When I was about 10 years old, my father took me and two of my friends to go see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in theaters. The film completely blew me away and allowed me to immerse myself in this world and go on this epic quest with the characters. The film was also a bit of an epiphany for me, as it completely opened my eyes to how films were made. It made me realize "Hey. This is what a film is. This is what goes into making one." To this day, if people ask me what my favorite film of all time is, I usually say that it's The Lord of the Rings (I consider all three films to be one giant long epic).
So you can understand how excited I was when I heard Peter Jackson, the director of the LOTR trilogy, was returning to direct the prequel The Hobbit after Guillermo del Toro had backed out and after a long, long legal battle with New Line Cinema. However, I was nervous when he planned to expand the film from two films into three. The Hobbit is a short book to begin with but nevertheless, I had faith in Jackson.
And now we have this first installment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This film is the beginning of The Hobbit trilogy, as we find our protagonist, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) become roped into going on an adventure with Gandalf (played once again by Ian McKellan), who asks him to help a band of 13 dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), who are trying to reclaim their treasure from the dragon Smaug .
Being a fan of Jackson's work on the Rings trilogy and a fan of the book upon which the movie is based, I was very excited to see what Jackson would do with The Hobbit. And, after watching the film, I felt that this was an extremely satisfying return to Middle-Earth.
The performances in this film are fantastic. Martin Freeman completely steals the show as Bilbo Baggins. Not only does he look like Bilbo from the book, but he gets so many mannerisms of him down. I can not imagine anyone else now playing this character. Freeman is known for being a very dry and witty British actor (to see a prime example of his acting, watch the BBC's Sherlock, where he plays Watson) and he gets to bring that wit to Bilbo. Bilbo is an immediately likeable and relatable character, being thrust into this huge adventure and seeing the rest of the world for the first time in his life. We experience all these new things along with him.
I liked the band of 13 dwarves in this, particularly Richard Armitage as Thorin. He gives an really good performance, making Thorin ashamed over the loss of his home and will do anything to get it back. The rest of the dwarves did fine as well. They all had their traits and were quite funny to watch at times.
However, I was particularly pleased to see some LOTR veterans return in The Hobbit. Ian McKellan, as always, kills it as Gandalf. He's excellent in this. Considering he is playing Gandalf the Grey and not Gandalf the White, he seemed not as serious as he was in the last two films. It was nice to explore more of Gandalf The Grey. Also, it was wonderul to see Ian Holm return as Bilbo, Elijah Wood as Frodo, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, and Christopher Lee as Saurman. It was fascinating to see how these characters were before the events in LOTR.
But perhaps my favorite returning character was Andy Serkis as Gollum. I have always thought that Serkis was a brilliant actor and that he was criminally robbed of an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Gollum in The Two Towers and in Return of the King. Here, he still retains Gollum's split personality, but he portrays Gollum as being more in control of himself, until realizing the Ring is gone. The riddles in the dark scene he has with Bilbo, which is one of the most pivotal scenes in the novel, is probably one of my favorite scenes in the film, for he and Freeman play so well off each other.
Peter Jackson, even in the spending all this time away from Middle-Earth, still knows how to shoot this world beautifully. some of these shots in this movie are flat out gorgeous completely breathtaking. He also still knows how to shoot battle scenes, although we haven't seen any on a Battle of Helm's Deep level....yet. We still have two more movies to go.
But the thing that struck me the most about this film was its tone. The tone is very faithful to the book, as the book was light-hearted and whimsical compared to the dark and dreary tone of Lord of the Rings. Jackson manages to keep the light tone of the novel by including some genuinely humorous moments. I found myself chuckiling quite a bit at some of the humor in the film, especially the ones involving the Dwarves. Also, the film had more of a sense of fantasy and adventure and had a lot more fantasy elements than I expected. Is this Lord of the Rings? No but that's because it's trying to be its own thing. Yes there are specific music cues (Howard Shore's score is once again amazing) and certain moments that happened in the Rings trilogy are hinted at in this, but the tones are entirely different. One is dark and brooding while the other tries to give you a feeling that you're on an adventure.
The only two gripes I had with this film was that the first half at times is a bit slow (this IS a near three hour movie after all) but luckily, the last two hours make up for it. Also, there is a character in this film named Radagast the Brown, who is an....eccentric wizard. At times the character made me smile a bit, but other times he just came off as annoying to me. If you don't care much for annoying characters then you won't like this one.
But overall, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a welcome return to Middle-Earth. Yes the first half is a bit slow but it gets made up for in the long run. Overall, I am very excited to see what the next two installments bring us.
Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment