The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (Warner Bros., MGM, New Line Cinema, WingNut Films, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I eked out the time to watch a big movie; I’d just got a Blu-Ray boxed set on closeout at Target of all six films in Peter Jackson’s two cycles based on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, the three films based on the Lord of the Rings novels (which made sense: three big books and three movies, one from each) and the prequels he made out of Tolkien’s first Middle-Earth story, The Hobbit. Charles and I were both at least mildly interested in the films of The Hobbit even though stretching out one normal-sized novel (and what amounted to a young-adult novel, at that) into three movies (and three long movies, at that – the one we watched last night, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, had a running time of 169 minutes) really seemed like milking the property to death. I had read The Hobbit during the summer my mother took my brother and I for a three-month summer in a small village called Ajijic (pronounced “Ah-Hee-Heek”), Mexico, where I contended with the insects, drank a lot of soda and read more comic books than I ever had in my life, before or since, mainly because they were about the only reading matter available that was in English. (I suspect they were popular among young Mexicans who found them helpful in learning English.) I was 13 there and I loved the book, and when we got home I thought The Lord of the Rings would be clear sailing – only I gave up about a third of the way through the first book, The Fellowship of the Ring, hopelessly perplexed and wondering how I would ever get through the rest and sort out who was who and what side they were on. (Later a professor who’s taught classes on The Lord of the Rings said there’s a part about a third of the way through Fellowship in which a lot of people give up, probably for that same reason.)

So I was back of scratch when Charles and I screened the three Lord of the Rings movies and Charles, who’s read the cycle more than once, became my “Tolkien whisperer” the way I’d been his “Wagner whisperer” when we watched the videos of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung. The Hobbit begins with a prologue explaining that the dwarves once inhabited a magic mountain with huge gold supplies until their leader, originally a decent, beneficent ruler, went Alberich on them and accumulated a huge supply of gold. This attracted the attention of the dragon Fafner – oops, I mean Smaug – who invaded the dwarf kingdom, killed the king, terrorized the rest of the dwarves into fleeing and kept the gold for himself – though it’s not initially clear whether he wanted merely to possess the gold or actually to eat it. Then we meet the story’s unlikely quest figure, hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman, whose most famous previous credit was as Dr. Watson to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes in the BBC-TV series Sherlock!), who’s supposedly the uncle of Frodo Baggins, the quest figure of The Lord of the Rings). Bilbo gets tricked into hosting a party for a group of 13 dwarves (though some of them may be elves – one of my frustrations with Tolkien is the sheer number of peoples he populates his books with and how hard it is to keep track of them all) led by Thorin Oakenshield, who’s either the son or grandson of the old king who was deposed by Smaug and who wants to lead an expedition to reopen the old mountain and wants Bilbo to come along because they think he’s a burglar and will be able to figure out how to open the secret gate to the inside of the mountain (which is visible only during nighttime at one particular phase of the moon) and let them back in to fight Smaug and regain their home.

There are the usual panoply of irritating Tolkien characters – including Andy Serkis’s Gollum, who returns from the Lord of the Rings movies and does the riddle scene with Bilbo (about the only scene I remembered from my long-ago reading of the book) and Radagast (Sylvester McCoy), who joins the quest even though he’s a recluse who’s far more comfortable in the company of animals than people. (In one scene he tries to nurse an opossum – or at least something that looked like an opossum – to health, only it’s killed long-distance by the magic of one or more of the evil characters.) For most of its running time The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey plays like a Republic serial, with long stretches of ponderous exposition (most of it delivered by the various characters as they march through various forest, rivers, valleys, gulleys and whatnot) setting up spectacular action scenes that end in cliffhangers – in at least two cases literal cliffhangers, in which Our Heroes find themselves trapped on cliffs. There’s one quite good scene in which the questers are menaced by Stone Giants, basically piles of animate rocks that throw rocks at each other. They don’t seem to be attacking our heroes deliberately but their quarrels put our heroes’ lives in immediate jeopardy, and at one point I joked that Republic serial heroes only had to worry about being stuck on the edges of cliffs: these guys had to worry about the Stone Giants throwing boulders at the cliffs and literally making them disintegrate.

As The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey rambled its way through its inflated running time I found myself neither liking nor disliking the movie – it reminded me of that long-ago line written by a Los Angeles Times critic (whose name I have, alas, forgotten) who said that modern big-budget blockbusters don’t entertain the audience so much as bludgeon it into submission. Though there are quite a few talented actors in this film – including Martin Freeman’s on-screen partner Benedict Cumberbatch in the brief role of the Necromancer and Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage’s non-drag name) as the Great Goblin, along with Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, who appears as a vision about midway through the film and is, amazingly, its only certainly female character (Charles said that some of Tolkien’s species have in-between sex characteristics, including women with facial hair) – only one, Ian McKellen as Gandalf (repeating his role from The Lord of the Rings even though he’s 10 years older in this prequel and looks it), acts with real power and authority. When this film first came out in 2012 the critics hated it and it was, predictably, a great hit anyway, but seen nine years later it’s pretty much a ponderous bore and vastly padded from the relatively compact original material. It’s got its moments, but I’m not sure how soon I want to watch the second and third films in the cycle – and quite frankly after Charles and I watched Game of Thrones together (and quite liked it, even its controversial ending), I got really impatient with Tolkien’s whimsical approach to medievalist fantasy; had we watched this before Game of Thrones I might have liked it better even though Game of Thrones sometimes went too far in the other direction and featured so much greed, sex, murder and mayhem one ached to see at least an occasional reference to humanity’s more noble aspects.