{"id":66952,"date":"2012-12-10T14:32:28","date_gmt":"2012-12-10T19:32:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/?p=66952"},"modified":"2012-12-10T14:33:19","modified_gmt":"2012-12-10T19:33:19","slug":"unspoiled-for-the-hobbit-an-unexpected-journey-arathorns-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2012\/12\/10\/66952-unspoiled-for-the-hobbit-an-unexpected-journey-arathorns-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Unspoiled for ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’ – Arathorn’s Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor Note: Arathorn was an original staffer of TheOneRing.net back in the early days of the site. His involvement in the site has waned in recent years due to professional and familial responsiblities. His perspective on ‘The Hobbit: An\u00a0Unexpected\u00a0Journey’ is unique as he has remained completely unspoiled and out-of-the-loop for nearly 10 years. Spoilers Ahead!<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"So, the question you probably want to hear answered is how The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey<\/em> compares with LoTR.\u00a0 From my perspective, it\u2019s pretty favourable \u2013 it worked much better for me than RoTK and FoTR, and probably slightly better than TTT.\u00a0 For context however, this is coming from someone who seriously undermined their enjoyment of LoTR by spoiling themselves rotten \u2013 whereas I\u2019ve deliberately kept myself unspoilt for The Hobbit.<\/p>\n

The pacing of The Hobbit: AUJ<\/em> is gentler and more consistent than LoTR \u2013 the storytelling unfolds at a much more metered and less rushed pace.\u00a0 At no point did I feel bored \u2013 it felt like a leisurely but appropriate telling of the story.\u00a0 Also, where story padding is added, it generally feels that it\u2019s actually dramatically required in order to provide additional context for the \u2018real\u2019 story, rather than a jarring and illadvised substitution from the books.\u00a0 For instance, the presence of Radagast is a much-needed and legitimate extension to portray the rise of evil in Mirkwood and Dol Guldur which would otherwise have to be shown as a slightly forced flashback.<\/p>\n

Also, the lighter humour and tone of The Hobbit feels much more suited to Peter Jackson\u2019s style \u2013 whereas I found myself wincing at many of the incongruously lighter moments in LoTR.\u00a0 I am glad to say that The Shire is presented much more naturalistically than the rather over-the-top utopia of the LoTR films (especially in the absence of The Scouring to balance it out!) \u2013 and there are thankfully no sequences remotely approaching the many \u201cjumping on the bed\u201d endings of RoTK (with the possible exception of needlessly belching dwarves\u2026)<\/p>\n

\"\"Much of the improved consistency over LoTR can be ascribed to Martin Freeman turning in a pretty much perfect performance as Bilbo, alongside Andy Serkis hitting new highs in his portrayal of Gollum and Ian McKellen growing further into Gandalf.\u00a0 In fact, almost all the performances are very strong, with the possible exception of the entirely CGI creation of Azog, who unfortunately comes across needlessly one-dimensionally, complete with some very clunky dialogue (bizarrely exaggerated by being subtitled into English) \u2013 think Gothmog, but worse.\u00a0 The contrast is particularly shown up by Barry Humphries turning in a wonderfully charismatic performance as the similarly CGI Goblin King, as well as the spot-on interpretations of the Trolls.<\/p>\n

