The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I can't say that I was super-excited for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  Part of it had to do with my work schedule at the time I saw it --- a 12:01AM opening day showing during a time where I worked long and early hours every day --- and part of it had to do with the fact that I grew up with The Lord of the Rings books before I ever got around to The Hobbit.  While The Hobbit is charming and fun, it's not epic awesomeness.   Still, An Unexpected Journey was being made by the same people who made the excellent LotR trilogy, so there should be little to worry about, aside from a hilarious dose of homosexual undertones, right?  I was a little uneasy, though.  The Hobbit is not a particularly long book, and yet An Unexpected Journey is only the first part of a Hobbit trilogy, while the significantly larger The Lord of the Rings books were barely squeezed into one (very long) film each.  Doesn't it feel like Peter Jackson is milking this one a little too much?

In this prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, we follow the young Bilbo Baggins (played by Martin Freeman here and Ian Holm in LotR) as he is enticed by a wizard, Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), to embark on a dangerous adventure.  The goal is to help a clan of dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), reclaim the home of their ancestors.  Why does it need reclaiming?  Well, dwarves like to mine riches from the earth.  Dragons apparently like riches, too.  When the wealth of Thorin's granddaddy became well-known, a dragon decided to move in and fricassee anyone who interrupted his enjoyment of his ill-gotten riches.

Artist interpretation

Of course, they're not going to take on a dragon all alone.  To go along with Bilbo, Gandalf, and Thorin are a lot of other dwarves.  In case the preview didn't illustrate that point to you, here's an alternate movie poster:

Which one of them is the hobbit?

Bilbo isn't really built for adventuring; he's a hobbit, which means he is small and inexperienced with weapons and the dangers that fill Middle-Earth.  He's not ready to face trolls, orcs, or goblins, much less a dragon that could frighten battle-happy dwarves --- and he may never be ready.  This is the tale of Bilbo's struggles to find his place in the group and in the world outside of his home in Hobbiton.  Of course, something else important happens in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Bilbo finds that ring that everyone made such a fuss about in those other three hobbit-ish films.

The acting in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is good, but this isn't really a movie built around individual performances.  Martin Freeman plays a wonderful everyman, so casting him as the very suburban Bilbo was a good choice that paid off well.  As the audience's POV character, he did a good job being confused and frightened for the audience, and I thought he conveyed his character's emotional journey rather well.  Ian McKellen was good as Gandalf the Grey; he's obviously familiar with the part, but I liked that he was a little more temperamental and less wise in this film.  Of the dwarves, Richard Armitage was by far the most impressive; it helps that he got to play a bad-ass and didn't have to wear goofy facial prosthetics, but Armitage was awfully good at brooding, too.

***Glower***

Ken Stott was the next most interesting dwarf, as the white-bearded right hand to Thorin.  He didn't really do anything terribly cool, but he turned in one of the better acting performances in this series simply through his dialogue. 

Stott was so good that I almost never laughed at the Cousin It under his nose

Oddly enough, those two cover most of the acting amongst the thirteen dwarf characters.  You can argue that James Nesbitt had a few solid moments, or that Aidan Turner stuck out (if only because he looked like the heartthrob of the group), but they didn't really have much to do.  The rest of the dwarves made little to no impression at all.  A lot of actors from LotR came back for small parts, and they were all fine.  Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee showed up, said a few lines, and were gone again.  Andy Serkis reprised his role as Gollum and he was excellent.  Serkis really does a great job every time he puts on a motion capture suit, and I hope he one day gets some recognition for the pioneering work he's doing (fun fact: Serkis also served as a second unit director on these movies).  He doesn't steal the film, like he did in The Two Towers, but that's mainly due to screen time.  Note to Peter Jackson: there's always more room in the script for Gollum.

He's like Jell-O in that way

The only other actor worth mentioning is former Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy, who got to play Radagast, the batty wizard that was apparently named by a twelve year-old in 1992.  McCoy did a solid job with a goofy character, almost to the point where I forgot about the fake bird poop on his face.

