When Peter Jackson announced ‘The Hobbit’ would be two movies, no one was surprised. When he announced it was going to be three movies, the decision seemed more capitalistic than artistic.
I’ve already complained at length about the decision to split The Hobbit into three films; a decision which makes about as much sense as making Green Eggs and Ham into a 13 episode HBO series, or turning the game Hungry Hungry Hippos into a movie. Oh, anyway, An Unexpected Journey is finally here so it’s time to make an informed judgement. Well, a semi-informed judgement.
It seems that there’s simply not enough material in the novel to justify this money-making move to split it into three films.
It seems that there’s simply not enough material in the novel to justify this money-making move to split it into three films. As Chuck explains in his great review, this first instalment feels aimless and meandering as a result; a gang of increasingly annoying dwarves go from place to place, battling CGI monster after CGI monster. By the time the credits roll (or whatever it is that 3D credits do; bulge, perhaps) it’s deeply unsatisfying, as if we’ve only watched a third of a film. Because that’s exactly what we’ve done.
This was never a problem for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all three films of which were proper movies in their own right, each with a beginning, middle and end. After all, each one was based on a single novel. Yes, The Fellowship of the Ring ended with the beginning of an adventure, but there was still a sense of finality to the piece. An Unexpected Journey, on the other hand, feels like a chopped up portion of one movie.
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Photo Credit: Warner Bros.