A slightly unexpectedly major overlap with LoTR is the score \u2013 beyond the fantastic \u2018Lonely Mountain\u2019 theme which underpins the whole film, I didn\u2019t spot any new thematic material at all beyond all the original leitmotifs from LoTR.\u00a0 Whilst the various themes have been reorchestrated (including a fantastic cymbalom introduction for Gollum\u2019s theme), there really feels like very little new material at all \u2013 and in some places (Rivendell, The Shire, The Ring) the audio cues sound taken almost verbatim from the various LoTR scores.\u00a0 Given that arguably one of the best things about the Star Wars prequels was the vast range of new thematic material that John Williams produced as a prequel in and of itself to the original SW scores, it seems bizarre that the main new theme here was apparently composed by Donaldson\/Roche\/Roddick\/Long rather than Howard Shore.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Outside the content of the film itself, there is of course the question over its presentation in HFR 3D.\u00a0 The 48fps presentation is unquestionably jarring at first \u2013 in my case however, I managed to stop getting distracted by it after about 25 minutes (coinciding with the story really getting going at Bag End).\u00a0 It\u2019s unfortunately true that the strangely smooth motion does evoke the impression of a shot-on-video 1980\u2019s BBC drama \u2013 and this impression is made only worse by the way the 3D glasses mute the colour and vibrancy of the footage.\u00a0 I actually took off my glasses briefly during Rivendell and was blown away by how vibrant and bright the print was.\u00a0 Putting glasses on again made it feel slightly as if I was watching it through a fish tank.<\/p>\n

The strangest side-effect of the 48fps video however is that certain rapid movements (e.g. Bilbo tying up his dressing gown in preparation to flee Bag End) end up looking as if they\u2019ve been inexplicably artificially sped up, as per the Benny Hill show.\u00a0 I think this is because when we normally see fast movements on film, they are very obviously motion-blurred.\u00a0 But if you see movement which is unexpectedly fast without any motion blur, your brain almost thinks it\u2019s more plausible that you\u2019re watching normal movement that has been \u2018sped up\u2019.\u00a0 Either that or PJ is doing something very<\/strong> strange with the framerate in some of the earlier shots in Bag End.\u00a0 On the plus side, the higher frame-rate added much more detail to the various spectacular fight set pieces \u2013 a major complaint of the fight choreography of LoTR for me was that the action was so kinetic and motion-blurred that you often couldn\u2019t really see what on earth was going on.\u00a0 HFR fixes this problem admirably, which arguably helps with the immersive experience.\u00a0 (That said, I haven\u2019t seen The Hobbit: AUJ<\/em> at 24fps yet, so I may be guessing wrong on this).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The 3D is impressive at points \u2013 especially in the jawdropping VFX of the Stone Giants\u2019 thunderbattle, and a welcome cameo for Sauron (in a pleasantly understated manifestation as opposed to the boggling eye of RoTK).\u00a0 However, elsewhere the 3D really doesn\u2019t contribute very much (unlike Prometheus, Thor, Hugo, Avatar or other more 3D-aware films) \u2013 and does detract noticeably from the clarity of the image, especially in combination with 48fps.\u00a0 My recommendation would certainly be to see it at first on a really good 2D 24fps screen \u2013 and then follow it up in HFR 3D a bit later.<\/p>\n

To conclude: The Hobbit: AUJ<\/em> is a more than worthy successor to the LoTR films \u2013 and learns from many of their mistakes and avoids many of their disappointments whilst standing true to all their positives.\u00a0 In the end, one of my key metrics for a good film is whether it sucks me in enough for the drama to send shivers up and down my spine\u2026 and I\u2019m happy to say that both the sacking of Dale and Thorin\u2019s final showdown managed that big time.\u00a0 The set pieces are bigger and more spectacular than ever, and the film captures both the essence and the detail of the book.\u00a0 What more could you ask for?\u00a0 In IMDB terms, I\u2019d give it 8 out of 10 (with FoTR coming in at 7, TTT at 8, RoTK at 7).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor Note: Arathorn was an original staffer of TheOneRing.net back in the early days of the site. His…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":66957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1344,32,41,42,46,4,49,1320,1383,1260,74,496,1292,148],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adam-brown","category-serkis","category-blanchett","category-lee","category-wood","category-hobbit-movie","category-mckellen","category-james-nesbitt","category-ken-stott","category-martin-freeman","category-jackson","category-production","category-richard-armitage","category-hobbit"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/hobbit-anunexpectedjourney04.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1tLoH-hpS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66952"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66964,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66952\/revisions\/66964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}