The Hobbit pt1 An Unexpected Journey (2012)

In Brief: On the day of his eleventy first birthday party, Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) begins to write a story, to pass down to his Nephew, Frodo (Elijah Wood), recounting the tale of a younger Bilbo's (Martin Freeman) encounter with Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen), who enlists the help of the young Hobbit to join a company of dwarfs, led by Thorin (Richard Armitage), to reclaim they're mountain home from the dragon Smaug.

This is going to sound strange, considering in 9 months time we'll be looking at the impending release of An unexpected journey extended edition. But someone really needs to introduce Peter Jackson to a editor. There's easily 30 minutes here (haven't read the whole book, only a few chapters when i was 11) that could have been cut from the film, and there's a near fake out ending before the start of another ho hum action scene.

Jackson has expanded on the story of The Hobbit, implementing elements from Tolkeins other works that happen at the some time, as well as some original content as well. This has expanded the scope of the film from its originally envisioned two part into its own trilogy. It doesn't sell the opening of the trilogy as well as Fellowship did (its going to be a undeniable comparison). And this can be seen in the characters. Where in Fellowship we quickly got a good understanding of our characters and who they were, and made recognisable in the fights fairly easiler, There's not such distinction in the Hobbit. We have 13 Dwarfs, who more or less become inextinguishable in a fight. Maybe 3 are recognisable, the rest just end up looking like the same lifeless prosthetic noses and beards, and then again in the quieter moments, very few get to stand out as they're own character. That's not to say they're poorly performed, they're just not given the screen time to care about them. 

I managed to find a Cinema that was showing the film in 48 FPS 3D, and it took most of the films run time for me to get use to it (characters appear to move with a unnatural swiftness, no blur), and stop looking at the world and thinking its fake. It regularly looks like a set from a stage production, rather then a detailed environment from a film. This did eventually subside later in the film, but there was also a lot of nicely rendered CGI that quite clearly looked out of place in the world, this wasn't limited to characters but also environments  How much of this can be blamed on the the 48 frames per second , Can't accurately be assessed without seeing the film again (not doing it any time soon), but considering this is WETA studio's, its probably not because it was a bad job. 

All of this negativity aside, there are some great sequences in this film, the Dwarfs melancholic singing at Bag end, Gollum, Bilbo's speech (if it weren't ruined by the tv spots), Gandalf and Galadriel(Cate Blanchett) at Rivendell are effective moments that pull you into the film. Martin Freeman does very well holding the film on his shoulders, and it is His series.