The Desolation

[Michael Murry]

Aside from the satirical treatment of Bilbo Baggins as the put-upon punter in his own fake exhibition, I found the following passage from the review pretty much the heart of the matter:

The title of the trilogy is ‘The Hobbit’, and yet Bilbo is barely the central focus, and when he is it often feels contrived and arbitrary. When he does play an active and necessary role his action is then rendered redundant by the events that follow. He rescues the dwarves from the spiders, but then the elves appear and do the same thing; he helps them escape the elves, but then Kili opens the second gate in a far more heroic manner; he has the bravery to confront Smaug, but then all the dwarves do the same. Indeed, much as in the first film, there is simply no sense of who the primary protagonist is supposed to be. The dwarves get more screen time than Bilbo. Bard – a tertiary character – gets more scenes than virtually any individual dwarf. Legolas, a character not even in the book, gets arguably more than Bard. And Tauriel, who is not only not in the book but also not in any Tolkien, gets more than Legolas. Who exactly is this film about?

This business about the differnece between the definite article "the" in the movie title versus the indefinite article "a" in the movie content reminds me of a scene from the Tom Cruise movie, Jack Reacher, wherein the eponymous leading character says to his lady-lawyer employer: "Drop me off at the auto-parts store." When she asks him "which one?" he patiently explains that he had said "the" auto-parts store, not just "any" auto-parts store. Then he asks her which local hardware store stands out in her mind as "the" most obvious one, whereupon she gets it and takes him to the aptly named "Default Auto Parts" emporium. In a similar fashion, given the plethora of secondary and teriary characters vying for screen time (and audience recognition) in these films, I can easily see someone asking to see The Hobbit and getting the perplexed reply: "which one?" And with only one hobbit actually appearing in these films, transforming Bilbo Baggins from a "the" to an "a" took a bit of doing, to say the least, not to mention half-a-billion dollars.

The first of these fan-rip-off films ruined things for me last year. I have so far not had much of a desire to experience the same -- or worse -- level of disappointment this year. So I will wait for the DVD rental to appear in a few months. Or perhaps, I will wait another month or so for for the HBO Asia programs on television here in Taiwan. I don't know. Just the thought of another stupid and vainglorious Peter Jackson cameo -- popping up to ruin things at the very beginning -- makes me want to skip the whole thing.