[Aiwendil]

So I finally saw it a few days ago. I went in with very low expectations indeed, and they were basically met. Maybe my judgement was affected by my being a bit under the weather at the time, but I'm afraid I found it rather a bloated, mis-shapen thing. Part of that, I'll readily admit, is me being a purist about the book (all right, so hang me). But part of it is, just as surely, dissatisfaction with it as a film, on its own terms. And where those intersect, there's the strong suspicion that many of the defects it has as a film could have been remedied by following the book more closely.

There were some things I liked, to be sure. A few that come to mind:

- Hobbiton and particularly Bag End were, of course, lovely; the latter possibly even more so than in FotR.

- Much of the prologue was good. I very much liked what we saw of Dale. Smaug's attack was quite well done, even if the coyness of not letting us get a good look at him was a bit obvious. Thror was good.

- On the whole, the Riddles in the Dark scene was done well. I could have done with Gollum a shade more menacing, but that's getting picky.

- Goblin town was utterly different from the way it comes across in the book, but I must say it was visually very appealing.

- The music was good. Others have complained that it recycled too much from LotR, but to me the amount of recycling didn't seem that different from other franchise films scored by the same composer.

- The 3D was not overdone. I have mixed feelings about 3D in general; I think it works for some films but not for others. It worked here, perhaps in part because it was (quite surprisingly, from Peter Jackson!) not done too blatantly. At times I almost felt like I was watching a 2D movie; at other times, it added a certain definition to the settings. It wasn't an immersive experience in the way that, say, Avatar, was, which I think was the right choice for this movie.

- I quite dug the Dwarves' singing.

So, you see, I'm not entirely a curmudgeonly, critical, grouch. Trying to bear that in mind, a few items from my long litany of complaints:

- It was too long. I'm not opposed to long movies in principle, but as I see it a film that's in the 150+ minute range needs to justify its length. The Lord of the Rings movies, whatever other criticisms of them I might have, did that. They were long, but only because that's how long it took to tell the story. AUJ could have been an hour shorter and told exactly the same story, if the action set pieces hadn't been allowed to run amok, and if things had been better paced. Cut out the unnecessary Dol Guldur/White Council stuff, and you're probably down to 90 minutes or so. All of which is simply to say what was already obvious: The Hobbit can't sustain three movies. It should have been one, maybe (maybe!) two.

- It was loaded with unnecessary action and false drama. The first point is really a corollary of this, for this is largely the reason that it was so long. Jackson never misses a chance to turn a minor incident into a major one (e.g. the stone giants), or a subtle point into a blatant one (e.g. Gandalf's little sermon to Bilbo when he hands him Sting). And when did it become mandatory to have a huge, spectacular, action set piece every fifteen minutes?

- Many of the Dwarves, of course, didn't look like Dwarves. They didn't act like Dwarves either, much of the time. At least, not like the Dwarves of The Hobbit, who were quite polite when they came to Bag End, and certainly didn't go raiding Bilbo's pantry and taking his food without permission. As far as their looks are concerned, it's regrettable that the prettification of, chiefly, Thorin, Fili, and Kili is the sort of thing that film-makers think (rightly or wrongly) is necessary. But it also results in a film-world that is very mixed up in its portrayal of Dwarves. Here, they (at least, many of them) look like Men, or perhaps Hobbits, particularly when you've got a company of thirteen of them and the forced perspective tricks lose much of their power. The look of the Dwarves was something I thought Jackson had gotten right in LotR, which makes it especially disappointing here.

- Thorin's character, quite apart from his appearance, deserves its own heading. Essentially, in my view, movie-Thorin and book-Thorin have nothing whatsoever in common, beyond superficialities. Book-Thorin was a proud, stubborn, often self-important and pompous, yet noble king, mostly virtuous (though also capable of great greed), and inclined to a certain stiffness and long-windedness that sometimes rendered him a bit silly. He was an interesting, well-drawn character. Movie-Thorin is a Hollywood trope; he has no personality of his own.

- I have mixed feelings about Martin Freeman's Bilbo. I like Freeman; I think he's a very good actor and is wonderful in Sherlock. But I can't help feeling he was a bit miscast here. His flat, perpetually put-upon affect works well when Bilbo's in difficult situations (e.g. the riddles), but it also gives one an impression of, I don't know, joylessness, for lack of a better word. For one thing, this starts things out on the wrong foot with the story proper. In the opening scene of the book, Bilbo is happy. It's a beautiful morning to just sit outside after breakfast with a pipe and blow smoke rings until you get hungry again. It's not until Gandalf mentions an 'adventure' that he becomes a bit perturbed. Freeman, on the other hand, seemed quite perturbed from the very beginning, and only got more and more so as the story went on. I sensed very little of the love of life, so to speak, that Bilbo seems to have in the book.

- Radagast. I admit, I'm probably even less objective than usual here, as, for reasons I don't entirely fathom, I've always been peculiarly fond of and intrigued by the Brown Wizard (hence the screen-name). So it probably goes without saying that I did not enjoy his portrayal in the film. With one exception: I did actually rather like the rabbit-sled.

- Others have said this, but: why have Azog still alive? Why not have him killed as in the books, have the story of Azanulbizar told as it is in the film, and use it to set up Bolg's enmity for part 3? Then you have a tighter part 1 (not that that's something Jackson apparently cares about), the set-up to reveal a great new villain in part 3, and a nice symmetry of vengeance-seeking between Azog-Bolg and Thror-Thorin. The quintessential example where staying closer to the book would have made for a better movie too.

- Maybe I missed something, but if no one knew until now that there was some guy calling himself the Necromancer in Dol Guldur, then where and when did Gandalf get Thrain's key and map? And, more importantly, why didn't Thorin ask him how he'd gotten them?

- Gollum with Dissociative Identity Disorder is a valid, reasonable interpretation of him in LotR. But not in The Hobbit. Again, it seems to me that this is detrimental to the movie on its own terms as well, since Gollum's split personality is quite extraneous to the story.

- Okay, so this is both a very minor complaint and a very old one, but I continue to hate the design of Elvish blades in the films - all sinuous and curved and pretty. Glamdring, for some reason, doesn't look like that, and it's great. But, alas, Orcrist does. Which bothers me further since it fails to make sense that they would look so different.

- Another really minor one: In the film, there's nothing to suggest that Gandalf doesn't intend, at least initially, to go the whole way with them. Which would seem to make them a company of fourteen already and obviate the need for Bilbo as the lucky number.