbo (rather than Gandalf) who thinks to stall the trolls until they're turned to stone by the rising sun. And to really drive home his character's growth, by the end of the film Bilbo is standing up against wolves and orcs all by his lonesome to prove his worth to Thorin and company, and to himself. All of these are changes to the book's version of events, but none of them feel wildly inconsistent with Tolkien's narrative or with his characters.
Thorin's character has also been tweaked slightly for the film. His stubbornness and pride, qualities present in the book but only really emphasized near the end (and, coincidentally, in one of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales recalling the events of The Hobbit from Gandalf's perspective), is made explicit in several scenes. The film's Thorin also has a particular dislike for elves, where the book's Thorin has no particular distaste or love for them (save after being captured and held in Mirkwood by Thranduil and the wood-elves, but even then his beef is with them specifically and not the race as a whole). These character tweaks didn't make too much of a difference in this first movie but will pay dividends later when he's captured by Thranduil (probably in the second movie) and when he's negotiating with the men and elves for shares of Smaug's treasure after the dragon's defeat (probably in the third film).

Enlarge / The film's Thorin Oakenshield differs from the one depicted in the book, but the changes are consistent with his characterization in some of Tolkien's more obscure writings.

The last big change to The Hobbit's core narrative is Azog, an orc fought by Thorin at Moria who serves as Bilbo and the dwarves' primary antagonist this outing. Azog is indeed a character from the books—the battle outside Moria is depicted in one of the LOTR appendices and Azog is mentioned briefly in The Hobbit, though in the books another dwarf kills him during that battle and he has no particular dislike of Thorin.
This is another change that was necessitated to some degree by the source material, though I'm not sure how it will play out in the end. The vast majority of The Hobbit is presented in concise, cut-up chapters, and while Smaug is the de facto villain, he's not an immediate threat to the heroes until toward the end of the story (and he's dispatched after only a handful of chapters). The Necromancer is likewise a threat on a larger scale, but he has little impact on Bilbo and the dwarves. A more immediate antagonist is necessary to drive the action, and Azog fills that role well enough (though as villains go he's about as one-dimensional as they get).

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Issues with source material

So far, I've written a lot about what I've liked, but don't let me give you the wrong impression: there's a lot wrong with this movie. As much as I enjoy all things Tolkien, it's ultimately a film with more problems than virtues. The largest and most endemic is the source material itself.
The Hobbit is an excellent book for what it is: a relatively short, light, one-shot children's novel. I've found that peoples' opinion of the book varies largely based on when they first read it. I was very young the first time I read it, and as such my memories of the book are mostly positive. It was one of the first big "chapter books" I really got into, and in length, style, and subject matter it's a good bridge between more overtly kid-targeted fare like Goosebumps and young-adult fiction like The Lord of the Rings itself.

Enlarge / Bilbo and the dwarves' rescue from the trolls by Gandalf is the first example of the book's (and the film's) over-reliance on dei ex machina to save the day.

Warner Bros.

A side effect of this is that The Hobbit is much simpler, narratively speaking, than The Lord of the Rings itself. One of the story's chief weaknesses is its over-reliance on dei ex machina—Bilbo and the dwarves are twice separated from Gandalf in the early stages of the book, and twice Gandalf reappears just in time to save the party from what seems like certain doom. Twice (once while the party is run up fir trees by orcs and wolves, and once again at the end of the book during the Battle of Five Armies), eagles swoop in from nowhere to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. There are other scenes ripped from the pages of the book that bog the movie down—a battle between stone giants, mentioned briefly in The Hobbit but expanded into one of the movie's more laughable and superfluous sequences—but the sheer number of last-minute rescues is probably the biggest narrative failing that the book transmits to the film.
Things like this are less of an issue for children, who are rarely critical enough to stop and think, "Wait, did that make sense?" By the time you're watching the third such improbable rescue in as many hours play out on the screen, most adults will be left unable to suspend their disbelief.
Equally distracting is the movie's disjointed feel, especially in the first half. It's peppered with flashbacks and other breaks from the main action that help to expand the movie's scope, but they feel like exactly what they are: snippets from many different stories patched together. All of this material is either taken directly from Tolkien's writings (the dwarves' war in Moria) or is a logical expansion of events merely hinted at in the body of The Hobbit's text (anything involving Radagast, the Necromancer, or the White Council). The movie's attempt to bring them all together under one roof results in a sometimes piecemeal narrative where many of the seams between the stories are showing.

