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| Review by Benn Robbins |
Given what I know about Peter Jackson and what I have seen previously from the New Zealand film maestro I must say that the penultimate film in the Middle Earth Saga was kind of a let down.
This chapter of the Hobbit trilogy should have been entitled “A very expected journey and the desolation of a good film maker”
It was grand and epic and emotional and exciting.
But most of all it was really boring.
I don’t know if it had to do with the fact that we have literally seen everything, in this film, before or if it was because at this point Jackson is so sick of the world of Middle Earth that he is basically phoning this one in.
It could have also been that this film looks more and more like a video game and less like a film with so much more digital 3D graphics being used than previous films.
I dunno.
Anyone familiar with the story knows what is going to happen and it was the same for the LoTR trilogy, but it was HOW he presented the material. From Fellowship to Two Towers to the climax of Return of the King, Jackson built upon each story and upped the ante and the storytelling. With The Hobbit Trilogy he seems to just seems to get more and more tired and meh.
Lets talk about the fact that The Hobbit, a book about a third the length of just one of the LotR books, which only got a film each, was split into three films.
Now that they are all out and I have seen them, I really ask myself why? Other than the obvious reason of money money money there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to have turned this book into what ends up being an 8 hour epic.
8 HOURS! Let that sink in.
By that logic the LotR trilogy should have been about 28 1/2 hours long. It makes no sense. I am a huge Tolkien fan. I love the Silmarillion but Eru save those who tried to sit though something like that.
But I digress. What works in this film is the bits added from the appendices and the scenes that were references from The Silmarillion. What didn’t work are all the long flying tracking shots and the spinning camerawork. All the walking and high above camera angles of mountains and New Zealand.
I understand it is pretty and gorgeous to look at but the film started to feel like an ad by the Commonwealth of New Zealand’s tourist ministry.
Misplaced slow motion and awkward editing created pacing problems where the film took way to long on trivial things and spent little to no time on character and scene development.
A perfect example of this is the “romance” between Tauriel, a character created for the film version of The Hobbit, wonderfully played by Evangeline Lilly, I must say and heart throb dwarf that is conveniently less hairy and bulbous, Kili, played by Aidan Turner is a big let down and by the time the film ends. The final culmination of all the cobbled together scenes of their forced relationship are so “wedged in” to an already dense plot that all I was left with was “Meh.
What was the purpose of that again?”. Having this weird romance in the film for no other reason than it seems to hook in the female audience is trite and very out of place in this story at best.
The Hobbit was originally written as a children’s book or at least a younger audience that the LotR books were written for and the thing that I loved about it is that it is fun and adventurous and has a great spirit to it. There was a sense of heroism and personal growth of all the characters, not just Bilbo Baggins. That the idea of not “judging a book by it’s cover” runs throughout the book. The films of the books have become grossly overwrought with pathos and violence with a sullen, sadness and hopelessness. The films kind of bummed me out and left me feeling kind of crappy instead of making me feel uplifted and that even at the worst of times great things can prevail.
So, my recommendation is go see it.
Go in with little expectations.
Watch the pretty CGI dragon. Watch the cool video game graphics. Try and figure out what the crap is going on with the creepy CGI’d Billy Connolly dwarf that looks like it came from the same nightmare that CGI young Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen spawned from in that crappy X-Men 3 movie. Laugh at the weird out of place elf dialogue between Thranduil and Legolas.
At least it is the shortest film of the 6 movies in either of the two trilogies. So it has that going for it right?
Also, visit New Zealand.
