The Hobbit Movie: Spoiler-Free Review
Dec. 24th, 2012 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ljwritesHere's something you might not often hear from a Lord of the Rings fan: Elves bore the hell out of me. I'm not talking the elves of the First and Second Ages, actual red-blooded bastards like Fëanor who destroyed himself and his entire line in pursuit of three sparkly gems, or his fellows who disobeyed their benevolent Valar overlords to forge a way to Middle Earth and committed lots of murder in the process. Those were the interesting elves, the ones who actually wanted stuff in the world and made mistakes, even committed crimes over those desires.
The elves of the Third Age, however, the ones in the LotR trilogy, have most of the interesting and all traces of evil beaten out of them much like mountains smoothed down by the ages. These folks are just echoes of their ancestors or younger selves, fading from Middle Earth and accepting their fate while mourning it. They're relics--majestic and powerful relics, yes, but their halls ring with silence and pale music where once there had been the clangor of laughter and strife. The elves of the Third Age are an old and tired race, ready to step aside for the younger races after one last hurrah.
The main trilogy was in many ways about the changing of the guard from the elder races of elves and dwarves to humans (or Men) and hobbits. The grandeur of the elves was well-represented in the loooong passages devoted to Rivendell and Lorien, and their last sparks of vitality in the cheerful antics of Legolas--who also, inevitably, also fell victim to the sea-longing. We have a long list of human locales and characters to choose from, and of course the hobbits and their home in the Shire form the emotional core of the entire story.
Where does that leave the dwarves? We had a stalwart warrior in Gimli son of Gloin, and we got to see a little of Moria after it became, literally, the Black Pit crawling with fell creatures. We never got to see them as a people, though, none of their culture or cities or civilization. We did get some glimpses through Gimli, in his unwavering loyalty, stubbornness and hot temper, warmth and compassion. Unlike with the elves, though, we never saw what was being lost with the dwarves prior to total destruction.
And of course in the LotR movies we didn't even get Gimli at all but a blustering fool. It was sort of an understandable decision, given how Legolas, the actual jokester of the totally straight duo, was contractually obligated not to smile and John Rhys-Davis as Gimli had the actual acting chops to be a comic relief. On the other hand the humor was so cheap and the character so crass I facepalmed my way through most of his appearances. In the movies as well as the books, the dwarves are the least represented of the major races.
Tolkien's earlier novel The Hobbit, the precursor to LotR which begins with thirteen dwarves setting off to find their long-lost homeland, should have been the story about dwarves and their civilization but never fulfilled that promise. The dwarves start off promisingly enough, with hints of both down-to-earth fun and an alien way of seeing the world. Later on, though, they become an undifferentiated bumbling mass that Bilbo has to rescue time and again.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The scope and ambition of The Hobbit were smaller than its sequel trilogy, and Professor Tolkien was telling the story with a fairy-tale and comic sensibility. The story was also mostly about Bilbo's shift from a comfortable middle-class existence to heroism (and back again, of course, in the archetypal hero's journey), so the short way to show this progression was to get the dwarves in trouble over and over again so Bilbo could bail them out. The dwarf kingdom was, again, a plundered and dead place, and we never got a better sense of dwarves as a people than in LotR.
Enter the film version of The Hobbit, almost ten years after the last Lord of the Rings movie release. My husband and I were puzzled to hear they were making a trilogy of movies again. What was there in The Hobbit to make three movies out of? We went to the theater on a bitterly cold night, still wondering and somewhat dreading the thought of a movie padded out to squeeze every last drop from the udder of that cash cow.
When we saw the movie, however, the decision to make three movies started to make sense. I don't care if it's a cash-cow move, I'll happily pay for it. Or to put it more succinctly:
First, the decision is good for further developing the setting. I was impressed at the way the first movie delved deeper into the world, moving forward with a confidence in the fan base that partly predated the earlier movies but was also enlarged and reinvigorated by the earlier cinematic releases. I loved seeing what Erebor was like before Smaug came, and what the depredations of the dragon were like. I thrilled at the flashback to the battle where Thorin earned the title of Oakenshield. It made for a slower movie, yes, but it also made for a deeper and fuller experience of the world that promises to be a solid foundation for the new trilogy.