Almost

The special effects were as stellar as you would expect from this series of films and these filmmakers.  It kind of sucks that this movie revisits so many things that we've seen before in Middle-Earth, because it gives a bit of a "been there, seen that" feel to the film.  Even with that in mind, the sets --- particularly the ancestral dwarf home --- are all awesome.  The CGI was excellent, even in the large battle scenes that clearly didn't have the actual actors fighting in them.  I wasn't a big fan of the makeup on the dwarves, though.  Too many just looked silly, even if they are faithful to how Tolkien wrote them.  It's not a big deal, in the big scheme of things, but it irritated me that there were bad guys who looked dirty and creepy...

...and then there would be good guys who looked like complete cartoon characters.

This is actually one of the better-looking dwarves

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Peter Jackson's work on The Hobbit.  As far as his co-writing credit goes (the script was basically done by him and his partner, Fran Walsh), I was impressed that An Unexpected Journey felt like a complete story.  Bilbo and Thorin had decently crafted character arcs, there was a natural ending point, and there was no cliffhanger ending.  That's tough to do with source material that originally had only 310 pages --- and keep in mind that two more movies are on their way from that same material.  I have no idea what the next two films will contain, but I'm alright with the contents of this one.  If you're wondering where the hell Jackson and co. found the rest of the material to pad this story enough to get three movies out of it, that was touched on a bit in this interview Peter Jackson had on The Colbert Report:

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As a director, I was a little less pleased with Peter Jackson.  The tale was definitely told competently.  The movie looked absolutely gorgeous, and the pacing was brisk; while my mind keeps telling me that this story was stretched out, it didn't feel that way when I was watching it.  I wasn't a huge fan of the action sequences; without someone awesome to focus on (like Legolas in LotR), I was faced with a bunch of characters I didn't really care much about in situations that didn't seem all that dire.  Admittedly, part of that impression is due to the fact that this movie looks so much like the Lord of the Rings movies that it suffers when you compare them by scale --- having fifteen good guys fighting a handful of orcs pales in comparison to the odds faced in LotR.  But the problems are not just by comparison.  Less than a third of this cast was fleshed out at all, so their survival meant little to me. 

I only cared about the guy who isn't attending a rap-metal show at the Renaissance fair

That's on Jackson.  There is no excuse to have all these characters left undeveloped, especially when there are three movies to fill.  Another option would be to imply how unimportant some of them are, but each one has enough quirkiness to make the viewer wonder about them.  This movie also suffered a bit from a lack of truly stellar bad guys.  The goblin king was kind of gross, but he struck me as more of a bloated tumor than a credible threat.

He has a tumor the size of a grapefruit an obese cave dweller

The albino orc looked fairly cool, but he didn't get the chance to actually do anything cool.  He just posed and growled.  He was so underwhelming that the top Google image hits for him are either blurry or behind-the-scenes shots.

This was the best pic I could find of Azog, the Defiler.  I mean "best" in every way possible.

Sure, Gollum was awesome (again), but he A) wasn't the primary threat B) only threatened Bilbo and C) obviously survived, along with Bilbo, because they are both in The Lord of the Rings. 

My biggest complaint with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, though, is with its tone.  This story is not as epic as LotR, but it is being presented in the same way.  As Stephen Colbert pointed out, Tolkien tried to go back and write an epic version of The Hobbit, but was later convinced that it was a bad idea.  It seems odd that the filmmakers would make the same mistake.  There's enough grandiosity in Middle-Earth to make this an epic tale, I suppose, but it just doesn't seem like the right fit.

