I’ve already complained at length about the decision to split The Hobbit into three films; a decision which makes about as much sense as making Green Eggs and Ham into a 13 episode HBO series, or turning the game Hungry Hungry Hippos into a movie. Oh, anyway, An Unexpected Journey is finally here so it’s time to make an informed judgement. Well, a semi-informed judgement.

It seems that there’s simply not enough material in the novel to justify this money-making move to split it into three films. As Chuck explains in his great review, this first instalment feels aimless and meandering as a result; a gang of increasingly annoying dwarves go from place to place, battling CGI monster after CGI monster. By the time the credits roll (or whatever it is that 3D credits do; bulge, perhaps) it’s deeply unsatisfying, as if we’ve only watched a third of a film. Because that’s exactly what we’ve done.

This was never a problem for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all three films of which were proper movies in their own right, each with a beginning, middle and end. After all, each one was based on a single novel. Yes, The Fellowship of the Ring ended with the beginning of an adventure, but there was still a sense of finality to the piece. An Unexpected Journey, on the other hand, feels like a chopped up portion of one movie.

At no point in The Lord of the Rings do you roll your eyes at a big CGI goblin with a stupid voice (Barry Humphries), or scratch your head at a crowbarred-in scene with Saruman (Christopher Lee), or curse a load of Dwarves under your breath. In fact, if you find the Dwarves’ comic antics anything less than riotously funny, then much of An Unexpected Journey just feels tedious. Too much time is spent introducing them in the Shire (the most boring place in Middle-earth) before wandering aimlessly from battle to battle, with some exposition here and a cutesy CGI hedgehog there. The bloated nature of it all highlights the problem of splitting The Hobbit into multiple movies; there’s not enough material to spread out over three films (“like butter scraped over too much bread,” to quote Bilbo) and so what we get is a lot of padding. A lot of soft, cushy padding.

If you were to watch An Unexpected Journey without watching the following two instalments, it would just feel like watching a series of events with no satisfying conclusion. A film should work by itself. You shouldn’t have to read the books or see other movies for it to make sense. The Harry Potter films are particularly bad in this respect; much of them require familiarity with the source material, and by splitting the final book into two movies, we get a penultimate instalment which goes absolutely nowhere. A single film should be a self-contained, fully coherent piece of work.

It would be odd to only watch, say, the third part of a trilogy, but it should still be possible. Again, The Lord of the Rings achieves this; The Return of the King works as a standalone film. Partly because it’s about as long as three movies. But even with its lengthy running time, An Unexpected Journey doesn’t feel like a fully satisfying movie and that is a problem. It’s a problem with splitting what should be single films into several parts, which allows filmmakers to get away with failing to successfully adapt material.

As I’ve argued, if you can’t fit your adaptation into a single film you have already failed. But now audiences are going to have to pay three times as much money for what may prove to be three unsatisfying The Hobbit movies. Why should this be acceptable in the world of film, when it’s thankfully not anywhere else? It’s like if a band were to release one album with all the guitar and bass parts, and then another the following year with all the drums and vocals. Or like reading The Hobbit, only for it to painfully snap shut on your fingers once you get a third of the way through. It seems that films no longer need to be actual films, and can get away with laziness and incoherence to make even more money.

Thanks to this greedy trend, what could have been a children’s fantasy classic looks more likely to become the disappointing follow up to one of the greatest trilogies ever made. The whole thing makes you wish that Guillermo del Toro had stayed in the director’s chair, making it all a little less cosy and a little less long. And if anyone from HBO is interested in my Green Eggs and Ham show, we’ll talk.

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Wow, has it really been nine years since The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was released? It really doesn’t seem that long, but it does seem like it’s been an eternity since the wheels started turning on production of The Hobbit, what with the rights feuds, a studio bankruptcy, and a director withdrawing even before the first frame was shot. But now it’s here, at least the first of three chapters, and the big question is: was it worth the wait?

