All good stories deserve embellishment

“I think I’m quite ready for another adventure,” 130-year-old Bilbo Baggins proclaimed at the very end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, before stepping onto an Elven ship bound for the afterlife. It was his last onscreen line. A decade later, here’s another adventure at last, skewing off from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy as a kind of well-meaning tangent, featuring several of our old friends in several of their old haunts, on a mission of moderately less import than the business with the ring. Prequels do, inherently, suck, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is barely an exception; if the film is yet a grand adventure and a thoroughly entertaining return to Middle Earth, it is such only because of the strength of the architecture that Jackson and Co. left there, ten years ago. The Lord of the Rings was shot through with a thrilling sense of invention and underdog sticktuitiveness. The Hobbit is a victory lap, widening its predecessor’s scope only marginally. This, at least, is honest: the filmmakers may extend Tolkien’s 300-page source novel to however many films they want, but The Hobbit will always be the tiny adventure that took place before the greater, graver Lord of the Rings.

The film’s new 48 frames per second photography is both awesome and awful. I will not spend much time on it, as the technology has been pushed into the foreground of the conversation on the film, which is out of step with its actual relevance. There are key sequences in The Hobbit, with their clear design bias towards high frame rate (for example, the prologue sequence at the Lonely Mountain, and the impressive Goblin Town action scenes towards the end), which work poorly in the down-converted 24 fps version of the film, where motion blur has been added after the fact. In 24 fps, these scenes are muddy and difficult to follow, and it seems like the traditional frame rate is having difficulty keeping up with the speed, movement, and detail that Jackson has built into his frame. The 48 fps projection, in these scenes and elsewhere, pops extraordinary detail out of every single shot, produces striking colour saturation and contrast… and handles general motion so poorly that it becomes quite exhausting to watch. The success of HFR seems inversely proportional to the speed of movement in any given shot; the faster the movement, the more standoffishly jerky the shot becomes. And because this is all just high-definition video anyway, it all – of course – looks like high-definition video. At its best, the 48 fps version of The Hobbit resembles a lavish BBC costume drama; at its worst, it makes the film look like old episodes of Doctor Who.

Speaking of Doctor Who, my favourite addition to the Middle Earth pantheon this time around must surely be Radagast the Brown, played by the Seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. While Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen, returning with a bit more gravel in his voice, but otherwise as delightful as ever) and the dwarves are off seeking the Arkenstone, Radagast is fumbling around the forest like a mad magpie, and anchors the film’s most exciting sequences as he discovers the growing threat at Dol Guldur. This leads to Gandalf assembling the Avengers for a council at Rivendell – Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Elrond (Hugo Weaving), and Saruman (a noticeably faltering Christopher Lee, but it’s a treat to have him here nevertheless) – and much promise of greater activities in the Hobbit films to come. The thread is left dangling here.

The A plot, as it were, concerns Bilbo Baggins, respectable hobbit, and thirteen dwarves setting out on a quest to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from the evil dragon, Smaug. As Bilbo, Martin Freeman is – as expected – nearly flawless, playing his scenes with credible precision and a gigantic thumping heart, ably seasoning his ticks and winks with a bit of Ian Holm, and standing appreciably apart from the four lead hobbits that have preceded him in the franchise – no small feat, given that Elijah Wood pops in for an extended, unnecessary cameo. One ofAn Unexpected Journey’s failings, though, is that it does tend to lose Bilbo a bit as the center of the story. In choosing to focus The Lord of the Rings squarely on Frodo, Jackson, Walsh and Boyens might have had to cut beloved source material from their movies, but they came out with a clearer throughline. Journey is more of a hodgepodge, bringing Bilbo in strongly at the beginning and resolving him smartly at the end, but missing him in the chaos somewhat in the middle.

A lot of that chaos is due to the dwarves, who are a chaotic lot. If Radagast is my favourite new character, James Nesbitt’s Bofur must be second, followed closely by Ken Stott’s Balin. Both characters surprised me, and provided an emotional contour to the dwarf quest that would otherwise be missing under the pricklier guidance of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage). The filmmakers also mine the subtext of The Hobbit admirably to find a driving purpose to the dwarven quest that goes beyond the book’s more direct interest in gold and riches. What’s surprising, then, is that of the thirteen dwarf characters, An Unexpected Journey only troubles itself about perhaps half of them, leaving the rest as little more than extras who just happen to constantly be onscreen. (There is a character – Bifur, I think – who has an axe sticking out of his head. This is never addressed, and he is never even focused upon. He has an axe sticking out of his head.) I’m particularly surprised that Peter Jackson – never one to avoid an opportunity for body humour, as we are reminded by the various snot and belch gags here – has avoided the temptation to turn gargantuan Bombur (Stephen Hunter) into the butt of six or seven dozen fat jokes.

