Bilbo Binks?

By Rod Dreher • December 13, 2012, 12:50 AM

So let’s jump right in: Is Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” a gaseous and self-indulgent disaster, a “Phantom Menace”-scale overinflated blimp of a movie that casts retroactive shadows across Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy? Counsel is leading the witness, as they used to say on “Law & Order,” but those were among the thoughts I had after leaving a screening of the first installment of Jackson’s prequel trilogy, especially as seen in the eerie and distracting 48 frames per second 3-D format. (The best single description of which came in a tweet from Salon contributor Bob Calhoun: It “looks like Jehovah’s Witness art.”)

1. This is very bad news. I’ve been really looking forward to this film, and am reading “The Hobbit” to my two younger children now, to prepare them for it. Now I don’t know that I want to ruin it for them with this crap (plus, it sounds too violent).

2. This is Schadenfreudishly good news. Peter Jackson’s decision to pad out Tolkien’s slim children’s book into three features was grotesquely cynical. Re-reading “The Hobbit” now with the movie in mind has made me wonder how in the world they were going to get three movies out of a narrative so slight. Now we know: great gobs of empty calories. After the unqualified triumph of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Jackson appears to have delivered his own hubristic comeuppance. Of course, he’ll get even more fantastically rich from this, but if O’Hehir’s take is true, Jackson will go down as the guy who Jar-Jar Binks’d the Tolkien film franchise. There’s no living that down.

Posted in Art & Architecture. Tagged Bilbo Baggins, hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Peter Jackson.

59 Responses to Bilbo Binks?

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dcs says:

December 13, 2012 at 6:46 pm

IMO, the Aragorn-Arwen romance absolutely belonged in the movie, and book-LOTR’s worst flaw is that Tolkien left it out of the main story so that readers are a bit befuddled when Arwen shows up at the end as a sort of Elf-wife ex machina.

I seem to recall Arwen being at Rivendell while the Fellowship was there. But if the reader is befuddled, it is because Frodo is as well. He does not understand why the Fellowship is waiting in Minas Tirith until Elrond arrives and gives the hand of his daughter to Aragorn.

Tom Bombadil is a cool side-trip, but adds nothing to the story

I disagree that he adds nothing to the story (the episode adds a real sense of both wonder and whimsy), but I’m fine with his being cut from the movie. I understand why it was done.
JonF says:

December 14, 2012 at 5:35 am

Re: But if the reader is befuddled, it is because Frodo is as well.

Well, yes. But LOTR is not told purely from Frodo’s POV. We also get Sam, Merry and Pippin, and, yes, Aragorn himself in various parts of it. The narrative is not limited to things only Frodo knew, or else the entire thing would have fit in one book.

Re: I disagree that he adds nothing to the story

I should have said that Bombadil adds nothing to the plot. Sloppy word choice on my part.

Re: I wondered if it was because someone who doesn’t have faith as their centre is hobbled attempting to do justice to Tolkien’s art.

The movie does manage to work in some of Tolkien’s larger thematic concerns, via Arwen’s choice to become mortal (and ultimately bear a child), Gandalf’s description to Pippin about what death brings, and Frodo’s insistence at Ostgiliath (after the Nazgul attack) that the world is worth fighting for.
Blairburton says:

December 14, 2012 at 6:53 am

“his children and grandchildren have been absolutely and ferociously opposed to parting with permission for anyone to touch the rest of his fiction in any way. ”

Not all of them. I believe his son, Christopher who is the child who has prepared other Tolkien works for publication and is in his 80s, hates the films. But Tolkien’s grandson Simon Tolkien, a successful author of suspense novels, had this to say about the The Hobbit in an interview

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2012/12/10/jrr-tolkien-peter-jackson-lord-of-the-rings/1730213/:

“Stretching. That’s the operative word, isn’t it? You don’t know what’s going to happen until you actually see it. The Hobbit is a short book my grandfather wrote for his children in the 1930s. The only way it’s going to work, in a certain sense, is if Jackson makes his own film, his own script and his own story. I personally think films work best if they’re not enslaved to the books from which they come.”

and a Tolkien great-grandson, Royd Tolkien, is actually an extra in one of the LOTR films.
Elizabeth says:

December 14, 2012 at 7:06 am

Wow, you haven’t seen it and you’re already trashing it. Do you always place this much weight on critic’s reviews of movies?
Brian Kaller says:

December 14, 2012 at 11:14 am

I’m sitting in the theatre lobby, just having seen “The Hobbit,” and I’m relieved to say that Salon is once again full of it.

Not that I didn’t agree with the reviewer in parts — the Radaghast parts, implied in Tolkien but made explicit here for padding, are a disastrously ill-written and overplayed, and briefly threaten to bring down the film.