Padding, oh the padding

Much has been made of Jackson's decision to split the diminutive Hobbit into a staggering three films. Some of this is no doubt related to his desire to tie the events of The Hobbit more explicitly to those of The Lord of the Rings, thus imbuing the films with more weight than a straightforward book-to-film translation would have. Up until now, I was willing to give Jackson the benefit of the doubt, but the first movie hasn't convinced me that this was a necessary step.
What happens in the next two movies remains to be seen, but An Unexpected Journey is stuffed to the brim with filler material. This begins right out of the gate, where what starts as a simple expository framing device for the films (narrated by Ian Holm, who here reprises his role from the LOTR films as an older Bilbo Baggins; appropriate since even in-universe the body of The Hobbit is presented as Bilbo's self-penned memoirs) expands into an overlong and occasionally draggy scene that serves no other purpose than to give Elijah Wood some screen time.
A later scene where a flummoxed Bilbo Baggins has his pantry raided by hungry dwarves is similarly overlong; it turns out that the boring eating scenes and descriptions of food present in so much fantasy fiction is just as boring to watch as it is to read. It doesn't help that this (and a couple other scenes) are played much too broadly. Dwarves burping and trolls using hobbits as tissues may play well to younger viewers and those with juvenile senses of humor, but the theater full of adults who I watched the movie with looked on in stony and awkward silence.

Enlarge / If you go to see An Unexpected Journey, prepare to be chased by this guy and his pals for what feels like at least a quarter of the film.

Warner Bros.

A more serious problem is the sheer number of overlong battle and chase sequences. The former are replete with people running in slow motion and shouting "NOOOOOOOOO!" The latter try to introduce some tension into scenes that would otherwise just be about our heroes walking from one place to another, but by the second wolves-chasing-dwarves sequence (which itself followed a 10-to-15-minute segment in which the party is chased out of a cave by orcs) I was checking the time to see how much longer the movie was.
I ultimately suspect that, even with all of the added and expanded elements, Jackson had the material for perhaps two to two-and-a-half films and decided it would be easier to expand the series to three movies instead of murdering some of his darlings and cutting back. The decision was also probably driven by the studio, which stands to make roughly ten hojillion dollars from each Hobbit film released whether there's one movie or eight movies. It's safe to say that they exerted no pressure on Jackson to be more judicious in his editing, and that's a shame because this movie needs an editor like Gandalf needs pipe-weed.

A Not Wholly Unexpected Disappointment

The movies has other problems, of course; these are merely the biggest and most obvious. It takes forever to get going, and the first half of the movie is littered with flashbacks and side stories that lay the foundation for later films but drag the pacing of this one way down. It's often too jargon-y, throwing around phrases like "Morgul-blade" and "Rhosgobel rabbits" and "Belladonna Took" as though viewers should be able to make heads or tails of them without context. The main Lord of the Rings films succeeded in part because of their mainstream appeal, but An Unexpected Journey's focus on bringing material from Tolkien's notes and appendices into the fold often makes it feel like it's aimed only at the people with dog-eared copies of The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales on their bookshelves.
Based on this one film, I don't think that The Hobbit films will be to The Lord of the Rings films as the Star Wars prequels were to the original films, but they will undoubtedly by the lesser of the two trilogies. An Unexpected Journey is bloated where the LOTR movies are nimbler and more concise. It has a sort of forced epicness to it, in part due to The Hobbit being a simpler book with a narrower scope written for a younger audience. Martin Freeman's Bilbo is hands-down the best performance in the film (perhaps excepting Andy Serkis' short but scene-stealing reprisal of Gollum), but he too often has to take a backseat so a flashback or chase sequence can play out.
There are plenty of things to like about this movie, but they ultimately become evident only after you've had time to digest it, not while you're actually in the theater watching one of its many padded-out battle scenes. It's hard to say how the next two movies will pan out, but those already cynical about the adaptation will find little here to assuage their fears—it turns out that even a book-to-film adaptation that's true to the source material can still be tanked by shoddy filmmaking.

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Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech.