Why The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Failed
Because when I saw the recent trailer for The Desolation of Smaug I barely cared.
“What did it say?”
Okay, okay, that’s not a real reason. Obviously it didn’t fail financially; there are plenty of people who really dug the newest addition to the cinematic saga of Middle Earth and really want to get in the theater for the second one.
I just have no idea why. And since we’ll be revving up for Desolation soon (and since Paul asked), I thought I’d weigh in on it.
I know that this is part one of a trilogy. Let us assume for a minute that that doesn’t matter. I’d probably argue on many days that Fellowship of the Ring was the best individual movie of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Whereas The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (for this piece, The Hobbit) seems to not understand its purpose, on any level.
Tolkien’s The Hobbit never functioned as a prequel to Lord of the Rings. Oh, sure, the connective tissue of Bilbo, the ring, and a couple other things is definitely there, but the main narrative and character arcs of The Hobbit simply dealt with a band of adventurers who set out to slay a dragon. Lord of the Rings grew out of that seed, not the other way around.
Jackson’s film version, on the other hand, is much more explicitly trying to work as a prequel to the LotR movies. But by deciding to expand the story in this way, Jackson and company have literally changed the function of the narrative.
Not that this automatically makes the movie bad. But frankly, to adapt a book as profoundly important in English literature as The Hobbit in a way that alters the very point of the text… is a bit arrogant? Is that fair to say? At the very least, it’s something that can’t be done halfway.
The reason it can’t be done halfway is that The Hobbit operates in a fundamentally different way than Lord of the Rings. For instance, its thematics operate more like those in a fable. Its narrative lacks the complexity of Tolkien’s magnum opus, favoring a more streamlined (some might say kid-friendly) approach.
You know, as kid-friendly as a movie with a graphic beheading can be. What the hell is wrong with this movie’s tone?
Anyway, the decision to expand the narrative with a bunch of added crap from other, unrelated books has essentially added more weight than the story can take.
The clearest example of this is the addition of Azog the Defiler. Now, my understanding is that the character is actually pulled from one of Tolkien’s numerous supplementary works. You’ll notice, however, that Tolkien didn’t put this guy anywhere NEAR the narrative of The Hobbit. By doing so anyway, Jackson in effect gave the story a needless villain.
Note: This isn’t the same as having a “hero orc” like Fellowship’s Lurtz or that ugly one.
Yeah, him.
The hero orcs in Lord of the Rings gave us a face to the armies and bands traveling through the story. It’s like how Lucas focuses the opening of Star Wars on that one older Rebel who gets shot in the hallway. It’s good, efficient filmmaking. These kinds of characters don’t need to have personal vendettas with the heroes, and in fact the vendetta in this movie is a huge distraction.*
Adding a villain to a story whose primary opposition is the forces of nature and a gosh-darn dragon, is pretty much needless. Seriously, why do we need the Pale Orc in here at all, when we already have so many other fantastic oppositions to our heroes?
Smaug is the story’s main villain. He’s the one who sets the plot in motion, he’s the one the dwarves are going after. He’s also thematically tied to Thorin, being a figure of unchecked greed. Thorin has to defeat his greed, his dragon, to complete his arc. Azog just distracts from this.
I’m going to try not to complain about how boring of a character this turned out to be.
Azog’s history with Thorin has other consequences. My jaw nearly dropped in the theater when, almost an hour into the movie, Thorin receives a SECOND backstory, told in narration and flashback, just like the more-effective backstory he got at the movie’s start. Not only is this overkill, but it essentially makes Thorin a more important character than Bilbo.
You’ll notice, incidentally, that Bilbo gets a relatively meager setup as a character. Given how effortlessly Jackson and his team sketched out the personalities and wants of the Hobbits in Fellowship, it’s kind of amazing how thin Bilbo feels by comparison.** Just look at the two or three scenes that introduce Merry and Pippin, or Sam.
There’s nothing in this movie nearly as fun or revealing as the “What about Second Breakfast?” scene.