We have finally arrived at peak photorealism, in terms of CGI characters, and several of these are better than their flesh-and-blood counterparts. Naturally, the Gollum sequence is a highlight of the movie, playing out a long, complicated scene between Bilbo and the old villain that bristles with wit, energy, and genuine pathos. But there are also the three mountain trolls, one of whom, charmingly, is still called Bert; and the corpulent Goblin King (played by Dame Edna!), whose chin wattle is nearly the size of a dwarf. I don’t know what the zipline monkey troll is called, but I’d like one, perhaps as a replacement for my mobile phone; and the rest of the goblin horde is good creepy-crawly fun. It is the journey underground (and its rhyming predecessor, the formidable prologue) which demonstrate what an unchained Peter Jackson can do, moving his camera through a fully realized fantasy environment with breathtaking success and a seemingly endless sense of madcap glee.

But rhyming, I think, is the problem, at least in terms of why prequels suck. There are so many portents and call-forwards and direct duplications of items and events (and even the outright plot structure) from The Lord of the Rings trilogy that there’s very little sense of invention or discovery about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; it all connects to, or outright copies, events and images we’ve long since memorized. If walking into The Fellowship of the Ring eleven years ago came with genuinely not knowing if Jackson’s team were going to be able to pull this off, watching The Hobbit feels a bit like an exercise in waiting for them to fail. That’s unfair. But certainly present in the other movies, absent here, was a soulfulness, an emotional connection to the characters and their quest that persisted regardless of the high fantasy of their surroundings. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is more of a goofball runabout and a calculated, give-the-people-what-they-want retread, neither of which I can particularly argue with. “All good stories deserve embellishment,” Gandalf says. Well: here it is.

Afterword, November 2013

We met yesterday as per the original plan and watched the Extended Edition of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, an event which demonstrated in one shot how far we’ve come while staying largely the same. “We” in this case was Steve, Dave, Chris (who actually owned the house in which we watched this thing, a terrifying thought) and Daniel (who I, when Gandalf interrogated Bilbo’s “good morning” with seven variants of what that comment could possibly mean, turned to and said “this is what it’s like talking to you”).

The first 30 minutes were spent on administrative business, i.e. the wheres and the hows of watching The Desolation of Smaug – on the Friday or the Saturday, in HFR first or second, etc., etc. Some variation of this conversation has happened four times since 2001.

And then it was on to the film, which could be my favourite Extended Edition so far, although it is admittedly playing in a generally lower field of achievement, so one can’t really compare it to, say, The Two Towers. Nonetheless I pretty much like everything that was added, even the gay joke, even the dwarf skinnydipping, even (with some reservation) the Goblin King’s extra song, though in the latter case only because I complained so loudly about that song not being in the theatrical cut, and one must attempt to remain consistent/non-hypocritical.

I like the new stuff at Rivendell best of all, soup to nuts. If you ask how much longer the Extended Edition is than the theatrical cut, you could say “one more day,” because somewhere between the reading of the map and the White Council they found an extra full day for Bilbo to wander around looking starry-eyed at murals of rings, and dwarves to screw shit up for Flight of the Concords. Nonetheless there are two critical pieces there, which are the references to the Seven Rings of the Dwarves, and the familial weakness in Thorin’s line, overheard by Bilbo – and Thorin.

Thorin remains the big gap in Unexpected; the movie never establishes him as a character on his own whose conflicts and interests should be of interest to me, the viewer. The Extended Edition doesn’t solve this, which is a shame, especially given where we’re going. It does do a better job of setting up the dwarf/elf conflict that will feed into Desolation, with just a hint of extra Thranduil (can’t get enough Thranduil, IMHO), and the aforementioned overheard conversation between Gandalf and Elrond.

