I recently did a movie marathon with Brooke where we watched the three Hobbit movies: An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies.  I’d only ever seen the first movie of the trilogy prior to this event, and that was immediately after I’d read the book.  It’s been five years now, so I have a slightly different perspective, but, as someone who liked The Hobbit, you can expect me to have words about this film.

This review is a bit tricky because I very much have two opinions on this trilogy of movies – as The Hobbit, a concise novel that I know and love in its original form, and as eight hours of visual entertainment that stands on its own.  Expect spoilers for both as I think through it.

One of the things I liked most about the book is that it’s a concise, focused, story which An Unexpected Journey showed right off would not be the case with the movies.  It was clear early on that the story the book is telling and the story the movies tell is quite different, even if they did draw from the same source material and I think the reason is that the goal of the two are different.  The book was really trying to tell a complete story in Tolkien’s world, but with the hooks to later works as a secondary concern.  The movies, on the other hand, we trying to tie in to the existing movies, with all the characters and action that people loved, while telling the specific story was secondary.  This sets up an interesting challenge in the movies where events and characters, which really have no place in the story, are introduced but then have to be justified and the narrative adapted to include them.  While not necessarily bad all the time (though, there are definitely cases where this was really bad), this fractured the story and pulled it in ways that weren’t really necessary.

Where I think this was most egregious was with Gandalf’s side-plot.  One of the things about the book that makes Gandalf so fascinating is that he comes and goes without explanation and always seems to have something else going on, but as the reader we don’t know what that is.  In short, he’s mysterious.  In the movies, not only are we shown what he’s doing, we’re shown why and how it fits into his larger plans.  While this is sometimes cool (seeing behind the curtain is cool), more than once it came across is quite banal (he used the same eagle trick again?)

The other thing that bugged me was the insertion of a large number of action scenes.  This was so much not what the book was about that it was a bit discordant.  In this case, I will admit that they were very well choreographed and quite entertaining, and probably the only thing that sustained the movie as long as it did, but they were ultimately a distraction.

The things that I liked the most about the movie were actually the slower non-action bits – the arrival of the dwarves at Bag End, outsmarting the trolls, the riddle contest with Gollum, and the conversation with Smaug, the gathering of the five armies, but these were so far spaced that it made it difficult to really get engaged with the rest as much.

Overall, I liked the movie experience of The Hobbit Trilogy, but it wasn’t really what I was looking for in terms of an adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.  But, in the end, that’s what I really wanted here – something to give texture to the thoughtful theme that Gandalf literally blurts out in the movie (as though we might have missed it).  I give the trilogy two gold breastplates – not as good as one piece of armor forged of better material, but shiny nonetheless.