The Hobbit: Not Appropriate for Any Age

Here’s what I liked about The Hobbit:

It was the first time I’d been to see a movie with my two East Coast nephews in years, and it was great to spend time with them.
The scene where Bilbo meets Gollum is pretty darn good.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Everything else.

Okay, that might be an overstatement, but The Hobbit was a colossal disappointment.

First, Peter Jackson is like the Stephen King of directors. Almost every one of his recent films needs an editor. The Lord of the Rings movies were good but didn’t need to be quite that long (to be fair, the same was true of the books) and King Kong was ponderous. The Hobbit, however, presents a whole new level of cinematic self indulgence.

As almost every review has noted, there is simply no need to make three three-hour movies from one 300-page book. Jackson has a solution to this problem. He delves deeper into the history and lore of Middle Earth, relying on Tolkien’s histories from, I presume, the Silmarillion. I say “I presume,” because life is too short for me to read the Silmarllion. Or Finnegan’s Wake… Or… well, fill in the blank. Jackson presents this history and lore as endless, bloated, exposition. And there ain’t nothing word than exposition.

Jackson also has a fondness for panoramic crane and helicopter shots. You know these shots. The camera sweeps across the scene in a direction that stands in opposition to the main action. It creates movement and emotion and is appealing the first 17 times you see it. The next 17 times it gets a bit tired. The next 17, stale. And the following 6,000, annoying. Jackson doesn’t have a fondness for these shots, he takes them out to dinner, wines them, dines them, and takes them back to his flat for a roll in the hay. Enough already.

Most surprising, the special FX in The Hobbit leave a lot to be desired. Other than the aforementioned scene with Gollum, the CGI and green screen effects are too easy to spot. (Especially in the sweeping panoramic shots.) That was truly disappointing, as you expect more from this production team. This more than anything else suggests that they sort of phoned it in.

Finally, The Hobbit is just silly. “Really, Len? Silly? A movie about trolls and goblins and hobbits, silly?” Okay, yeah, it would be hard for this movie NOT to be silly. But the LOTR films didn’t fall into that trap. (Though the source material for The Hobbit does skew younger.) The problem is, while that silliness will play well to a younger audience, the movie is really too violent and scary for any kid under 8 years old. And I guess with that in mind, I should amend the title of this post to:

The Hobbit, Not Appropriate for Anyone Other than 8 – 13 Year-Old Boys.

If that’s not you, wait for the DVD.

Of course, you can be sure I’ll go see both sequels. (Yeah, don’t say it. I know.)