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Dec. 15th, 2012 10:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alas_a_llamaSo, yeah. I saw The Hobbit. Enjoyed it. In the advertisements my sister and I joked about what it would be like if Frank Miller had written and directed it.
We'll divide this up into bad points and good points.
The bad:
Martin Freeman was unbearably smug in his performance at points and in general one of the weaker actors there - he was consistently being out-performed by Sir Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Aiden Turner, Sylvester McCoy, James Nesbitt and Hugo Weaving (I'd no doubt have cause to include Cate Blanchett and Sir Christopher Lee in this list, but they shared no scenes). It's not to say that he's a bad actor, he's just - not half as good as most of the cast.
The increased framerate made me nauseous at first, but I got used to it pretty quickly, at which point I saw no visible difference in quality whatsoever. So that came across as kind of pointless.
Sir Christopher seemed a bit - off? I'm not sure what it was, but he lacked his usual presence.
At time, the references to wider Tolkien canon came a bit thick and heavy at times. I loved that, personally, but on the whole it could alienate viewers, and it diminishes the film's ability to stand on its own.
Dear god, was there a single problem the dwarves got themselves into that wasn't solved by Gandalf ex Machina? The book had this problem a bit too, but it's dialed up to eleven in the film. It got to the point where at the end I felt like the characters were acknowledging that he was literally always saving them.
The good:
Excellent cast, as a whole, with special mentions to Blanchett, Armitage, Turner and McCoy (special special mention to McCoy, who at one point switches from 'kooky old man' to 'powerful wizard' in the span of a split second). Freeman was the weak link in the chain, but also not in the film all that much.
A lot of changes to the source material that really, really work! Mostly stuff to expand on backstory and to work in the Lord of the Rings connection - which is necessary, I think, because Tolkien didn't know he was going to write LOTR when he wrote The Hobbit, and it's neater and more interesting to have them linked together more strongly.
Really good pacing. The Fellowship of the Ring is probably my least favourite Jackson film, in large part because its pacing is terrible - really, really terrible, and it gave the impression that Jackson just isn't very good at all at journey narratives (in the other two LOTR films, the journeying is mostly dispensed with in favour of movement from one static set piece to another, which works better for him). But the journey narrative of The Hobbit is very strong, and it's paced excellently, and feels appropriately weighty and epic.
The humour and seriousness were very well-balanced - which is another thing Jackson has struggled with before. Neither diminished the other, and the story felt both light-hearted at times and serious at others. It was good.
Special highlights:
Kili screaming "I don't have parasites! YOU HAVE PARASITES!" at Bilbo.
Thorin and the dwarves singing.
Galadriel. Everything with Galadriel.
The whole riddles scene with Gollum.
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Date: 2012-12-15 11:11 pm (UTC)Thank you for articulating many of my thoughts as I'm still kind of that the yay Hobbit stage.
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Date: 2012-12-16 02:44 am (UTC)I'm kind of at the yay Hobbit stage too - and I didn't even like the book. I'll most likely see it again next week.
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Date: 2012-12-16 02:48 am (UTC)Its the first book of Tolkien's that I read so a favorite of mine, but I haven't read it in ages.
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Date: 2012-12-16 02:03 am (UTC)/unrelated pup journal
/except that i bet he'd also ship them
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Date: 2012-12-16 02:41 am (UTC)(Armitage does a very good range in GRUMPY ANGRYFACE.)
(Kili and Bilbo do, at least, interact more than Bilbo and most of the non-Thorin dwarves. Which isn't a lot, but still.)
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Date: 2012-12-16 02:46 am (UTC)