A wearisome journey

Peter Jackson has had an interesting career to say the least.  Starting out with humorous and gory low-budget shockers, he hit the big time with Heavenly Creatures and then was elevated to the A-list of must have directors with The Lord of the Rings trilogy followed by the remake of King Kong.  That giant ape beating his chest atop the Empire State Building may have also been a zenith for Jackson as well, as he has rather gone off the boil recently and faster than Steven Spielberg with whom he collaborated on Tin-Tin.  The Lovely Bones was a bit of a step back critically if not commercially and The Adventures of Tin-Tin was careering on the edge of catastrophe but, like its hero, just pulling through in the end.

Maybe Jackson sensed it too, perhaps explaining not only why he returned to J.R.R. Tolkien but also splitting the shortest book of Middle Earth into three instalments, to give it some false trilogy feel.  So we begin with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.  I have no problem with the tale being trisected (despite a ridiculous literary tie-in that releases a third of a book, maybe patronising the stereotypical short-attention spans of the multiplex masses).  What is inexplicable in terms of quality control is why each segment had to be two and a half hours long, replicating The Lord of the Rings threesome but with considerably less material.  It’s not so much in terms of value for money, rather more in stiffness in the derriere.  

This leads to inevitable padding.  Contrary to most, I didn’t have a problem the presumptuous pre-empting of Tolkien himself with the fable of Erebor - with its impressive CGI-gothic settings and narrative of rise and fall, it was like a mini-movie in itself.  But then they spend far too much time in The Shire, irritating Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins and then meander from one implausible set-piece to another – implausible because despite all the incredible dangers and physical battering they face, the characters emerge with barely a scratch, let alone any one of them dying.  Plus Just-In-Time was more in evidence than in a South Korean industrial plant; the protagonists face almost certain annihilation but, every single time, their coals are pulled out of the fire with seconds to spare like a James Bond parody.  When Hugo Weaving’s elf king says to the band of their arrival at that exact moment ‘fate favours you’ – well, duh!  The pootering around is irritating as well – at several points I was thinking to myself “Just get on with it!”  This is ameliorated in sections with the promotion of New Zealand scenery to send its tourist board into paroxysms of joy.

The late film critic Alexander Walker once said of Star Wars Episode II that the IQ of the movie rose with the appearance of Christopher Lee and so it does here as well as he play Saruman the White before he goes to seed, yet in his talking with Ian McKellen’s Gandalf the Grey, he is given to being rather sinister in his obstructiveness, harking to what we know he will become, rather than heartfelt caution.  It seems Lee has buried the hatchet with Jackson after being left out of the final edit of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, an omission where salt was rubbed in by sweeping the Oscars after two near misses beforehand.

I once read that where a book takes on average eight hours to consume, a film restricts you to two, again on average, but unfortunately Jackson took that too literally.  He doesn’t even use the extra time to give additional characterisation, most of the dwarves resembling an interchangeable, amorphous mass.  By the time we get to the money scene of Andy Serkis’ Gollum, I was too wearied to be intrigued greatly by it.  If there was undeniable positive to be drawn from An Unexpected Journey, it inspired a desire in me to return to the original book (though not the commercial tie-in), a tome I last read when I was nine-years old.  Whether I can find the time is another matter but the film has rekindled an idea of a re-read – I don’t know whether Jackson would find that a dubious accolade or not.  It’s not a terribly bad picture (indeed it was filmed 48 frames per second high-definition) but it’s not terribly good either.  A two-star (out of five) striving for three but not quite getting there and neither will we reach a destination of sorts until late 2014.