The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Cert 12a, 169 mins - review

The first part of Peter Jackson’s latest trilogy already feels a bit stretched but children will love the dragons, dwarves, wizards and wigs
19 January 2013

The first review of The Hobbit is still the best. It’s the reader’s report written by Rayner Unwin, the son of the book’s original publisher, Stanley Unwin, back in the Thirties.

"Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit-hole and never went for adventures, at last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves perswaded him to go. He had a very exiting time fighting goblins and wargs… This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of five and nine."

At the time Rayner Unwin was 10.

The Lord of the Rings is a book for children too, I would say, although many fans may dispute that. But about The Hobbit there can be no dispute. It's written in a chaffing, avuncular and deliberately simple style, with Tolkien often reverting to the first person and then quite patronisingly addressing the child as "you", as he explains the Hobbit world to a little one of limited experience.

Peter Jackson, though, has made this grandiose film of The Hobbit to be as much like his immense Lord of the Rings Trilogy as possible. To this end, outdoing the two-part finales of Twilight and Harry Potter, he has stretched out this fairly short book into three long films. The commercial imperative for this is obvious but it is otherwise crackers.

This first instalment, nearly three hours long, draws on only the first six chapters. To fill up, Jackson has padded out Tolkien's scenes, brought back characters from the Trilogy, and added others that are new, including Radagast the Brown, a character only passingly mentioned by Tolkien, turned here into a major player, an entirely annoying eco-wizard played by the lamest Doctor Who, Sylvester McCoy, who has birds nesting in his hair, a tree growing through his house, and gets about on a superfast sled drawn by rabbits. Yes, rabbits. Saruman the White (Christopher Lee, impersonating the Turin Shroud) has also been sent back from LOTR where he belongs. "Do not speak to me of Radagast the Brown," he says in his profound way. "He is a fatuous fellow: it is his excessive consumption of mushrooms."

Rather more appealingly, Cate Blanchett has been imported from LOTR too, to reprise her turn as top elf "Galadriel, the White Lady of Lothlorien", drifting around in a shimmering translucent dress, perhaps not even translucent enough for some tastes, since she is the only female character in the film (there are no women at all in the book; Tolkien forgot them, I expect).

Also added is Azog the Pale Orc (Manu Bennett in motion-capture), who rides around on a white warg or devil-dog, trying to pay back the regal dwarf Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) for cutting his arm off in a previous encounter, leaving him with a nasty grappling hook, Abu Hamza-style.

After an apocalyptic pre-credits sequence, in which the dragon Smaug demolishes the dwarves' Lonely Mountain home to get their gold, there is a long and dreadful opening scene in which 13 surviving dwarves mirthfully gather, under Gandalf's guidance, in Bilbo's home, to enjoy a raucous dinner, in effect an office party, complete with songs and dud jokes, before setting off on their adventure. The heart almost fails before this bit is through.

Jackson has filmed The Hobbit in groundbreaking "HFR 3D", in which the film races along at 48 frames per second, twice the usual rate. It has had the same effect some people have found with HD TV of revealing more sags and wrinkles than you need to see. The dwarves, wearing extensive facial prostheses, look terrible. Their bulbous, hooked noses are revealed as absurdly false, as are their huge beards, eyebrows and wigs, all, save for the tresses of posh Thorin, made from bristly yak hair. (The whole film is bizarrely hairy — save for its prime villains, Azog and Gollum, both malevolently bald, like rival visions of William Hague gone to the bad.)

Then again, the HD makes Bilbo's big hairy feet an embarrassment; Martin Freeman is so obviously wearing clumpy hobbit boots that he can't walk properly. Nor is he, by the way, any great turn in any other respect, just playing the humble innocent again — "Me? Little me?" — that served him so well as Watson. It doesn't help that, in order for Gandalf to tower over him, they couldn't actually act their shared scenes together.

What does work well here are the motion capture and completely CGI effects, in the big battle setpieces with wargs, orcs, goblins, stone giants, trolls and eagles. They are really exiting, as Rayner said, although even smaller children will soon realise that however dreadfully assailed, none of our heroes is ever at any risk of actual harm. These scenes benefit, of course, from the fact that while it is no longer OK to rejoice in the slaughter of, say, Red Indians for being savages, there are no such problems when it comes to goblins. What else are such fantasies for?

Absolutely the best thing in the film is the subterranean riddle scene between Bilbo and Gollum, brilliantly played in mo-cap by Andy Serkis again, the genius of this form of physical theatre. He's thrilling as he slinks about talking to himself madly. "We loves games, doesn't we, precious? Does it like to play?"

So, even in this first instalment, Jackson has delivered plenty more of the big setpieces that fans loved in the trilogy, albeit at the cost of making The Hobbit far more imperial and epic than it needs to be. But there. As Dr Johnson told Mrs Thrale: "Babies do not want (said he) to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little minds." Plenty of giants and castles here.

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