Light On Dark Water

The New Hobbit Movie

I had definitely mixed feelings about the Lord of the Rings movies. The last of those three was the subject of the very first Sunday Night Journal, back in 2004. Since then my view of them has grown more negative. I think my complaint that 

The films seem driven by a compulsion to overstate and overdo, to crowd every possible moment with action, to pile more and yet more noisy dangers, yet more unconvincing physical stunts, onto the story…

was correct, and in retrospect now these tendencies seem more prominent and less forgiveable. Too much of it seems wrong in tone, and visually wrong, though I realize that's a very subjective opinion. I didn't like the portrayal of Aragorn…etc. etc. etc. I haven't had much desire to see them again.

Well, it looks like those tendencies are even more pronounced in the first of what's intended to be a trilogy (which I didn't know until today). Jeffrey Overstreet says:

[Director Peter Jackson is] too fond of muscular power, drawn to show characters dueling instead of developing. He’ll seize any mention of strife in the story and exaggerate it into absurdity….

But where Tolkien served the head and the heart, Jackson serves the appetite for adrenalin rush….

Presented in 3D—at the much-hyped forty-eight frames per second—An Unexpected Journey has more in common with amusement parks than literature.

The whole review is here.

The bad thing is that I'll probably give in to the temptation to see it, if only because at least some parts of it will be very pretty to look at.

Update: according to Steven Greydanus, it's even worse.

Maclin Horton
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25 responses to “The New Hobbit Movie”

  1. Don

    I’m not going to bother with it. I saw The Fellowship of the Ring and was unimpressed. Who needed a movie based on the Cliffs Notes of the Lord of the Rings? When I heard they were making The Hobbit, I thought it had a chance to be good, since it is a lighter story and short enough to fit in a movie. Then I heard he was padding it to a trilogy and I gave up.

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  2. Janet

    Well, those are my exact feeling about the LotR trilogy, so I’ve been wavering about whether or not I was going to see The Hobbit. I was, but now I’m not so sure.
    Don, I had the same reaction to the announcement of the trilogy.
    AMDG

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  3. Rob G

    Originally I didn’t mind the idea of a trilogy, since my understanding was that Jackson was also going to work in the backstory from the Unfinished Tales or Book of Lost Tales. But apparently he hasn’t so much done that as bloated the film with battles and such — we get a lot more action but not a whole lot more story.

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  4. Craig

    Yes, it is pretty disappointing to see how things are shaping up for Bilbo et al. I am one of the few (around here) who likes the LotR films, but reading a few reviews of the new film has me worried. I’ll still see it — it can’t be as bad as The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, can it? — but I am sorry to see that Peter Jackson has apparently lost his balance. (Incidentally, I can’t help wondering how it would have been different had the original director, Guillermo del Toro, seen it through.)
    Many of the reviews I’ve looked at comment on the way the tone of this film is closer to LotR: darker, more serious, less playful and childlike than the book. But this, in itself, does not really bother me. Tolkien himself began re-writing The Hobbit in a style closer to that of LotR (but stopped when his publishers said they were not interested).
    That said, a film should still be a film, not a video game. And the high frame rate (48 frames per second) has been drawing generally poor reviews.
    Anthony Lane’s review is worth reading.

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  5. Mac

    Maybe not quite as bad as Dawn Treader, but it sounds pretty bad.
    As Guillermo del Toro directed the also very mixed, but to my taste rather worse, Pan’s Labryinth, I think I’d still prefer Jackson.
    I don’t know what the significance of the 48 frames is for the viewer. Seems like it would just be either unnoticeable or better–I mean, the higher the sample rate the better, I would think, until the point of diminishing returns. But I think I would definitely not want to see it in 3D.
    I certainly wouldn’t argue with anyone who chose not to see the LotR movies, or try to talk them into it. On the way to work I was thinking about them, and remembering some of the good things, which are definitely there, and that I wouldn’t mind seeing those parts again. The problem for me is that images from the movies will tend to overpower the books.

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  6. Janet

    I didn’t see the Dawn Treader. I had tried to resist the lure of the first two, but failed. Prince Caspian pretty much sealed it for me, and when people who had like PC hated DT, I didn’t go.
    Agree about the overpowering. I’m beginning to think that even if their images are often more beautiful than mine, mine are mine and I want to keep them.
    AMDG

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  7. Marianne

    From what I’ve gathered from my time here in New Zealand, Peter Jackson and his movie production company are one of the country’s biggest resources. Last year, the government was terrified for a time when he threatened to move his company to a different country because of trouble he was having with labor unions. So the government told the unions to shut the heck up. Interesting because this is a very union-friendly place. Anyway, makes sense that he’s going for a trilogy — he’s got to keep the spigot open and running for as long as possible.