Look, I don’t care if they change the book. I actually haven’t read it in something like ten years, and I’ve forgotten many of the finer details. This isn’t “Oh, they changed the book I love and I’m going to whine about it.” It’s more like “Well, the book actually handled the story well.”
Like I said, though, The Hobbit’s lack of purpose doesn’t only reside at a macro level. Sequences, scenes, characters, lines of dialogue, and basic filmmaking decisions are constantly, aggravatingly wrong. They either lack an obvious purpose, or worse, completely work against it.
For instance, if this movie is a prequel to Lord of the Rings, why is Bilbo finding the One Ring shot completely differently than it appears in Fellowship’s prologue?
More generally, dialogue scenes wander for what feels like days. Bits of information are repeated two, three, four times throughout the movie. Not just the important ones, either. Let’s follow the saga of the carving on Bilbo’s door:
Right at the start of the movie, we see Gandalf carve a strange symbol on Bilbo’s door. Later, after the dwarves show up, Thorin awkwardly mentions that it would have been difficult to find the place without the symbol. Bilbo declares such a symbol doesn’t exist. In turn, Gandalf admits that it does.
THIS CARVING HAS ALREADY SERVED ITS PURPOSE WHY ARE WE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT.
At least they answered the burning question of how this sign got nailed to Bag End’s gate.
Or what about the mother of all redundant scenes: The White Council.
Okay, I really hate to do the nitpicking thing. There’s nothing that frustrates me as much as sitting through something like a RedLetterMedia video that simply picks and picks and picks at a movie until there’s nothing there but bones. So know that I could almost go line by line in this scene as I merely call out my favorite useless exchange:
Galadriel: You carry something… It came to you from Radagast…… He found it in Dol Goldur….
Gandalf: Yes…
Galadriel: Show me…
We have already seen every bit of this in the movie! And she’s talking slow. Also, why didn’t Gandalf just lead with that thing in the first place? And why does the movie treat its uncovering like a reveal, when we’ve already seen it?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvbBRpoeyw8
Why is this scene even IN this movie?
By the way, this is most of what people are talking about when complaining about the movie’s length. Not that the very concept of a lengthy adaptation of the story is incomprehensible,*** but that things simply take forever to happen.
It’s forty minutes before Bilbo leaves his house in this movie. In the EXTENDED Fellowship, it’s forty minutes before Frodo and Sam leave The Shire. Go back and compare how much more happens by that point in Fellowship than The Hobbit.
Also, after Thorin sits down to dinner, the conversation where Bilbo is informed that he’s to join them in a dangerous mission to take back their homeland takes as long to unfold as the entire Council of Elrond did. And again, that’s the extended Council of Elrond.
This scene has a bajillion times more context, and much higher stakes, too.
Trust me, I could go on. But instead, I’ll point out a scene in this movie that DOES work. One of the best scenes in The Hobbit is the introduction of Radagast the Brown. His desperate attempt to save a hedgehog has clear stakes. The action and stakes escalate — first the hedgehog is about to die, then the spiders attack, then Radagast starts to succumb to the poison of evil — by the way, none of this is explicitly explained.
It’s engaging because Radagast acts with agency. There’s no waiting around. At the end of this scene, we don’t need the dark power that has gripped the forest to be detailed in the dialogue. We’ve seen it in action.
In writing classes, you’ll hear this referred to as “show, don’t tell.” It’s important.
By what pact with the devil did this movie turn out so brilliantly?
It’s impossible for me to avoid the mental comparison to Alice in Wonderland, another movie which had the inescapable feeling that its (talented) director had simply gotten too preoccupied with the technology to realize that the movie itself was inane.
Still, apparently people like the movie. It’s hard for me to not think that a good bit of that has to do with simply returning to Middle Earth. For this viewer, though, simply making it a destination is not enough. The journey has to be worth the while, too.****
The thing that really bothers me about the soft pass The Hobbit has received is this: Compared with the Lord of the Rings movies, this one doesn’t stack up — there aren’t nearly as many great lines, iconic scenes, or memorable moments. Compared with the book, it flounders. And when compared with the needs of the narrative it tells, it falls shorter than its main character.