Second, the decision makes sense from a character development point of view. The original Hobbit was really too short to ever do justice to thirteen dwarves, so it's no wonder Tolkien never really tried except with four or five of them. A single movie couldn't have done it, either, but with three movies there's a chance to actually develop the dwarves--and by extension, the civilization they came from.
And if the movie took liberties with the source material to achieve those ends, I say take away. I loved the sense of the dwarves that came through various changes, both as a group and as individuals. Not all thirteen dwarves are equal in importance and interest, which is a good thing: If the script had tried to do that, it would have degenerated into an incomprehesnible mess. Instead, the creative team brilliantly flipped the challenge on its head. Thirteen might be too much to develop as thirteen distinct characters, at least in the first movie, but it's a great number to develop as a group.
The result is a stunning visual effect of not just a group but a people. Gone are the thirteen color-coded hoods that Tolkien described but instead an array of styles, looks, and personalities that give a sense of a people scattered far and wide, each with his own life, story, and more than his share of hardships. From rough-and-tumble warrior Dwalin to fastidious head waiter Dori, I found myself entranced by the earthy contentment and explosive color of the dwarvish gathering.
Professor Tolkien's dwarves might have degenerated from a colorful start to become a bunch of bearded basket cases, but Peter Jackson follows that early characterization through to exciting action scenes and moving character scenes alike. The dwarves' preternatural reflexes from the cleanup scene in Bag's End, for instance, are put to good use in chaotic yet clever action scenes where the dwarves use both brains and brawn to overcome obstacles.
And their own prettyboy archer, of course.
Also, rather than the cowardly gold-grubbers they increasingly become in the book, in the movies the dwarves show genuine personality and caring for each other and, increasingly, for Bilbo as they come to accept him as one of their own. They may be prickly and suspicious little bastards, probably with good reason, but once you're in you're in.
Both the best and the worst of dwarvish qualities come through the character of their leader, Thorin, who is an honest-to-goodness hero with a generous heart, someone who has endured so much and whom men would gladly follow to their deaths. He is also hot-tempered, stubborn, and can hold a grudge like it's a competition. We see both his greatness and the seeds of his downfall in his deeply sympathetic portrayal. The script did a great job of giving the sense that you would throttle the guy for with his own beard or take a blade to the gut for him at different times.
Remember how I mentioned how boring elves are? They make what I think was a great appearance in this movie. They were a contrast to our dwarves at every point--tall, slender, and androgynous in our modern code of beauty in contrast to the dwarves' short and stocky builds, ethereal and artsy against the dwarves' down-to-earth concerns. Also, the elven women's faces have no hair. Evidently it says so right on the dwarves' scripts.
The bloodless elves of the Third Age are a great foil for the fire-in-the-belly dwarves, and I don't think it's an accident that the battle scene involving elves was pared down to the bare minimum while the bulk of the elven scenes were of them talking and being woo mysterious. Elves seem apart from the world in even the bloodiest scenes, striking from a distance and with a swiftness that enemies can't quite touch. Dwarves on the other hand are right in the thick of everything, getting and giving (mostly giving) the scuffs and the bloody gaping wounds to show for it. The contrast between elves who talk and dwarves who do stuff was an effective one, and effectively built up dwarven antipathy for elven apathy.
I liked the movie overall, but the writing also had its flaws; there were a few blatant Aesop Moments with Gandalf, and one scene was nothing but endless talk because evidently simply being near elves gives you some kind of verbosity virus. (Dwarves and hobbits seem to be happily immune.) At times the action scenes bordered on being gratuitous, though I found them enjoyable for the most part.