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  8. Mac

    So he’s fallen into the George Lucas syndrome.
    Here’s an occasionally funny review from someone who doesn’t exactly get Tolkien, if indeed he’s even read him.

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  9. Robert Gotcher

    I tell my kids I’m a purist. I watched the Fellowship, then only snatches of the other two that my kids said were “the best parts.” I watched the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, then didn’t watch the other two.
    I didn’t even like that recent Star Trek movie, mostly because I detest the reset button.

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  10. Craig

    The complaint from a lot of reviewers is that the high frame rate makes the picture too crisp, so that it looks artificial somehow. I have had a similar experience on the few occasions when I have seen a high definition television: it looks unnaturally clear. It could be just a matter of familiarity, of course, but it could still be a distraction.

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  11. Mac

    Admirable restraint, Robert. I was too curious, even after the disappointment of the second installment of LOTR. Well, and there were also the things I did like about it. I thought the Lewis movies got off to a good start, meaning about the first half of the first movie. They’re now on a trajectory to abysmal.
    Star Trek, however, has never interested me very much. I wouldn’t expect anything more than passable entertainment from any of those movies.

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  12. Mac

    “Unnaturally clear” sounds like those people who miss the surface noise of LPs. What I’ve seen of HD TV looked pretty good to me.

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  13. Grumpy

    If Steven Greydanus didn’t like it, I’m really looking forward to it!

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  14. Anne-Marie

    “The problem for me is that images from the movies will tend to overpower the books.”
    That’s why, after seeing FotR once, I decided not to see it again and not ever to see the later movies. I’m glad to say I’ve almost forgotten the movie’s visuals, and can now read Tolkien with my earlier mental pictures.
    I’m not sure I could watch the Hobbit movie without wondering when Sherlock will turn up.

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  15. Mac

    Sherlock?
    I meant to reply a day or two ago to Janet saying she wants to keep her own images. Not having a visual sort of mind, I’m not sure I can even say I have images. More like impressions, and pretty vague. But in a number of cases in LotR the movie images are nevertheless definitely at odds with my impression. This is most importantly, because he’s one of the key figures, Aragorn. He was just very wrong for me. I’ve seen illustrated editions of the book which had a more suitable depiction, but I can’t remember the artist’s name.

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  16. Mac

    What’s so bad about Greydanus, Grumpy? If I remember correctly you don’t care much for Tolkien, so maybe you would enjoy the films as fantasy spectacles.

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  17. Janet

    I guess that means you haven’t seen the BBC Sherlock series with Benedict Cumberpatch as Sherlock Holmes. Martin Freeman, who plays Bilbo, is Watson in the series. It’s really quite good.
    AMDG

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  18. Mac

    Yes, I have seen it–at least I guess it must be the same thing. But I can’t remember very clearly at all what Watson looks like, much less remember the actor’s name.

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  19. Grumpy

    I bought a truly awful movie about Edith Stein with a blurb by Greydanus on it.
    I am not a Tolkein fan. But it does bother me that they have turned the Hobbit into a trilogy. When it is not a trilogy.

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  20. Paul

    Just think of it as an epic miniseries?

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  21. Mac

    I didn’t know there was an Edith Stein movie.
    It’s hard not to see the trilogy-izing of The Hobbit as a mercenary move.

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  22. Mac

    I didn’t know there was an Edith Stein movie.
    It’s hard not to see the trilogy-izing of The Hobbit as a mercenary move.

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  23. Craig

    The trilog-izing might be mercenary in motive, but I’m not convinced of it. I believe that the push toward more and longer films is coming from Peter Jackson et al, not from the studio. I think they began with the intention of making one film, then expanded to two, and finally (rather late in the game) to three. I remember reading that the studio went along with it rather reluctantly. I have the feeling that the production got out of control, and they simply had too much material.
    Sherlock will be in the second film! (I heard that he is going to be the voice of Smaug.)

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  24. Marianne

    The Atlantic weighs in: “Peter Jackson’s Violent Betrayal of Tolkien” —
    The scene where Bilbo spares Gollum in the movie comes immediately after an extended, jovially bloody battle between dwarves and goblins, larded with visual jokes involving decapitation, disembowelment, and baddies crushed by rolling rocks. The sequence is more like a body-count video game than like anything in the sedate novel, where battles are confused and brief and frightening, rather than exuberant eye-candy ballet.
    The goblin battle is hardly an aberration in the film. I had wondered how Peter Jackson was going to spread the book over three movies. Now I know: He’s simply added extra bonus carnage at every opportunity.
    Glad I’m not a fan.

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  25. Mac

    And I picked up the entertainment section of the local paper a day or two ago to read the story about Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf, and roughly half of it was devoted to the fact that he’s gay. Now there’s an image you want in your mind when you’re reading Tolkien.

    Reply

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