Get it? Because he’s a Hobbit. Sorry guys, I needed an outro.
FOOTNOTES:
*It doesn’t help that Azog’s B-plot is handled as clumsily as anything else I’ve seen lately. The scene where he kills a henchman on Weathertop would be cheap in a Die Hard sequel, let alone a freakin’ Tolkien adaptation. Also, why use Weathertop? Ugh.
**Martin Freeman works overtime and nearly convinces us otherwise, but Ian Holm’s Bilbo might have been better drawn in the original movies, and in a fraction of the time.
***Though it sort of is.
****A brief list of things about this movie that I thought absolutely worked: Riddles in the Dark, Radagast (until that godawful chase scene), the Mountain Giant fight, and… um… oh, the prologue was pretty tight, too. But that’s about it.
Couldn’t agree more. It’s just scene padding, padding, and more padding. They need to stretch this out to 3 movies of course. They’ve already built the sets, the characters are in makeup, and the caterers are there…. so why not stretch this out to 3 movies and make 3 times the money? The franchise was simply too big and the money to be made too great to NOT compromise this work with padding.
And if you go back and see certain scenes again its even more obvious. The dish washing scene: Yes, I get it. The dwarves are very coordinated when they want to be. Or the tree on the ledge scene: For the love of… will the eagles just show up already?
Two words: narrative gibberish. (Which is essentially what you said)
There’s the old truth about what ‘adventure’ audiences truly crave. LOTR is, at its core, a fully realized good vs. evil tale; THE HOBBIT is not. It’s more academic, more nuanced, more story and less action. As such, it’s a markedly different kind of story set within the same universe. I had said this back when talk was starting about Jackson getting approval to do a filmed version of THE HOBBIT — that it’d never approach LOTR in storytelling brilliance if he stuck to the source material (which he pretty much didn’t but pulling in all of these other threads in order to produce something he thought was filmable) — and I was dragged through the mud for it.
Now look what he have? A filmed version of THE HOBBIT that, on some levels, bares little resemblance to the source material (so far), and, with two films to go, can only further stray from it.
People know what they’re getting with Jackson now. It’s not like George Lucas is making these, at least, but it’s still a shame for those of us who’d prefer a more faithful narrative. The heaviness of tying this to the Fellowship story isn’t helping anything so far as you point out. The whole council scene makes me wonder how Saruman held his position so long given how obvious it is he’s suffering from ADD. Having these orcs traveling in the daytime makes Saruman’s creation of the uruk-hai pointless as well (as they already seem to exist). Bilbo and the dwarves as action heroes is simply annoying. The Great Goblin was a punchline at best. I didn’t hate the whole of this first effort in the trilogy-that-didn’t-need-to-be but my slim hopes based on Guillermo Del Toro’s involvement have largely been dashed.
Perhaps this failure has more to do with making money than anything else. Why go all out bringing characters to life when you just need to string together a bunch of action sequences? Is anyone else still angry over Aragorn just letting Frodo go in that first film of PJ’s trilogy (which, I’d agree, was the best of them)? I thought a reviewer was dead on in pointing out the Endor “hover bike” scenes were better than Radagast’s squirrel sled ones… There’s a lot of deja vu to be had with respect to the underground scenes in particular. The Oscars weren’t above awarding PJ so what else is there, besides? He’s great commercially and artistically so there!
@Zimmerman
For me, the key to making this movie work was not even asking it to hold comparison to LotR, but rather to simply make it work on its own terms as an adaptation of The Hobbit. I would have really liked a smaller, more lighthearted adventure that stood on its own terms.
The Lord of the Rings didn’t make The Hobbit obsolete (talking books here), because they function in very different ways and serve very different purposes. This dichotomy could have easily translated over to the movie versions as well.
But I have to ask… how do you find The Hobbit more nuanced than Lord of the Rings?
I went into this article with an open mind but you have completely nullified your own opinion with one comment. In an article about how a movie doesn’t live up to the book or proceeding three movies you admit that you haven’t even read the book in over ten years. How can you even recall what was in the book?
