When director Peter Jackson first pitched his idea to adapt the sprawling, three-book Lord of the Rings series for the big screen, he intended to make two movies at a cost of 75 million dollars. Somewhere along the line, the lineup rose from two movies to three and the budget from 75 million to amounts beyond the count of mortal men. It was worth it, though. The Lord of the Rings movies debuted to massive critical acclaim, enormous box office receipts, and went on to inspire the kind of devotion usually reserved for Star Wars devotees and those in thrall to the heavier doomsday cults.
When it was announced that Jackson would be directing an adaptation of The Hobbit, a lighter, smaller book set before events of the Lord of the Rings but within the same sword-and-sorcery universe, fans watched this process happen in reverse. Plans for one movie became two, then three, and soon all were wondering how the filmmakers would manage to stretch the shortest book in the set to last for three movies.
They manage about as well as can be expected, which is to say not particularly well, although the film is not a disaster. It is well-made, with sumptuous visuals, a strong cast, and careful attention to detail, but the pace is stretched out and it feels stretched out. Despite some moments of grandeur, the most interesting thing about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is the story behind how it came to be adapted and what that says about big-budget movie-making today.
The plot: unassuming hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) lives a pleasantly sedate life in The Shire, that most bucolic of fantasy backwaters. Adventure comes knocking in the form of gray-garbed wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and a small host of nomadic dwarves led by Thorin Oakensheild (Richard Armitage) who enlist Bilbo’s help in traveling to their faraway ancestral homeland and reclaiming it from a very big, very angry, very dangerous dragon named Smaug.
That synopsis probably didn’t take long to read, but the movie takes its sweet time setting it up. By flashback and speech, by show and by tell, Jackson and his screenwriters make sure the audience is filled in on every detail of the why and the how and the where and the what of the quest before it gets blessedly underway, occasionally taking the time to repeat themselves for those who may have missed it.
That said, there are parts of the movie that are as exciting and charming as anything from The Lord of the Rings movies or, better yet, from The Hobbit. The best scene in the movie is a leisurely battle of wits between Bilbo, who has gotten lost in a dark, foreboding cave, and Gollum, a loathsome, bug-eyed creature who will show Bilbo the way out if he can best him in a riddle contest. If Bilbo loses, Gollum will eat him. The Lord of the Rings movies subsisted on spectacular battle scenes involving thousands of combatants and pyrotechnics aplenty. An Unexpected Journey has a few of those, most of them embellished far beyond the space they occupied in the book, but they have less meaning here because the stakes are so much lower. But in the riddle scene, we know exactly what the stakes are, and we can relax and enjoy the maze of wordplay built up as the two characters slowly circle each other. It’s a highlight.
But Jackson, or more likely the studio executives hoping for another trilogy-sized windfall, do not or cannot stop at that. The script pulls in additional material from all kinds of sources, including extraneous text from The Lord of the Rings novels, author J.R.R. Tolkien’s copious notes, and Peter Jackson’s imagination, to fill us in on details of the story about which we simply do not care. Whenever the movie strays from Bilbo’s little big adventuring, it loses focus and slows down. Maybe it couldn’t have happened any other way. The pile of gold amassed by The Lord of the Rings movies proved too tempting, and what should have been an intimate performance has been set on a stage three times too big.
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