Film Review: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The fairest thing you can say about the first film of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit prequel trilogy is that it compares favourably to The Phantom Menace, its equivalent in the Star Wars franchise.

It has some of the same main problems as Menace: the viewer knows, for instance, that several characters – Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins like Yoda and Obi Wan before them – obviously survive to feature in the very films they’re in the prequel to, which removes a certain sense of peril from the action sequences, and lends a redundancy to plotlines that are neatly tied-up by the beginning of the Lord of the Rings.

An Unexpected Journey succeeds where The Phantom Menace fails, however, partly due to being able to draw from strong source material where George Lucas simply had to pull trade federations and double-ended lightsabres out of his arse.

It’s the scenes pulled straight from Tolkien’s novel, such as Bilbo’s riddles in the dark with Gollum, which are the highlights of the film.

However, the fact that they’ve had to stretch the relatively short book into three different films has meant that throwaway references (rock giants, I’m looking at you) have been bastardised into entire set pieces.

The wizard Radagast the Brown – who was only mentioned once in the novel, but gets a substantial chunk of screen time here – is effectively Jar Jar Binks done well.

He’s goofy comic relief character in a fantasy full of decapitations and death, yes, but unlike Binks he isn’t a racist stereotype, he does actually prove a degree of competence, and Saruman’s remarks about him during the White Council betrays a self-awareness on the film’s part about his ridiculousness that was profoundly lacking in the Star Wars prequels.

(As an aside: the scene with Radagast the Brown and Sebastian the Hedgehog is unexpectedly incredible.)

Unfortunately, while An Unexpected Journey seems like a triumph beside The Phantom Menace, it doesn’t match up quite so well to Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy – the dwarf-packed company doesn’t have nearly the same diversity or richness of character as the Fellowship did.

There’s a deluge of frightfully unfunny slapstick humour, and an overt reliance on CGI that makes action-packed scenes look less like a movie and more like an admittedly fun-seeming video game.

Compare the apparent physicality and menace of the Uruk-Hai in The Fellowship of the Ring – an effect made possible through inventive make-up, costume and acting – to the uncannily fake non-presence of the one-armed orc-king Azog the Defiler, and it becomes clear that there’s a lot to be said for the argument that technological advancements in computer generation will never catch up old-fashioned special effects.

Saying that, the first film in The Hobbit trilogy is occasionally beautifully shot, surprisingly well-paced considering the circumstances surrounding its adaptation, and is led by a star turn from Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, who brings a likeable believability to his role as the titular hobbit.

It’s not a perfect film by any standards, but it also isn’t the embarrassment it could have been, even if it doesn’t quite match up to the spectacle and grandeur of The Lord of the Rings.

Director: Peter Jackson
12A, 169min

Words: Christopher Macarthur-Boyd