Go back and read the book. I read it at least once a year and have done so for the past twenty. I also read the War of the Ring once a year and the Silmarillion about once every five years.
Jackson, his wife and their writing partner have probably read the all of the above more times than all of us combined and know the source material better than anyone living today.
All that “boring” stuff of the White Council? It will pay off in spades when they are battling the Necromancer later in the series (it’s where Gandalf disappears to when the rest of the party are in the woods and prisoners of the elves-most casual viewers would wonder why a Wizard would leave 14 party members when they need him most and this will explain why). The background of Thorin and his rival? That will pay off ten times over in the final movie when they meet in the Battle of the Five Armies.
It’s funny how people were so happy with the 20 minutes spent on Krypton at the beginning of MoS since it would be the only chance to really see it on screen. The same applies to all the bits that the filmmakers crafted back into this story. For a die hard Tolkien nut like myself, who realizes that this is the last time we will ever get to see Middle Earth brought to life in such amazing detail, it is like crack to a crack whore. This is it. There will be nothing else made form this series. The Tolkien estate will not be allowing any further films, tv shows or cartoons made of this property.
I for one will enjoy this while it last and I trust Jackson to craft an amazing trilogy. To complain about the first act in a three act play is just an excuse to complain about something.
The story of The Hobbit is very easy to remember, and I never said I only read it once. The comment was simply meant to reinforce the idea that I’m not sitting through the movie with the book in mind.
I never said you read the book only once, just pointing out that you said you haven’t read it in ten years.
Also, Thorin didn’t have two flashbacks to himself. The opening flashback is more about how the Dwarves were driven from their home and what the set-up was before the dragon attacked. Yes, Thorin is featured but he is the viewer’s anchor to the the event. If they picked his grandfather, father or a random Dwarf it would not tie the story together as well or give purpose to their quest.
The second flashback is totally about Thorin and after the final fight it will provide a nice “bookend effect” to the start and finish of the story.
@DavidR:
To answer in any great detail why I’d say THE HOBBIT is more nuanced than LOTR would open up a can of political philsophizing (sp?) that I wouldn’t want to do on an entertainment site. You can usually Google THE HOBBIT and politics and find some scholarly essays on the point (this refers to the books, not the films, but methinks it’s pretty valid with flicks, too). If I find the last one I read on the subject, I’ll put up a link here later today.
That’s a mighty well-written piece, David, and full of truth and knowledge. The problem is that these are all infinitesimally small infractions when compared to, oh say, the last two Christopher Nolan films (if I may devour the sacred cow to name two), so “fail” is a pretty strong word. If you are letting issues like that ruin an entire series for you, you’re doing movies wrong. It’s like hating Star Wars because light sabers don’t make scientific sense or Leia and Luke were siblings. If you are a fan, you look past the little flaws that plague every single production, rather than stop-watching every scene to see how the pacing matches up with previous films in the franchise for the sake of finding flaws.
It’s pretty clear that there was studio interference in the form of shoehorning a boss-battle antagonist into the first film for the sake of traditional adventure filmmaking, but being familiar with the character and his history, I could hardly say he didn’t fit. There was an orc who killed Thorin’s father, and the party was being pursued by warg riders. No reason not to combine the two if the studio is going to insist on a big bad for the first film.
When you consider Jackson was combining elements of an encyclopedic history with the children’s story narratiave of the book, I think he did an amazing job. Tolkien fans seem to like the film in my experience (although we have our own separate list of complaints). Non-Tolkien fans seem to not have enjoyed it as much. But who would you say is a better judge of what makes a good Tolkien story? Plus, we’re all totally going to rush out to see the next two as quickly as possible and that is the ultimate IRL “show, don’t tell” in terms of establishing quality.
The problem I had with the White Orc is he’s still freaking alive and will be in the second movie.
They use him as a main villain for the first movie. I thought they’d have him killed or permanently removed somehow, thus, ending that plot and having the first movie have some conclusion. The second movie will be defeating Smaug (I assume), and the third movie will be with the Necromancer.
But.. White Orc just ranaway. It felt like the first movie did nothing but *slowly* build things up to be continued in the second movie. The ending is really anti-climatic.
