Anticipation can be destructive. In the months leading up to the premiere of Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I found myself daring to hope that Jackson would strike gold once more--that this film would be a triumph of story-telling and visual effects on the same level as the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Day by day, the hope grew from a small kernel into an entire corn field...until the reviews starting rolling in. They were positive, for the most part, but not overwhelmingly so. Many "top film critics" complained that they didn't feel engaged in the story, that the pacing was too slow, that it felt hackneyed and repetitive. Crestfallen, my hopes regressed. The anticipation gnawed at me still, but a new feeling took root: doubt. Was Peter Jackson's attempt to make The Hobbit, a straightforward, 300-page children's story, into an epic film trilogy nothing more than an intricate scheme to make himself even richer by capitalizing on J.R.R. Tolkien's life's work? Was Jackson selling out at the expense of quality? What if I hated The Hobbit?
These are the things that a die-hard, lifelong Tolkien fan worries about when someone--anyone, even the massively talented Jackson--attempts to adapt the stories of Middle Earth from the page to the big screen.
As it turns out, my fears were completely unfounded, and the "top film critics" are full of rubbish. The Hobbit is, from beginning to end, nothing short of perfection.
It wasn't the innovation or the novelty of The Hobbit that defined the quality of my viewing experience. It was its familiarity, the fact that it felt like an extension or an expansion of the LOTR trilogy. It was its similarity, yet differences; from the music to the costumes to the color palettes, it felt like meeting an old friend for the first time in a decade and learning about all the wonderful things she's seen and done since the last time you saw each other. This franchise is surely more than a money-maker for Jackson. He treats the Tolkien canon with reverence, and it shows in his films.
That's not to say that The Hobbit isn't, at times, rather silly and droll. After all, the main characters are the cheerful hobbit Bilbo Baggins and 13 hungry, boozy, loud, bombastic dwarves. Viewers may have grown accustomed to the stately elves and human warriors that were involved in the events of the LOTR films, and perhaps came to expect the same of the new trilogy. There is nothing inherently dignified or elegant about dwarves or hobbits; thus, their discourse and activities are proportionately outlandish. I found the dwarves' antics delightful and extremely true to the tone of Tolkien's work. Capturing the essence of a group of characters is difficult (one of the major failures of the Harry Potter movies, in my opinion), but Jackson succeeds, creating a charming pack of misfits that seem to have been lifted straight from the hundreds of thousands of pages that Tolkien wrote about Middle Earth. I respect Jackson's ability to adapt to the change in tone of The Hobbit films from the more sober LOTR. Those who criticized the silliness simply didn't understand that The Hobbit takes place when Middle Earth is not being directly threatened by the evil forces of Sauron, and that the relatively peaceful setting demands a different, more lighthearted tone.
In life, anticipation is often met with disappointment. Heinous tragedies occur of which no sense can be made. But I'm pleased to find that the refuge offered by the fantastical tales of Middle Earth, where good prevails over evil with comfortable predictability, is still here for us, in all its 48-frames-per-second visual splendor. The old adage says that you can never really go home, but for those of us devoted to Tolkien's Middle Earth, Jackson awards us with a unique opportunity to prove the adage--and those "critics"--delightfully wrong.
