I'll continue in the same "short style" as the last two times, at least for two reasons: primo - I still have problems with my right hand, secundo - I don't really have a subject = "The Hobbit" confirmed my expectancies of a bloated story thrown away on Christmas time to get $, not that there aren't also some good parts ...
But not sufficient enough unfortunately. It's imposible to compare "The Hobbit" with something from the LotR trilogy. I've read "The Hobbit" when I was 13-14 years old. And from that age it looked to me like a children's book by definition. I've started "Lord of the Rings" when I was around 18 and until I finished it the movies were released. Even if it doesn't lose completely the "for kids" tag (I still cannot get out of my mind the Tom Bombadil episode - thank God left outside in the movies), the subject is uncomparable much more dense. I won't start making parallels and building alegories here, since there are already enough on the net. Getting back to "The Hobbit" we have a small tale where Bilbo Baggins (the uncle of the much more known Frodo) leaves together with a group of gnomes in a dragon slaying quest. The reason: long ago, the dragon found a place to live exactly in the midle of the piles of gold gathered by the gnomes. The story has two parts, the way I see it, which are connected somehow to the original title: "There and Back Again" = translated freely: what happens before and after the dragon. In total is quite short as length (the number of pages doesn't even reach the one in "The Two Towers" - the shortest volume in the ring trilogy). Somehow though, the cinematic version seems to be lengthened enough to spane over three movies ...
From which in the first we don't get up to the dragon yet. And to fill the space we have at least 30-40 minutes (exclusively = nothing more) of crossed swords, orc and goblin screams, and other violent effects generated by the Middle-Earth inter-racial conflicts. A good part is that the story was a bit extended (well, three parts needed this), I don't know if using original Tolkien material or not, but I'm afraid that not sufficient enough anyway to think on getting on par with LotR (also for the next part not only this one). To stick to what's good in the movie, getting over the superficial, the predictable and the cliche in the script, what we have is quite ok for this genre. At least considering that in the fantasy area it's rare when I get to see something decent.
Rating: 3 out of 5
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