Also I hated Ragatash the Brown Wizard or however you spell his name. Oh a guy with bird shit trying to save a freaking hedgehog? He has a sled pulled by bunnies. Jesus Christ. It was way to childish for me to get into.
Failed?
Sure… Now go home and finish watching Spring Breakers.
Do I think the Hobbit movie could have been handled better? Yes.
Do I think the Hobbit movie was still damned entertaining? Yes.
I agree with many of the points you make, and part of what is disappointing is what Jackson has indeed shown he can do better. The CGI of the white orc is annoying and the how film could clearly have been tighter done as two films instead of three. But part of the reason why so many of us still enjoyed the movie is that we aren’t just comparing it to its possible ideal, but to so many other films. The music, the acting, the action, and yes the story are still so much better than any other attempt at a Hobbit movie, or even 90% of any other movie that gets churned out.
Which isn’t to say pointing out flaws or places where something could have been even better is wrong. It is indeed difficult when you think about how easily something could have been improved. But I just don’t think it’s fair to say the Hobbit got a free pass. Indeed, I think it’s generally being judged more harshly than most other films that come out. Our expectations these days are so high and it’s easy to take for granted how much was done right.
Anyway, you’re certainly entitled to not have enjoyed it (just as I am to have liked it…though it is a bit insulting when your tone comes across like anyone who did enjoy it is being foolish or hasn’t put any thought into it. I realize that probably wasn’t your intention, but there it is).
Cheers.
I have not read any of Tolkiens books but my whole initial reaction to making The Hobbit into 3 movies was WHY? and HOW? The book is pretty small I know that. Just seems he want more money.
Okay, so as most people here probably know, Tolkien created Middle Earth and wrote these stories in order to create his own epic cycle. Referencing his own childhood, several different histories, and the greek epic cycle, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are basically formal exercises in writing Homeric equivalents. Obviously the two works (viewing LotR as a single piece in three parts) are more than just copies, but at a very basic level The Hobbit is The Odyssey, and The Lord of the Rings is The Iliad. The main reason I bring this up is to point out that the Hobbit is fundamentally a pure adventure story, taking cues from the original adventure story (at least for the western history of stories). The things you point out as flaws are actually strengths in this genre. For example, the addition of Azog actually provides a force that pushes our heroes as they are simultaneously pulled by their grail. This is in some regards an equivalent to Poseidon in The Odyssey. As others have already mentioned, this also weaves into the already existing plot of The Hobbit almost seamlessly, and provides meaning for the Battle of Five Armies that was lacking in the original text. You complain that it took 40 minutes to leave Bilbo’s house, but keep in mind that the film needed to introduce 14 characters that the viewer was unfamiliar with. Reading the books, there is very little to differentiate most of the dwarves, especially those with similar names which are often described as pairs. The last thing I want to address is the splitting into three films. Having seen the animated Hobbit film, I don’t think that the story could be successfully fit into one film. I also don’t think it would quite fit into two whole films. This means, that extra material would be required. I think Jackson made the smart decision to include the necromancer storyline, which happens at the same time, and ties the story more the LotR. That said, there is too much in that storyline to fit in the half a film left over by the Hobbit. That pushes this new story into a third film, which wouldn’t quite work without the fleshing out of some parts of the original story, such as the inclusion of Azog.
I liked the movie but I did feel like they made scenes long then they needed to be. A lot of extra stuff that didn’t really add anything. I would really have been fine with 1 movie. It is one book.
You really can’t understand why people who dug the movie are looking forward to the second one? Is it really so hard to understand that your opinion isn’t the only one, nor the only valid one?
I enjoyed The Hobbit as light entertainment, but it was nowhere near as good as LOTR, especially the Fellowship.
How could they have improved it?
In my opinion, removed Radagast entirely and not even mentioned that cinematic abomination, gotten rid of the Great Goblin, and made the goblins more like they were in the Fellowship.
The biggest problem I have was Radagast. Pot jokes in Middle Earth? There is no universe in which that is acceptable.