Spoiler & Nerd Alerts: Thoughts on Jackson's Hobbit

My issues with the Hobbit film, in a nutshell:

They cut my favorite character! That's right, with an approximate 540 minutes to adapt less than 300 pages of text, with a budget of half a billion dollars and one of the best special effects armies in existence, Jackson & co. made the the decision to cut Pursey [real name withheld], William the Troll's Talking Purse:

Trolls's are the mischief, and this was no exception. “'Ere, 'oo are you?” it squeaked, as it left the pocket; and William turned round at once and grabbed Bilbo by the neck, before he could duck behind the tree.

Jackson's WETA team could have pulled this scene off quite masterfully, and I'm sure they could have pulled in some great voice talent. I'm torn between Michael Caine and Helena Bonham Carter, myself.

I really enjoyed the Hobbit, and will likely see it again, as well as the sequels. It has two flaws that unfortunately intrude into almost every scene: first, a seeming lack of editing, and, second, a blind adherence to the “rules” of action & fantasy films that washes out many of the most enjoyable parts of the work. For the former, not much need to elaborate—although the Onion, as usually, nails it, and also--take a look at how the pacing in some of those chase scenes (doesn't) work. For the latter—the way that a children's adventure story has turned into an epic battle movie, well, that's what this post is about.

The Epic Infection

The real problem here is the failure to escape the “epic fantasy film” trap. The unspoken rule for “high fantasy” adaptations, at least lately, is that they must serve mainly as vehicles to get us to large, quasi-medieval combat scenes, with bonus boints for supernatural creatures/forces at work. Portraying huge numbers of combatants, once a major financial and logistic hurdle, has become obligatory.

This idea has infected our very definition of what “epic” means in a film, rather as ludicrous fight scenes in front of, and sometimes destroying, famous landmarks and settings has become de rigeur for modern action and superhero films.

When spectacle is made the defining core of a film, it's only natural that all the apparatus around it suffers. Dale Beran quite rightly compares superhero films to pornos—ultimately, all plot and dialog only exist to get us to that fight/sex scene, and thus evolve to be eminently skippable. (His article on Batman is quite worth reading, a very thoughtful and well-read analysis of many of the same issues I've been noticing; it's also one of the best articulations of the "amusement ride" criticism of action movies, which applies quite thoroughly to the Hobbit.)

Tolkien's Hobbit is a children's adventure story, one that is fairly light-hearted without shying away from serious events. Bilbo is the focus: the narrative follows him quite closely, and we understand the story mostly through his reactions: lack of handkerchiefs, infrequent meals, and a nasty head-cold loom larger in the text than larger, “grittier” political or military events. The “biggest” event in the book, the Battle of the Five Armies, comes as something of a surprise to Bilbo (and the reader), it's not glorified, and Bilbo has a very small role in it. The most important moments in the book are smaller, quieter—the sudden compassion for Gollum, the killing of the spider as Bilbo's first real test of bravery, his “betrayal” of Thorin to try to broker peace, the recitation of “The Road Goes Ever On” as he returns home. Despite featuring a 50-something protagonist, provincial, fond of maps, perhaps a bit based on Tolkien himself, it's a bildingsroman, showing Bilbo discovering and creating a better, braver, more adventurous side of himself.

Jackson's Hobbit is a set-up for more epic battles and monster-fights. It's a continuation of the LOTR film franchise by other means. From the moment Dwalin shows up, heavily tattooed and wearing what appear to be some kind of battle-gauntlets, you know what Jackson's about. There's two main goals here: get us to a truly epic Battle of the Five Armies, and some sweet Necromancer-and-his-jolly-minons fight scenes. Smaug is primarily a character, doesn't have any screen-time until the last bit of the book, and has only one possible fight scene—so he can only be milked for so much, in film-franchise logic. Without inventing some really silly dragon-minions of some kind, it's hard to imagine how the Smaug scenes can be drawn out into the kind of action scenes we apparently are imagined to need.

Nope, it's goblins and the Necromancer that are gonna move these lunchboxes, folks. I can just picture this brain-storming session.

Peter F. Jackson: Okay folks, very excited to get filming here. So, who are our main villains?

Ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien: Well, Smaug, mainly...

Team of Film Industy Types: That won't do, he barely appears until the last 20 pages!

PFJ: What else can we work with?

GT: Well, there's Bolg, I suppose.

TFIT: Who?

GT: The leader of the goblin forces at the Battle of the Five Armies.

TFIT: That's even later than Smaug! What about this Necromancer guy?

GT: The Necromancer isn't really--

PFJ: Okay, we run with the Necromancer, do the whole White Council thing, Ian hitting things with a glowing stick, Hugo throwing his hair around, maybe even give Cate a bow or something. Let's make sure it's real clear Chris is going to turn later—our audience isn't all Tolkien scholars, you know!

TFIT: Love it! Any way we can get some younger eye-candy on the White Council? What about Liv? Has Orlando's price tag dropped again?

GT: Um--

PFJ: Still not enough villainy to get us through the first film though, what else do we have?

GT: Ah--

PFJ: More goblins?

TFIT: Big beefy Voldemort-looking goblin antagonist?

PFJ: On a white wolf?

TFIT & PFJ: AND A ROBOT ARM!

GT: Good grief.

Yes, they added a sub-plot/revenge story featuring a suspicously Rowlingy, and frankly hilarious goblin. But no screen-time for Pursey, it seems. Kind of a shame they couldn't just get Fiennes to play Azog, and have done. Will just have to hang in there for for Benedict Cumberbatch's Necromancer/Smaug duties.

