The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Review

The arithmetic tells the story. A short children's book became three films of nearly three hours each, and the padding is visible inside the first act, where roughly forty five minutes pass before anybody leaves the Shire. Jackson fills the space with material dragged in from the appendices and invented outright, including a wizard on a rabbit sled and a pale orc pursuing the company for reasons the book never needed.

Thirteen dwarves arrive and perhaps four of them acquire personalities. The larger loss is texture. The original trilogy was shot on film with an obsessive commitment to miniatures and prosthetics; this is a brighter, smoother, more digital object, and the high frame rate presentation made the sets look like sets and the costumes look like costumes.

Richard Armitage gives Thorin real weight, and Martin Freeman is beautifully cast, playing Bilbo as a fussy man discovering by accident that he is brave. And then there is Riddles in the Dark, fifteen minutes of two characters and a rock, where Serkis and Freeman produce the best scene in any of the six films Jackson made here. It is proof of what this trilogy could have been at a third of the length.