The answer is neither yes nor no, as the first chapter in the new trilogy is resoundingly average. I remember being enraptured by the first Lord of the Rings movie from the very beginning; the look, the style, the music … everything about it just drew you into the world of Middle Earth. Since we’ve all been there, settling into a viewing of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, should be like settling into a comfy couch. You certainly know what to expect style-wise with Peter Jackson once again behind the camera, and even the story should have some familiarity to it, since we’re re-connecting with some characters we already know from the previous films (even though this one takes place sixty years earlier).

Unfortunately, what Jackson has done by taking a simple, single-volume children’s story and turning it into a nine-hour epic has made the movie overly bloated and episodic, especially during the first hour when we’re meeting the thirteen dwarfs and getting side stories that sometimes do not have any bearing on the main story at hand. For instance, Gandalf (Ian McKellan) tells the story of another wizard, Radagast the Brown (Sylvester McCoy) and his discovery of a necromancer destroying nature all around him. This side story intrudes on the main story, as Gandalf brings news of the necromancer to Elrond (Hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), and Saruman (Christopher Lee) who dismisses it as just a man playing with magic. Of course, the necromancer will obviously play into the story, as Benedict Cumberbatch was cast in the role (and he’s credited, but never seen in the movie).

The main plot of the book is there, though, between all of the extra stuff Jackson has added. Bilbo Baggins (a terrific Martin Freeman) is enlisted by Gandalf to join a band of dwarfs on their quest to regain their homeland — and gold — from the dragon Smaug. Along the way, they have to battle orcs, goblins, and trolls, and after getting separated from the group during an underground battle with the goblins, Bilbo meets up with a strange creature, Gollum (Andy Serkis), and comes in possession of that magical, golden ring. It’s here that the movie finally kicks into gear with Serkis’ amazing performance. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences really needs to rethink their acting categories to include motion capture performances like this, because even though the actor is replaced by a fully realized CG character, his performance is just stunning (and the advances in CG rendering since the last movie have grown by leaps and bounds, making this the most realistic Gollum yet).

Unfortunately, the movie ends just as it’s really getting started with the band of travelers seeing their destination for the first time off in the distance. What The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey ends up being is a three-hour origin story that we have to wait a year to see how it pans out. Another problem I had was that the whole thing felt like Jackson was just indulging himself. It took a while for the LOTR films to show us some major battles, but The Hobbit has at least three! The effects are incredible, but it all seemed like a bit of overkill and padding. The story has gotten completely lost amongst all the pageantry. More time should have been spent getting to know the dwarfs, the camaraderie, the journey, instead of just throwing one battle after another at us (and don’t get me started on the pointless rock giants fight scene that only served to show off more CGI wonders). As it is, by the end of the movie, you really don’t care one way or another about Thorin’s (Richard Armitage) quest to get back to his home, and with most of the plot points from the book already included in this movie, you have to wonder how much more padding is to come. I fear that the Hobbit trilogy is going to go down in film history as the new Star Wars prequels trilogy.

Another point that needs to be made – at least for those planning to check out the film in the new High Frame Rate 3D edition – is that despite what Jackson and the studio have to say about the process, it really did not serve the film well at all. Yes, the picture is probably the sharpest and clearest you’ve ever seen on a big screen, and the CGI characters all look more real than ever before, but it just looks like you’re watching a big screen version of some old BBC video production from the 1970s (and a modern video game during the battle scenes). The original trilogy had a beautiful look and depth to them — a truly epic scale — but the 48 frames-per-second of video (film normally runs at 24 fps and video at 30 fps) actually makes the movie look cheap and flat, even in 3D! There’s a shot of the band of dwarfs, Bilbo and Gandalf looking across a chasm at Rivendell and it looks like they’re staring at a painting. I don’t know how this will all look when projected at a normal frame rate on film (or in IMAX), and I can appreciate Jackson’s attempts at trying something new (and I shudder to think what Avatar 2 will look like if James Cameron can get the frame rate up to 60 fps), but I think the experiment is a failure (and it doesn’t help if you’re prone to motion sickness … I was still dizzy six hours after leaving the theater and had to resort to Sea Bands to keep from hurling my popcorn about twenty minutes in). Hopefully Jackson can fine tune the effect over the next year and bring a little more depth to the film overall when The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug hits theaters in 2013. The opening chapter, though, is just a bit meh.

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