Years back in Hobbit-film talks, I was incredibly excited when Del Toro was tapped for direction, before production delays forced him off. Besides his skill at deploying special effects in ways that add to the story rather than subtract, Pan's Labyrinth (and even to some extent the Hellboy movies) showcases a rare ability not to get stuck in ironbound genre tropes & attitudes.I was really looking forward to his direction, as his idea of making the Hobbit connected to Jackson's Lord of the Rings, but with a different tone, sounded right-on. (This interview in particular got my hopes up.)

I'm sure his influence was not inconsequential on the final film. Case in point: elk-riding Elf. Something about that has Del Toro on it. But, sadly, the idea of the Hobbit as a lighter film has been completely lost. The conspicuously purse-less "Roast Mutton" sequence, for example, turns from a semi-comic scene to a pitched battle, complete with fight music and dwarves lashing about with all manner of weaponry. They still wind up in sacks...and then Gandalf, rather than establishing himself as a trickster figure, splits a boulder in half with his sweet magic stick. Yep.

This is a Silly Place

With the honestly crazy length of this project—9ish hours—it's all the more depressing that so much is simplified and dumbed down. Some simplification is inevitable in film adaptation, but, combined with the desire to make this a Serious Fantasy Action movie, the decision was apparently to militarize and villainize wherever possible, rather than present the audience with any ambiguity or complexity. Take the Dwarven/Elven tension, for instance. Here's what we get from the text:

Dwarves don't get on well with them. Even decent enough dwarves like Thorin and his friends think them foolish (which is a very foolish thing to think),or get annoyed with them. For some elves tease them and laugh at them, and most of all their beards.

Later, when Thorin's capture in Mirkwood is related, we get a little more:

So to the cave they dragged Thorin—not too gently, for they did not love dwarves, and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days they had had wars with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing their treasures. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account...All this was known to every dwarf, though Thorin's family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of...

These two passages alone set the tone for the antagonism between elves and dwarves in The Hobbit—based on misunderstanding, over-seriousness, and greed, the last of which in particular is the main vice of the work. The grievance between the Mirkwood elves & dwarves is something I've always been a bit interested in—it's either a thematic repetition of Thingol's slaying way back in the Second Age, or a direct reference to it and the destruction of Menegroth which followed. Tolkien's fond of the old thematic repetition, and at any rate didn't have the material outside of the Hobbit pinned down in a real definite version at that point, so I don't lose any sleep over it.

But, rather than simply build in a bit of annoyance at singing, prank-pulling Rivendell elves, or a bit more realistic tension with the Mirkwood gang, and rather than, you know, using some of the 180 minutes to set some of this up, we instead have a Ludicrous Army of Elk-Elves, standing, for some reason, near the Lonely Mountain, right when the dragon shows up, and then being all “No elven Red Cross for you because you were showing off your JEWELS too hard before kbye”. And so, of course! Thorin & co. hate all elves, and immediately draw weapons on entering Rivendell.

The Rivendell elves...all 4 of them. The rest are presumably off, y'know, not being in their semi-abandoned vaguely-Celticy pagoda complex, or maybe taking some juiceboxes to all those choir-boys just off-screen.

Vaguely-Celticy pagoda complex, I say, and elves that take themselves way too seriously. Tolkien's Rivendell is filled with songs—silly nonsense ones as well as historical lays, not atmospheric choir music. And the house itself is a comfortable house, the last homely house, where the dwarves & hobbit stay for two weeks. It's one of those odd little shifts in tone that disappointed me, from something rich to something simple—this adaptation has the elves playing only one note, and that note is Solemn and Ethereal and Vaguely British Or Something.

I'm intrigued as to how the films are going to carry off the anti-greed moral—the first one does look like they're setting it up a bit. I think it will take some careful work to make that part of Bilbo's parting with the Arkenstone, and Thorin's last speech, really come across. Bilbo's willingness to surrender the Arkenstone, after experiencing a real lust for it, is one of those quiet moments that really makes the book for me, and of course is another thematic repeition, echoed later in his willing passing of the Ring, the only person to do so.

Thorin's farewell, if it doesn't get lost in cinematic DRAMA, is one of the neater summations of some of Tolkien's philosophy—unlike the war against the Shadow in the Lord of the Rings, the violence in the Hobbit is all rooted in greed & lust for power of basically normal folks, to which Tolkien offers the antidote of “food and cheer and song”. That sentiment, among others of Tolkien's, has been a powerful shaping influence on me, and I'm hoping Jackson pulls off the message.

I could keep talking about this film at length—it's a great excuse to launch off into Tolkien nit-picking/glorifying, and an intriguing distillation of all the things that bug me about post-Tolkien fantasy in many incarnations—why are dwarves Highland Scots? Who started with the pointy ears, and is there a special circle of hell for that? But. I will save some of these thoughts for later—maybe for the next film.

I did really enjoy Jackson's film, and if you liked the book, or fantasy movies in general, I wouldn't discourage you from seeing it. It's got a lot of good points—Martin Freeman is the perfect choice for Bilbo, Radagast was fun, and they did far more justice to the “Riddles in the Dark” scene than I expected. Despite a bucketful of textual deviations both tonal and mundane (Orcrist & Glamdring not being mates and lacking patented orc-detection technology, for example), it's still gratifying to see a vision of Tolkien's world fleshed out like this, and they even tossed a few tongue-in-cheek goodies our way, as when Gandalf “can't remember” the names of the blue wizards. And if you liked the book, but felt it REALLY NEEDED a wizard riding a rabbit-sleigh, or a super-muscled Voldemort goblin dude with a robot arm on an albino wolf, this is your film.

No Pursey, though.