It troubles Gandalf, too

I guess the easiest way to sum this movie up is to say that An Unexpected Journey is missing a lot of the charm that I expected to find, going into the movie.  That doesn't mean that it is a bad movie, by any means.  It's just not what I expected or, really, wanted in a film adaptation of The Hobbit.  It is still a good movie and totally worth seeing.  There is a lot to like here.  In fact, there is just under three hours of movie to like here (and we have six more hours on the way!).  It's just not as overwhelmingly, jaw-droppingly fantastic as the Lord of the Rings movies were.  I think that is because this feels like a continuation of those films, instead of a new trilogy with its own identity.  Hopefully, the sequels will course-correct that a little.

A quick aside on the format of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:  I have now seen this film in the standard 24 frames per second and in 3D 48 frames per second.  The former was a much better experience for me.  The 3D was fine when I saw it on opening night, but the action scenes looked terrible.  However, my experience doesn't match up with any of the other complaints I've read online regarding the 48 fps presentation.  Instead of looking like a video game, or looking "too real," or looking like the ClearMotion option on a Samsung TV, all the action looked like it was sped up.  It felt like I was watching something out of the silent movie era, or at least an action scene from an early James Bond movie.  My assumption is that someone played the 48 fps version of the movie at 24 fps (because that's how fast-motion scenes are conveyed in those other examples).  If you have a better theory, I'd love to hear it. 

X-Men

Doesn't the tagline "Trust a Few, Fear the Rest" kind of go against the movie's message?

As the release of the X-Men franchise reboot/re-imagining/origin story, X-Men: First Class, rapidly approaches, I thought it would be interesting to re-watch X-Men and see how the ball got rolling.

To understand this movie, you have to accept that there has been a genetic trend in human births over the last sixty or so years that has allowed a tiny minority of people to be born with genetic mutations.  I'm not talking about your normal defects or abnormalities, though.

Ugly is not a super-power.

These mutations give extraordinary powers to otherwise normal people.  The powers range quite a bit, from the ability to control weather or magnetism to fast healing or being irresistible to women.

Hell-lloooo, ladies!

Can you buy into all that?  If not, this movie is going to seem a little silly.  Well, mutants (as the super-powered-by-birth are called) have apparently been trying to live normal lives, safe in their anonymity from the lynchings that can occur when people find something new to hate.  Seeing this as a dangerous status quo, Senator Kelly (Bruce Davidson) proposes legislation that will require all mutants to register themselves and their abilities with the US Government, essentially treating them as weapons.  Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) believes that Senator Kelly is frightened of what he doesn't understand, but that the general public will see the legislation as the bigoted mess it is.  His take on the situation is to protect humanity from angry mutants and things will get better.  Magneto (Ian McKellan), who survived German concentration camps, sees this as another attempt to wipe "his people" off the face of the planet.  Understandably, he decides to take a more offensive approach to this problem.  Both men have followers willing to fight for these two opposing ideologies, but the first steps toward a genetic war come when a runaway teen, Rogue (Anna Paquin), and a metal-boned and -clawed tough guy, Wolverine (Hugh Jackman), suddenly pop up on the radars of Xavier and Magneto.

Man, the cast of X-Men is good!  Mostly.  Well, Hugh Jackman is perfect in the lead role as Wolverine, at the very least.  Angry and tough, yet confused and surprisingly caring, Jackman brought the iconic character to life.  Ian McKellan was great as the villainous Magneto, but it wasn't his nastiness that made him so appealing; McKellan succeeded in the always difficult task of making a bad guy sympathetic.  Patrick Stewart was also good as Xavier, and not just because he looks exactly like the comic character.  Stewart's eloquence and British accent helped make the almost saintly nature of Xavier plausible --- if only the screenwriters could have found a way for his character to not get sidelined in the movie, then we could have seen his kindness tested.

