Revisiting Peter Jackson’s first instalment in ‘The Hobbit’ (2012) trilogy after a reread proved it missed the mark more than I first thought in theatres. No doubt owing to preproduction troubles of many-sided legal scuffles and a changing of directors, a conspicuous hurry to have the film turned (and cashed) in leaves a wild emptiness.
All starts familiar: the irreverent wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) entices homebody Bilbo (Martin Freeman) to join a band of dwarves to reclaim their dragons-be-there mountain keep. The forty minutes it takes Bilbo to head to the hills is fantastic exposition, filled with after-dinner clutter and a fireside setting revered by humane camerawork and Howard Shore’s faultless score.
Jackson leans admirably to an earthy sensibility, and, for a time, presses the most buttoned-down eye to believe ‘We must away, ere break of day, / To find our long-forgotten gold’. The essence of an honest classic is nursed. The fiction is suddenly tangible, but dim-lit sparkling of embers on rosy, remembering faces never again show themselves as sincere.
The narrative turns overhasty. The episodic, chapter-by-chapter intrigue of the book is swapped for a stodgy recycling of chases, angst and an altogether nebulous fear of an evil something pulling strings somewhere. In fact, the book’s core logic is stolen by a gust of rabid threats and wargs. No resolution is retained, Bilbo has no time to recollect, to doubt, endure, or feel. Neither have the dwarves any reason to initiate an appreciation of him as anything but a no-good burglar or, suddenly, a perfect hero. Characters just as much as their witnesses are dizzy deciding why they are there in the first place.
To whole the just-shy of three-hour runtime, the dwarvish King Thorin (Richard Armitage) and Elrond (Hugo Weaving) are drawn out to reactive caricatures of their in-book realities, and even Gandalf suffers a few too-easy growls and grunts. Force-fed fears of a ‘Morgul Blade’ or a ‘pale orc astride a white warg’ come with the breathless reek of promises of a sparklier second instalment. This appears in the need for an antagonist. Smaug, the dragon who displaced the dwarves, is far too next-summer, and so hollow furrows between Bilbo and Thorin must steal away the homely peace of Middle-Earth and puff up Azog (Manu Bennett) the orc revived and snarling, scarred and deformed in standard-issue villainy.
The book opts for Azog’s son Bolg (also a four-letter name) to fight Thorin — and not then. While garish flashbacks put reason to the King’s ever-stoic frown and recreate shot-for-shot Sauron’s slaying in ‘Fellowship’ by a newly fatherless King, a grander idea is missed.
There is no hardiness to try anything more or different from Jackson’s earlier ‘Lord of The Rings’.
Kitschy scenes (a Goblin scaffold fitted for a toboggan), as well as fiercely brilliant pulses — Bilbo and Gollum (Andy Serkis) riddling in the dark — are illuminations, sadly, of a step forward followed by two steps back. The latter evidences the wealth of the source material with neat, beneficial alterations, gently adapting a chapter to a cohesive, textured scene.
Not a moment after, however, the film fattens itself with short-order glare. One is reminded the best use of the book in production was a cudgel to the back of the head of bookish onlookers. Show don’t feel breeds from every sweet-hued sunset, and a kind of steering clear of its emotional, hobbit-large centre. By writing a new, fast story Jackson misdoes Bilbo, to whom the story is too deeply tied to beautify that severance.
His heroism is transmogrified into a slaying, sword-handy wit, not the moderate but big-hearted hobbit the novel honours. Supporting characters in turn become strung-up, hollering corpses fit to sit only in the sudden shadow of a rightly modest one among their fourteen, run, and eat and run. This sudden chicanery is cheap and volatile. Bilbo is simultaneously separated and insulated by characters’ pinching his screen time. Efforts to faithfully render his view are momentary and late. Repetitions of, ‘thinking once again of his comfortable chair before the fire in his favourite sitting-room in his hobbit-hole’ are cited by dwarves in clunky dialogue as if to fabricate the three hours better spent proving that point.
The narrator’s focalisation of Bilbo’s uncertain traipse into Middle-Earth in the book is missed. There is not once the beauty in the brevity of ‘[fording] a river at a wide shallow place full of noise and stones and foam’. An exhale is missed. A pause. The time for tea to steep.
No one leaves their seat with new knowledge of Middle-Earth or without a fiercer, if muddied, fondness for Tolkien’s care for the simple and good.
There, certainly. But not back again.