Movie Thoughts: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

• Released: 14 December 2012
• Directed by: Peter Jackson
• Running time: 2 h 49 min
• Rating 4/5

Synopsis

A Hobbit goes on an unexpected adventure by joining a company of dwarves (and one wizard) on a mission to reclaim their homeland from a dragon.

My Thoughts

While writing this post I just realized that this movie is turning ten years old this year (2022). What the hell, time goes too fast. Anyways.

I've already done my Movie Thoughts on the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (aka my favorite trilogy of all time), but I only recently realized that I haven't done any on the Hobbit trilogy yet. So I guess we're doing that now, starting with the first movie.

We meet our titular hobbit Bilbo from the Rings trilogy, as he narrates his past journey with the dwarves. It turns out to be quite a thrilling tale, with various obstacles such as trolls, goblins, orcs and wargs. On his journey, Bilbo finds a magical Ring that turns out to control the entire fate of Middle Earth one day. 

Over the course of the movie, many of the dwarves doubt Bilbo and his loyalties, often seeing him as unworthy, but by the end of the movie Bilbo finds a newfound courage and proves his dedication to them. By the end of the movie they're a great distance closer to reaching their location of interest than before.

There's a lot of conflict about the Hobbit movies and whether people actually like them or not. My personal take is: you won't like this if you expect another Lord of the Rings trilogy going in. It may take place in the same world, but it's not. This is a smaller story (although the last movie tries to make it just as epic as Rings in some aspects).

I definitely get some of the flaws in this movie, don't get me wrong. It's needlessly long (the book it is based on is very short compared to any of the Rings books) and honestly I think a duology might've been enough to tell the story, because a lot of stuff gets added here that wasn't in the book in order to make for more conflict. And the execution just doesn't always work. 

I also personally find that we don't really get to know enough of our company. Outside of Thorin, Balin and some others, most of the dwarves get little to no lines whatsoever, so too little to establish their personalities. While we do see Bilbo grow (a core element to the story) and of course he has some meaningful interactions with some of the characters, the viewer just doesn't feel connected to Thorin's company in the same way they were to the Fellowship in Rings. And I get it, there's a lot more characters, but even in the sequels none of the side-dwarves really get their time to shine. There's only a few that really seem to matter (Thorin, Balin, Kili, and to a lesser extent Dwalin, Bofur and Fili). And that's only the dwarf characters. There's also characters like Gandalf, Gollum and many more in the future two movies that all need screen-time. 

But I still really like this movie. It's not the Lord of the Rings, and it doesn't have to be. To me, it's flawed, but I enjoy it nonetheless.

Honestly, one of my main gripes with the movie isn't even the length, the stuff they added or how little we get to know some characters, but the visuals. Somehow, in the ten years that have passed since Fellowship of the Ring hit the big screen, the CGI and effects here sometimes look worse than before. Which is quite an achievement, considering the larger budgets these movies have, and of course the time that has passed since then and the technological progression that comes with it. An Unexpected Journey seems to lean less into practical effects and more into CGI (unlike the Rings trilogy, which used practical effects if they could). And it doesn't always look good.

Granted, there's a few things that good or even better than in Rings. Gollum still looks fantastic, and the wargs (although they have very different designs) look much better and are integrated better into the environments. But in certain other elements it just sucks. Azog never looks real, which wasn't a problem with any of the orcs in Rings because those were mostly just people wearing extreme prosthetics and makeup rather than a guy in a mocap suit with CGI over him. The locations also seem to lean much more into CGI rather than bigatures like the Rings films did.

I don't know, it just isn't that good. There's definitely visual elements of the Rings trilogy that didn't age well, but there's also so many aspects that look so much better than it does in the Hobbit. I get that leaning heavily into CGI is just something a lot of modern movies do, but it's not always the answer. I'm not just saying this because I'm a huge sucker for practical effects, but also because it just doesn't look good and will age poorly (heck, it already has in the past few years).

Overall I do really like this movie, it just feels a bit lacking in certain areas and the story is just needlessly dragged out. Lord of the Rings this is not, but it's still a good outing. I totally get why a lot of people don't like it, but to me it's still fine, some visual elements aside.