The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Re-view

Films are released, they are discussed, they are judged and they are revered or forgotten. Occasionally after several years or even decades they are reassessed by fans and critics and their historical placing my rise or fall. I’ve decided to reassess a film myself but it isn’t a film I saw decades or even years ago, it’s a film I saw just four months and nineteen days ago. Like a lot of people who grew up watching Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy I couldn’t wait for the release of the first instalment of his second Middle Earth trilogy, The Hobbit and Unexpected Journey. I saw it just before Christmas last year and was hugely disappointed, so much so that I gave the film just 4/10 when I reviewed it. To put that into context, that’s the same rating I gave to Rock of Ages and We Bought a Zoo, two films I never want to see again.

For me the main problem with the movie was that it was ruined by one thing; 3D. I thought the 3D in The Hobbit was pointless (if you’ll excuse the pun). It darkened the screen, hiding the beautiful landscapes and made the scenes set underground as easy to see as a particularly difficult to see thing, being viewed by a blind man, facing the other way. The images were also fuzzy and the motion blur I got from the action scenes meant that I often just gave up and closed my eyes. All in all it was a disaster. So having reviewed the film and received exasperated looks from friends who read it, I vowed to re-view it when it came out on Blu-Ray. So was I right?

An Unexpected Journey

Around sixty years before the events of The Lord of the Rings trilogy a young Hobbit called Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) was whisked off for what became a life changing adventure. An Unexpected Journey is based on the first few chapters of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit but contains almost all the highlights of the book I read as a teenager. After a tortured pre production that included a change of writer and director, problems with studio financing, the temporary loss of it’s central actor and location issues, An Unexpected Journey is finally here and even for a year which featured the likes of Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises and So Undercover, this was the film that I’d been looking forward to the most all year. I saw the film close to a week ago now and am only just writing a review. Generally I’ll put pen to paper or rather finger to keyboard within twenty-four hours of seeing a movie but my experience of An Unexpected Journey made me put off writing in the hope of a second viewing. With Christmas around the corner and a trip back to my hometown looming I probably won’t get to see the film again until 2013 but will probably update my review once I have. The reason for wanting to see it again before writing a review is because the impossible happened; I didn’t like it.