All in all, as of the first movie The Hobbit is coming out strong and I hope the series will continue in this vein for the other two. It fills a dwarf-shaped hole in the worldbuilding, has competent writing and amazing production values. It also paints in other aspects of Middle Earth that I will not discuss in depth lest I spoil the soup. Whether you're a fan of Tolkien's world and would like to see more of it, and/or want some fast-paced action and lots of stylized violence, I think you'll enjoy this movie.
Oh, and also:
The elves of the Third Age, however, the ones in the LotR trilogy, have most of the interesting and all traces of evil beaten out of them much like mountains smoothed down by the ages. These folks are just echoes of their ancestors or younger selves, fading from Middle Earth and accepting their fate while mourning it. They're relics--majestic and powerful relics, yes, but their halls ring with silence and pale music where once there had been the clangor of laughter and strife. The elves of the Third Age are an old and tired race, ready to step aside for the younger races after one last hurrah.
The main trilogy was in many ways about the changing of the guard from the elder races of elves and dwarves to humans (or Men) and hobbits. The grandeur of the elves was well-represented in the loooong passages devoted to Rivendell and Lorien, and their last sparks of vitality in the cheerful antics of Legolas--who also, inevitably, also fell victim to the sea-longing. We have a long list of human locales and characters to choose from, and of course the hobbits and their home in the Shire form the emotional core of the entire story.
Where does that leave the dwarves? We had a stalwart warrior in Gimli son of Gloin, and we got to see a little of Moria after it became, literally, the Black Pit crawling with fell creatures. We never got to see them as a people, though, none of their culture or cities or civilization. We did get some glimpses through Gimli, in his unwavering loyalty, stubbornness and hot temper, warmth and compassion. Unlike with the elves, though, we never saw what was being lost with the dwarves prior to total destruction.
And of course in the LotR movies we didn't even get Gimli at all but a blustering fool. It was sort of an understandable decision, given how Legolas, the actual jokester of the totally straight duo, was contractually obligated not to smile and John Rhys-Davis as Gimli had the actual acting chops to be a comic relief. On the other hand the humor was so cheap and the character so crass I facepalmed my way through most of his appearances. In the movies as well as the books, the dwarves are the least represented of the major races.
Tolkien's earlier novel The Hobbit, the precursor to LotR which begins with thirteen dwarves setting off to find their long-lost homeland, should have been the story about dwarves and their civilization but never fulfilled that promise. The dwarves start off promisingly enough, with hints of both down-to-earth fun and an alien way of seeing the world. Later on, though, they become an undifferentiated bumbling mass that Bilbo has to rescue time and again.
There are a couple of reasons for this. The scope and ambition of The Hobbit were smaller than its sequel trilogy, and Professor Tolkien was telling the story with a fairy-tale and comic sensibility. The story was also mostly about Bilbo's shift from a comfortable middle-class existence to heroism (and back again, of course, in the archetypal hero's journey), so the short way to show this progression was to get the dwarves in trouble over and over again so Bilbo could bail them out. The dwarf kingdom was, again, a plundered and dead place, and we never got a better sense of dwarves as a people than in LotR.
Enter the film version of The Hobbit, almost ten years after the last Lord of the Rings movie release. My husband and I were puzzled to hear they were making a trilogy of movies again. What was there in The Hobbit to make three movies out of? We went to the theater on a bitterly cold night, still wondering and somewhat dreading the thought of a movie padded out to squeeze every last drop from the udder of that cash cow.
When we saw the movie, however, the decision to make three movies started to make sense. I don't care if it's a cash-cow move, I'll happily pay for it. Or to put it more succinctly:
First, the decision is good for further developing the setting. I was impressed at the way the first movie delved deeper into the world, moving forward with a confidence in the fan base that partly predated the earlier movies but was also enlarged and reinvigorated by the earlier cinematic releases. I loved seeing what Erebor was like before Smaug came, and what the depredations of the dragon were like. I thrilled at the flashback to the battle where Thorin earned the title of Oakenshield. It made for a slower movie, yes, but it also made for a deeper and fuller experience of the world that promises to be a solid foundation for the new trilogy.
