Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the movie, you don’t want to read further!
Finally I went to see The Hobbit tonight. Ouch. I didn’t expect to come out which such a bad feeling about it.
Before I start, I have to say that I read the book many years ago. This means that I know the story, I know how the quest will end and all the turning points in the journey. On the other side, since few years have gone by, I miss some of the details such some names of the dwarves and some sequences in the story.
That said let’s talk about the movie. Before seeing it, I didn’t read any comment on the web but I was skeptical the same. Especially because I couldn’t understand the need of doing a trilogy out of a very simple book.
After seeing the first, my fears became reality: there was really no need to do a new trilogy. The movie is generally slow, alternating short action-packed moments to long descriptive scenes. Something that generally happens in a book, where the author has to create images in his readers’ minds, not the kind of narration used in a movie.
If you see the book inside the entire anthology, the Hobbit is a long preface to the facts that are going to happen in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. Essentially The Hobbit exist only because Bilbo has to find the Ring. It’s a fun reading, it’s well composed but it’s still a very simple story.
Peter Jackson is of course trying to revive the hype and the magic of the LOTR, but in my opinion he transformed The Hobbit into something different, something less “Hobbity”. The power of the story written by Tolkien is the simplicity, the story re-written by Jackson & Co. is loosing itself into special effect and extremely lengthy static dialogs.
We’ll see what will happen with the following episodes, but I’m certainly not looking forward to them as much as I did with the LOTR.
Finally a mention about the 48fps. Initially the effect was like looking at a very cheap soap opera production, then this hyper-realism came to life and made the movie really enjoyable. The only issue was with some of the special effects. Sometimes you can really tell that something is extremely fake, like the big hawks scene or when the Brown wizard run from the globins on his sleight.
Now I would like to go back and watch the entire LOTR trilogy just to feel a bit better!