The Hobbit
Ah, 2012: the year where films weren’t 90 minutes if they could be two – possibly three – hours long. Watching The Hobbit you get the feeling that feeding 5,000 people from a few bits of fish and bread must have been only marginally trickier than director Peter Jackson’s current task: making a trilogy of threehour- long fi lms out of a children’s book that only a particularly nervous reader could call lengthy.
The many and devoted followers of Tolkien’s Middleearth books, and the box-office dominance of The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy, made a cinematic version of its prequel an inevitability. Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is not so much invited as coerced by Ian McKellen’s wizard Gandalf to join a troupe of dwarves in an adventure to reclaim their kingdom from a murderous, leathery, psychopath, the dragon Smaug.
Dragons? Brilliant. But even the most dedicated fantasy fan will have trouble staying awake during the first half of this. Jackson and his team have padded out the book with appendices from The Lord Of The Rings and it makes for a jolly, if rather bloated, film.
If Jackson were that pushed for content, he could have spent half an hour having a nice chat with the less-featured dwarves, instead of focusing on Ken Stott’s billowing white beard and James Nesbitt’s magnificent facial hair. For the first uneventful hour or so you may as well be watching an extended jam of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge. Even Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, ravishing as the elves of Rivendell, captivate more through their looks than what they actually have to do.
But just when a popcorn coma beckons, the pace picks up and you remember what a tremendous director Jackson can be. Lavish skirmishes with goblins, escapes through battling mountains and running away from orcs are breathtaking, but it’s let down by Jackson’s new trick, filming everything at 48fps (frames per second).
While this whizzy new technology is intended to speed up and cut out the blurring you get with 3D, the side effect is that it gets rid of the usual, slightly dreamy quality and makes everything look as if it’s happening in your sitting room. Without the fantasy sheen, every carefully applied prosthetic, each painstakingly designed giant bird, looks obviously fake. Instead of suspending our belief to join the quest on Middle-earth, it feels as if we’ve travelled back to Narnia, or a particularly ancient episode of Neighbours.
Where Jackson’s new technique really works is with the deranged, ring-obsessed Gollum who looks dreadfully real. Andy Serkis reprises his role here and the scene in which Baggins must out-riddle him, or be eaten alive, is genuinely terrifying. But as good as Gollum is, there’s plenty more where nothing much happens.
You have to hope that the appendices that Jackson is plundering for plot get a bit livelier, or we’ll all have died of boredom by the time Smaug takes centre stage.
The many and devoted followers of Tolkien’s Middleearth books, and the box-office dominance of The Lord Of The Rings film trilogy, made a cinematic version of its prequel an inevitability. Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is not so much invited as coerced by Ian McKellen’s wizard Gandalf to join a troupe of dwarves in an adventure to reclaim their kingdom from a murderous, leathery, psychopath, the dragon Smaug.
Dragons? Brilliant. But even the most dedicated fantasy fan will have trouble staying awake during the first half of this. Jackson and his team have padded out the book with appendices from The Lord Of The Rings and it makes for a jolly, if rather bloated, film.
If Jackson were that pushed for content, he could have spent half an hour having a nice chat with the less-featured dwarves, instead of focusing on Ken Stott’s billowing white beard and James Nesbitt’s magnificent facial hair. For the first uneventful hour or so you may as well be watching an extended jam of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge. Even Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving, ravishing as the elves of Rivendell, captivate more through their looks than what they actually have to do.
But just when a popcorn coma beckons, the pace picks up and you remember what a tremendous director Jackson can be. Lavish skirmishes with goblins, escapes through battling mountains and running away from orcs are breathtaking, but it’s let down by Jackson’s new trick, filming everything at 48fps (frames per second).
While this whizzy new technology is intended to speed up and cut out the blurring you get with 3D, the side effect is that it gets rid of the usual, slightly dreamy quality and makes everything look as if it’s happening in your sitting room. Without the fantasy sheen, every carefully applied prosthetic, each painstakingly designed giant bird, looks obviously fake. Instead of suspending our belief to join the quest on Middle-earth, it feels as if we’ve travelled back to Narnia, or a particularly ancient episode of Neighbours.
Where Jackson’s new technique really works is with the deranged, ring-obsessed Gollum who looks dreadfully real. Andy Serkis reprises his role here and the scene in which Baggins must out-riddle him, or be eaten alive, is genuinely terrifying. But as good as Gollum is, there’s plenty more where nothing much happens.
You have to hope that the appendices that Jackson is plundering for plot get a bit livelier, or we’ll all have died of boredom by the time Smaug takes centre stage.