Second, the decision makes sense from a character development point of view. The original Hobbit was really too short to ever do justice to thirteen dwarves, so it's no wonder Tolkien never really tried except with four or five of them. A single movie couldn't have done it, either, but with three movies there's a chance to actually develop the dwarves--and by extension, the civilization they came from.
And if the movie took liberties with the source material to achieve those ends, I say take away. I loved the sense of the dwarves that came through various changes, both as a group and as individuals. Not all thirteen dwarves are equal in importance and interest, which is a good thing: If the script had tried to do that, it would have degenerated into an incomprehesnible mess. Instead, the creative team brilliantly flipped the challenge on its head. Thirteen might be too much to develop as thirteen distinct characters, at least in the first movie, but it's a great number to develop as a group.
The result is a stunning visual effect of not just a group but a people. Gone are the thirteen color-coded hoods that Tolkien described but instead an array of styles, looks, and personalities that give a sense of a people scattered far and wide, each with his own life, story, and more than his share of hardships. From rough-and-tumble warrior Dwalin to fastidious head waiter Dori, I found myself entranced by the earthy contentment and explosive color of the dwarvish gathering.
Professor Tolkien's dwarves might have degenerated from a colorful start to become a bunch of bearded basket cases, but Peter Jackson follows that early characterization through to exciting action scenes and moving character scenes alike. The dwarves' preternatural reflexes from the cleanup scene in Bag's End, for instance, are put to good use in chaotic yet clever action scenes where the dwarves use both brains and brawn to overcome obstacles.
And their own prettyboy archer, of course.
Also, rather than the cowardly gold-grubbers they increasingly become in the book, in the movies the dwarves show genuine personality and caring for each other and, increasingly, for Bilbo as they come to accept him as one of their own. They may be prickly and suspicious little bastards, probably with good reason, but once you're in you're in.
Both the best and the worst of dwarvish qualities come through the character of their leader, Thorin, who is an honest-to-goodness hero with a generous heart, someone who has endured so much and whom men would gladly follow to their deaths. He is also hot-tempered, stubborn, and can hold a grudge like it's a competition. We see both his greatness and the seeds of his downfall in his deeply sympathetic portrayal. The script did a great job of giving the sense that you would throttle the guy for with his own beard or take a blade to the gut for him at different times.
Remember how I mentioned how boring elves are? They make what I think was a great appearance in this movie. They were a contrast to our dwarves at every point--tall, slender, and androgynous in our modern code of beauty in contrast to the dwarves' short and stocky builds, ethereal and artsy against the dwarves' down-to-earth concerns. Also, the elven women's faces have no hair. Evidently it says so right on the dwarves' scripts.
The bloodless elves of the Third Age are a great foil for the fire-in-the-belly dwarves, and I don't think it's an accident that the battle scene involving elves was pared down to the bare minimum while the bulk of the elven scenes were of them talking and being woo mysterious. Elves seem apart from the world in even the bloodiest scenes, striking from a distance and with a swiftness that enemies can't quite touch. Dwarves on the other hand are right in the thick of everything, getting and giving (mostly giving) the scuffs and the bloody gaping wounds to show for it. The contrast between elves who talk and dwarves who do stuff was an effective one, and effectively built up dwarven antipathy for elven apathy.
I liked the movie overall, but the writing also had its flaws; there were a few blatant Aesop Moments with Gandalf, and one scene was nothing but endless talk because evidently simply being near elves gives you some kind of verbosity virus. (Dwarves and hobbits seem to be happily immune.) At times the action scenes bordered on being gratuitous, though I found them enjoyable for the most part.
All in all, as of the first movie The Hobbit is coming out strong and I hope the series will continue in this vein for the other two. It fills a dwarf-shaped hole in the worldbuilding, has competent writing and amazing production values. It also paints in other aspects of Middle Earth that I will not discuss in depth lest I spoil the soup. Whether you're a fan of Tolkien's world and would like to see more of it, and/or want some fast-paced action and lots of stylized violence, I think you'll enjoy this movie.
Oh, and also:
