The Hobbit: An Uxepected Journey

It was hard to imagine the Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy could come anywhere close to the epic nature of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After all, The Hobbit is a prequel with a story that is much more adventure and much less impending doom. But with that in mind, the first installment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hits theaters. The film follows a young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) as he joins a group of dwarves attempting to retake their homeland from a gold hungry dragon. But there is also a lot more information that casual fans of the book won’t be familiar with. Jackson and his team scoured through additional JRR Tolkien texts including appendices from “The Lord of the Rings” books to add depth and tie these movies to the other three titles.

Freeman brings a level of comedic timing to Bilbo that isn’t seen with the stoic lead of the previous films, Frodo, played by Elijah Wood. This allows for some great dialogue and physical comedy with the dwarves, who are mostly caricatures used as jokes. But with so many new characters, there are expanded roles to include ties to fan favorites like Gandalf (Ian McKellan), Elrond (Hugo Weaving) and Galadriel (Cate Blanchett). It’s also worth mentioning the film’s strongest scene where Bilbo tests his wit against Gollum, (Andy Serkis) a deformed ring obsessed creature. Jackson definitely knows what the fans want, complexity and continuity. The film is long and requires a level of commitment to enjoy, but we know from experience Jackson likes to make the audience earn the rewards that come at the end of an epic story like this.

The director also quenched his thirst for innovation by filming the trilogy in a higher frame rate of 48 fps (frames per-second). The industry standard is 24, so this provides a more life-like look to the scenes. I was able to screen the movie in one of these theaters. Most theaters aren’t capable of playing the High frame rate version at this time. But in the instance of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the format is tailor made for the stunning landscape imagery and top of the line CGI employed throughout. It’s pretty clear that any movie that doesn’t have a sky high budget will not benefit from the new procedure. It would just make it look cheap.

Each film earns either zero, a half or a full arrow in five categories. The categories are Acting, Writing/Directing, Emotion, Innovation and Overall Impression. The arrows are added up to equal the full score.