But then, I felt the same way about Gimli the dwarf in Lord of the Rings — a heroic ambassador in the book, transformed into a slapstick sidekick for the films.

Either way, though, it was a small misstep, which detracted from the film but did not ruin it. And in this, as in the LOTR, I found the majority of it enjoyable.

Look, there’s no getting ’round the fact that all the books had to be heavily adapted; LOTR had to be cut down to make a film series, and “Hobbit” had to be padded. That’s not a deal-breaker if the padding works, and at least in the first film, most of it did.

(Side note: did anyone else picture Radaghast “the Brown” as brown-skinned? I’m not much for politically-correct tokenism, but in a series of books in which the heroes are all white and the monsters black, this was the one time casting actually CALLED for a minority, and they passed it by. Or did everyone else picture the character differently?)
James Kabala says:

December 14, 2012 at 11:19 am

Brian Kaller: I believe the name refers, like Gandalf the Great or Saruman the White, to the color of his robe.
James C. says:

December 14, 2012 at 6:43 pm

I just saw it today. I think you’ll find it enjoyable if you keep your expectations at the right level. No, it’s not going to be LOTR. If you read the book LOTR first, followed by the Hobbit book, the latter would probably be pretty disappointing if you expected it to be something along the same lines.

At the same time, you can’t expect the film to be just like the book Hobbit. Having come after Jackson’s LOTR, the story had to be told in a different way. All of the grave and important things happening just off the edges of the page are already known, so the film needs to acknowledge them and fill us in on the backstory.

Jackson’s attempt at doing this is not entirely successful: Some things work and others don’t. I thought the White Council scene was a bit disappointing after the initial joy at seeing Elrond, Galadriel and Saruman. It was underwritten and uneven. It’s clear that Jackson, Walsh and Boyens had to write the scene from scratch, without a template from Tolkien to adapt (compare to the “Council of Elrond” scene in LOTR, long but interesting and critical to advancing the plot; Tolkien devoted a whole chapter to the scene in the book).

Some of the Radagast stuff was a bit silly, but overall I enjoyed that; yes, he’s pretty dotty, but he’s not a bumbling incompetent. The film makes clear that he is surprisingly powerful despite his initial appearance; I look forward to seeing more of him, hopefully not as comic relief.

I was somewhat disappointed in the use of CGI. Not as many “bigatures” this time, with more sets and backgrounds being computer generated. It’s well done as it goes, but as the camera sweeps about, it has more of a video-game feel than the majestic, soaring shots around, over, under and through the wonderfully detailed scale models in LOTR.

Also, regrettably all the baddies are computer generated, and I didn’t like the cartoonish design of the main villains (Azog and the Great Goblin).

There are also too many cartoonish CGI-constructed action scenes that go beyond the limits of plausibility (the whole company surfing/riding a roller coaster ride of collapsing wooden scaffolding and bridges hundreds of feet to the ground completely unscathed is one; another is the stone giant fight in the mountains.

One great triumph of CGI is the familiar-but-improved Gollum 3.0. He’s terrific, and his scene with Bilbo is the best in the film.

Okay, I know most of these comments are criticisms, but I DID enjoy it and look forward to the next two installments. It’s a long, leisurely, rollicking, spectacular adventure story, but without the truckloads of pathos and thematic and philosophical depth of LOTR.

The only times I got misty-eyed were when characters from the earlier films showed up (Ian Holm’s Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, Elrond, Galadriel, Rivendell and the Shire themselves). Of course, 1/3 of the way through the book, there weren’t any weepy moments either. I look forward to seeing what Jackson and co. do with Bilbo and Thorin’s relationship in the 3rd film.
Tony says:

December 14, 2012 at 9:01 pm

Hobbit was awesome
Siarlys Jenkins says:

December 14, 2012 at 10:46 pm

I hadn’t expected it would be necessary to offer a full defense of Tom Bombadil, but here goes…

Bombadil was not a Hero Of The Age, but merely maintained a modicum of peace and good order in his immediate neighborhood. He had plenty of power, and the good judgement to use it wisely and sparingly. He only intervened when there was an acute danger to someone. He was not corruptible, because there wasn’t anything he needed from anyone.

I found all that esthetically pleasing. But then, I wasn’t reading or watching to find vicarious vindication of my or anyone else’s faith. I was looking for wonder and mystery and color and arrangments not actually available in this world.

Whether Bombadil could have single-handedly stood up to Sauron if the rest of the world fell is conjectural, because Sauron was defeated. Finally, I disagree with the notion that Jackson had to make his own story. If you make a movie of someone’s book, you should stick closely to the original plot. Why? Because its not yours.