The rest of the cast was definitely supporting, when compared to those three.  Anna Paquin was solid as Rogue, and she managed to not be annoying or whiny in a role that could have easily swung that way.  I think James Marsden doesn't get enough credit for his work as Cyclops; yes, playing the uptight guy is pretty easy, but he and Jackman had a lot of chemistry with their verbal barbs.  Famke Janssen was completely acceptable as Jean Grey, even if the love triangle that formed around her was pretty underdeveloped.  Halle Berry, on the other hand, was truly wretched as Storm.  Pick an accent, already, lady!  It doesn't help matters that she delivered the absolute worst line in the whole movie: "Do you know what happens when a toad is struck by lightning?  The same thing that happens to everything else."  That's just terrible.

Two non-masturbation things that make you go blind: bad acting and bangs.

On the other hand, I liked Shawn Ashmore's performance as Iceman, even if it was steeped a little too heavily in teen melodrama.  As for the bad guys, Ray Park was pretty cool as Toad, even if he's just a green-painted stuntman.  I thought Rebecca Romijn looked pretty hot in her ridiculously naked "costume," and the special effects made her character seem awesome.  When you look a little closer, though, you realize that she almost never spoke and most of her "acting" involved her looking sexy.  Well, that's good enough for most people, I guess.

Not the most attractive "O" face, but I'll take it.

I was pretty disappointed in Tyler Mane's Sabretooth, though.  A lack of interesting dialogue, an over-reliance on wires to show off his super-strength and super-jumping (?) abilities, and a generally awful character design combined to make Sabretooth pretty lame.  And that's a shame, since --- in the comics, which are obviously not the movies --- he's basically Wolverine minus the conscience. 

Plucking and threading aren't enough...grab a mower to tame those brows!

Bryan Singer did a great job directing this film, with the exception of letting Halle Berry use a terrible accent (sometimes).  This is a character-driven movie, where these potentially silly and melodramatic mutants are seen as people instead of excuses for special effects.  That is what makes this movie so important.  Keep in mind that the last major super-hero movies before this were the too-violent-for-kids Blade and the awful Batman & Robin; if X-Men didn't deliver to a wide audience, you can be sure that Spider-Man and Batman Begins would not have been made (at least not in this decade).  I appreciated a lot of the choices made by Singer and his production team, too.  The black leather costumes keep the guffaws of implausibility away much longer than comic book costumes would have.  Making Wolverine the main character and leaving a lot of his history unexplained/under-explained gave his character (who is otherwise kind of un-invested in Xavier's team) motivation and a character arc.  The tone of the film is perhaps Singer's greatest legacy on this movie, as well as for all post-2000 comic book movies.  This feels like a science fiction film instead of an adaptation of a childish medium.

Hugh Jackman always has time to entertain with a Tonys-related tale.

The movie is not perfect, though.  Magneto's secret hideout is located in an island prison with no walkways between the cells?  Exactly where would that be?  The pace is a little slow, and nothing truly thrilling ever happens; it does an admirable job of setting up the premise with a fairly interesting story, so the sequel could be awesome.  The special effects are solid, but not spectacular.  What makes this movie seem more impressive is the awful development hell it went through before being made this way.  There were several script rewrites, many directors, and Hugh Jackman was cast as Wolverine after the movie had been filming for three weeks already; the actor originally signed to play the part was the awful Dougray Scott, who backed out to film Mission: Impossible II.  The film also had Joss Whedon do a dialogue-fixing rewrite for one of the older, stupider scripts; his script allegedly only had two lines make the final movie --- Storm's lightning and toads line and the one where Wolverine calls Cyclops a dick, the worst and best (respectively) lines of the movie.  When you think of the other Marvel Comics movies that had been made before this (the Dolph Lungren Punisher and the rubber-eared Captain America) and how easily this film could have been made into something like them, I think X-Men deserves some respect.  And it helps that it's a good movie.

I should also point out that I am a ridiculously big X-Men comics fan (like, 30+ solid years of collecting big), so I know good and bad X-Men stories when I see them.  Writing this review also reminded me of the awesomely cheesy (but still awesome for its time) X-Men cartoon and its cool theme music.  Adapting that theme into a symphonic film score would have made this movie near perfect for my nerdy tastes.