Hobbit: Unexpected Journey film review- by The Guardian

Full text transcript of the Hobbit Unexpected Journey film review

You must be Mr. Buggins. You can’t come in, you come to the wrong house, which hasn’t been canceled. No one told us no nothing to cancel. That’s a really. These were just kind of sharp and it’s nice this place.

Do you do it yourself? I know it’s been in the family for years. That’s my mother’s glory box. Can you please not do that? Really? Really. Come on.

Give us a hand, Mr. Dwalin in the hole.

Otherwise I’ll never get everyone in. Everyone. How many more do you want? Oh, no, no, no. There’s nobody home.

Go away for somebody else. I’m now joined on an unexpected journey all of my own by The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw and Henry Barnes. Peter, the original book, The Hobbit was a standalone book, not even a particularly long book, but it is now been stretched, cranked out into three separate rooms.

Yes, it’s sort of incredible that this very slight, rather unassuming children’s bedtime tale is going to occupy the same amount of space as the massive epic trilogy. I mean, the next thing you know, he’s going to do ten movie version of the Silmarillion or something like that. There is something massively disproportionate about it. But if you like me, not a very great Tolkien admirer, you have no great allegiance to the integrity of the original. Then this hugely overinflated act of fan love is kind of daft but amiable and kind of likeable. I didn’t I don’t have a problem with its length as such, but I think there is an elephant in the room problem with with The Hobbit. And that is just basically the look of the thing. It’s shot on high frame rate, 48 frames per second, which is this extraordinary technical act of pioneering.

And we were all very excited to see what it looked like. And sadly, it looks like this. It looks like television. And I think there is almost a sort of emperor’s new clothes conspiracy among executives and even perhaps critics not to sort of say it out loud. But that’s what I have to say. Stunned me from from the get go. I sort of got used to it a bit. I never stopped thinking about it, though. What I did get used to it. And there’s a lot to like about The Hobbit, Henry.

There’s been a lot of lurid advance word about this high frame rate, 48 frames per second. There’s been stories about people getting nauseous and throwing up in the isle and speaking in tongues.

Some of their heads explode.

How is it for you that I find it disconcerting? I mean, I agree with Peter to an extent. But the main thing for me was that there’s a stark difference now between the live action elements of the film and everything else that has been created for CGI. And I think the one problem with 48 frames per second is supposed to make things look more realistic in that way. It completely draws back the curtain and all the computer animated stuff and takes you right inside the sausage factory and suddenly seeing the guts of how all this stuff is made. And it does look like a very expensive school play in effect, because you kind of got this live action thing in the front and then a glossy background in the background and they just look completely at odds with each other. But in a weird way, how the film looks almost doesn’t matter to me because The Hobbit is sort of like Formula One or Morris dancing, and it’s a part of British culture that I just I do not understand. I don’t get the mythology. I don’t find any of the characters. But maybe Golomb interesting. I mean, the dwarves in this film, for example, don’t have a character at all, between 13 of them. As far as I can tell, there’s more characters.

Well, no white there’s the odd character, but the odd character that that kind of jar’s against Tolkien’s original thing. I think there’s a I think it’s it’s Orry who’s basically played as a a crusty who’s just emerged from the shop. And I don’t think talking about him as this and he says, oh, you got any chips? There is much to enjoy here that were being quite down on it. But there’s there’s certainly a kind of antic energy in there and the sort of boisterous earnestness, I thought Martin Freeman, who’s got an incredibly difficult role to play.

Bilbo Baggins is not essentially a likeable character until, well, I guess in this world until halfway through the second movie next year. But he does carry it really well. You kind of convinced by this ordinary man thrown into an extraordinary adventure. And I like him in this, and I think he does a fantastic job with it. The rest of the cast. James Nesbitt is one of the dwarves.

I don’t know their names, but stinky, stinky old Bosie I like can stop me, even though he had that huge, ridiculous nose, which other people say is looks just absurdly false. But I thought it was quite so absurdly false. I think they think McKellen back as McKellen. It’s nice to see him back, actually, because he just he looks like. So here I am back again, not trying, thinking about something else, enjoying myself. And it’s very watchable. What I thought was interesting about Martin Freeman is he’s he’s acting much less than I’ve seen him act in almost anything else. I think it was the most underplayed he’s ever been really in any of his films.

It reminded me of Tim from the office, really, in that it was absolutely laidback and calm and not acting at all under the rest of them were acting their heads off or being a stiff and as immobile as waxworks, rather like Cate Blanchett and and Christopher Lee as Galadriel and Saruman. But he was total. He relaxed, inhabiting this perhaps the telly as well, but he looked totally at home and he’s an attractive presence on on screen. Do you worry that the attractive presence might begin to thin over two more films? I do. I mean, I felt at the end of it, as I said, I didn’t mind it and I didn’t have a problem with it. But at the end but I felt at the end of nearly three hours, I’d had enough of a goodish thing now. And the thought of two more films like this where the story arc and the character development and all those absurd, quaint ideas are going to be very, very unclear, to say the very least of it. I sort of quale of it, but who knows?

Who knows whether price for having such power or not such. But inside, he wasn’t talking about.