In which I hardly spoil The Hobbit at all

I'm going to have to almost beg some of my friends to read this post, since after my post about The Dark Knight Rises my reputation for spoiling things has approached mythic proportions in certain circles. So here goes: Guys, come oonnn. Every single one of you has read the damn book.

That said, if you haven't read The Hobbit, go do that. Seriously, just go. Don't use the internet until you've finished it. Your life will be better for it. I'll wait.

With that out of the way, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey was a positive experience on the whole. It also made me sad. Sad because I came away convinced that while Peter Jackson--no, not Peter Jackson, since we can't truly know the minds of the creative people involved*--but some entity or force, either a person or the emanation of commonalities in multiple persons' psyches--we'll call it Fred--brought The Hobbit to the screen as an act of artistic love; and a second entity or force--we'll call it Satan--compelled the story to be stretched into three long movies in a naked grab for money.

This is not actually what I expected. I thought of the Peter Jackson who shopped a two-movie Lord of the Rings for years until Robert Shaye made the brilliant--but then bold--suggestion that the films be a trilogy. When I first read that The Hobbitses would be not two movies but three, the article included some gushing by Mr. Jackson about all the extra material he was excited to be able to fit into the newly trilogized series. I now suspect that Mr. Jackson was compelled by Satan to say this. About 10-20% of the film's run time is padding and cruft that I can't believe anyone was excited to be able to include.

The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Okay Film is a prolonged battle between Fred and Satan, with both gaining and losing the upper hand at various points. The arc of the movie is a happy one, inasmuch as Satan solidly controls the movie in the beginning but Fred manages to prevail in the end, with only a brief resurgence just before the credits to promise that there will be a sequel.

Fred's influence on the film meant that the worst of my fears were averted. I had worried that there would be no differentiation in tone between The Lord of the Ringses and The Hobbitses. Instead, where Fred had his way, at least, there seemed to be an awareness that LotR belongs to the genre of Epic Fantasy while The Hobbit belongs to the genre of Fantasy Adventure. This is a difference that makes a difference. For example, Tolkien's habit of having his characters spontaneously bust rhymes was suppressed in the LotR movies. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Musical, not every song that Tolkien wrote shows up (by a long shot) but some of the characters sing, and they do so more spontaneously and with more coordination than anyone in the LotR movies did. There's also a slightly cartoonish veneer over the whole thing, which is not wholly unwelcome... but I'll get to that later, because it is mostly unwelcome.

Martin Freeman is definitely a servant of Fred, and Fred's power is at its apogee when Freeman's Bilbo encounters Andy Serkis' Gollum. In fact, this movie actually excited me about the character of Gollum in a way that the LotR movies didn't. LotR Gollum was innovative and praiseworthy; the Riddle Game would have been a brilliant scene if Andy Serkis had been on screen himself in grey makeup.**

Satan's influence on the film meant that I was disappointed in unexpected ways. Perhaps the most pervasive effect of Satan's influence was--believe it or not--the CGI. Basically all the goblins, trolls, wargs, eagles, staircases, hedgehogs, and bunny rabbits are fairly obviously digitized illusions. It seemed pretty blatant that after demanding eight hours of movie, Satan was not willing to shell out for bigatures, props, and makeup on the scale of LotR. (After all, we were all going to see the movie anyway, and aren't computers 10 years better than they were 10 years ago? That has to be enough.) As a result, the movie mostly works, but it never inspires the awe that its predecessors did because it is mostly fake. See the aforementioned cartoonish veneer.

The inserted character Azog, who is apparently set to be the series' visible Big Bad (allowing for Smaug to be handled more intelligently, like Jaws), is particularly unconvincing, which is a particular shame. He also feels thoroughly obligatory and joyless... and pretty detachable. He may not be as much an attempt to pad out the movie as to create a throughline in an otherwise episodic story, but the attempt is misguided. If I were a betting man I would bet that his prominence was ramped up in post-production to fill the void left by the Necromancer, who presumably was going to be the villain of the first half of The Hobbit but will now be contained instead in the second third.

The writing is uneven, in places as insubstantial as the CGI, but I expected weakness there. I am really surprised to have been so visually disappointed by The Hobbit's superfluities. It is true that a lot of the superfluity is super-superfluous. Elijah Wood, in particular, seemed to have just wandered onto set on his way to pick up his check. There are several characters who we are apparently just supposed to be happy to see, and we don't do much more than see them.

I am more optimistic about the second movie than I might be. It will probably consist mostly of fanfic about the White Council and the Necromancer, but I will give that a go if Necky is a more compelling villain than Azog.

It's actually a little frightening how effective TH:tUJ's artistic triage was. Fred and Satan both knew what notes would have to play true in order for fans to come back for part 2/3. What absolutely had to work really worked, but there was lot of slack in between.

Finally, a lot of fuss has been made about the framerate. I can't speak to it. What I saw was obviously old-fashioned 24 FPS, and if anything, it actually ended up blurrier than other movies I've seen. So if you can, I guess, try the 48 FPS, maybe. I don't know. All the reviews I read complained about it. It's probably the future, though, so get used to it, I guess.

* And certain people insist that copies of The Silmarillion burn when Peter Jackson touches them, and he wants to cancel Christmas to make more room in the year for warg attacks.
** Not to minimize the contributions of the digital puppeteers who created the physical performance. It's beyond me to say where Serkis' decisions end and the animators' decisions begin.