Mostly, of course, the fun was in the doing of it, rather than the actual content; get us boys talking about Azog and Isildur and we can go for a good long while. We delved into the special features after the movie, and amused ourselves mightily with further tales of Kiwi ingenuity driving the production of the biggest movie(s) ever made. I’m still not clear on which middle-aged Brit plays which dwarf, but plan to keep it that way; otherwise it’s a month till Desolation, and I am rarin’ to go.

Sorry guys, more Hobbit

I know, I know. It’s been a lot of this stuff lately. (And let’s be candid: it ain’t stopping anytime soon. It’s going to be all-Hobbit all-the-time on tederick.com till the new year.) The problem with last week’s Watched post is that I put it together on the fly, having watched the extended cut of An Unexpected Journey but none of the expansive (like, nine hours and a 3-hour commentary) special features on the blu-ray. I spent such a lovely week doing the latter part – and building Bag End out of Lego while I was at it, which is as perfect a meditative exercise as anything I can think of. And naturally, while stewing myself in all of these things, I a) did not have time to watch anything else, and b) thought of more stuff.

Well, really only one more thing. But it’s something that goes to one of my central preoccupations of late, which was generally, “What is wrong with The Hobbit?” Obviously, something is; audiences did not embrace the property with anything like the fervour with which they greeted The Fellowship of the Ring. I’ve forgiven some of my own problems with An Unexpected Journey and forgotten several of the others; there’s quite a disparity between my original review and the piece I wrote for Destroy All Monsters two weeks ago, but in the latter element I’m quite frustrated with myself this week, because I’d only scarcely begun to dig away at all the (I think) quite compelling reasons why Journey is underappreciated. I’ve thought of a dozen more while going over the extended edition disks; I won’t list them here, but at some point when all this is done I might have to pen a sequel to that column. At which point everyone will really be sick of me.

But no, the single point I wanted to make is this: with The Hobbit, has the Peter Jackson approach to the Tolkien aesthetic exceeded its maximum density?

Here’s the thing: you watch all these special features, particularly the pieces around design and the adaptation of the story, and you begin to become aware of a fucking universe of stuff onscreen in The Hobbit that completely escapes one’s attention on the first pass. Take Goblin Town for instance: until I watched these special features, I had no idea that Goblin Town was made up of shanghaied junk that the goblins have been stealing from the world above for hundreds of years. It’s quite clear, looking at the sequences again in retrospect; but An Unexpected Journey flew through that piece of worldbuilding at such a breakneck pace (not a term most people would apply to An Unexpected Journey) that I had no idea what I was looking at when I saw it at the time, and dismissed Goblin Town as a pale variant of more interesting underground realms that Jackson (and others) had put onscreen in the past fifteen years.

This phenomenon occurred repeatedly throughout my track through Unexpected’s Appendices, with those documentaries serving as Rosetta stones to a whole hidden language of detail and storytelling that is – again – actually onscreen in An Unexpected Journey, but completely escaped my (not unobsessive) gaze till now. I’ve seen this movie ten times, by the way. But it wasn’t till I watched these features that I, for example, could tell you with any confidence who each of the dwarves were, or how they were related to one another. Now I’m suddenly quite fond of the lot of them – as much so, in a lot of ways, as I was of the Fellowship – but I recognize that the movie itself did a poor job of setting me up to feel this way.

It’s a strange mirroring of an existing phenomenon from Tolkien’s work itself. Tolkien, when he was done telling his two stories, had so much other stuff about why all the elements of those stories were the way they were, that he had to write his Appendices (and all the other collections of miscellaneous lore, from The Silmarillion through Unfinished Tales) to contain the myriad detail spilling from his head. Now, in The Hobbit trilogy, we’ve come again to the same sort of problem: there’s so much detail in the film itself that the film itself can’t expose it all. It falls to – again – a set of Appendices, literally called that again in this case, to crack the code of how and why the random assortment of wonders and myths that make up The Hobbit are the way they are.

Not unlike the landmark Appendices of the original Lord of the Rings trilogy, these special features are a bargain at twice the price. They do such an endearing job of humanizing what certainly seemed like an overlarge and impersonal project from the outside. The personalities within – from Mark Hadlow to Barry Humphries to, as always, Jackson himself – present the most cunning demonstration available of why making movies is the best job on earth; and, also as usual, why New Zealand is probably the best place to make them.