Saw the Hobbit movie today. I have read the book countless times since I was a child, and now I have been reading it to my own children. Thus, this was an interesting evening, to say the least.
Hopefully I would find time to do a proper analysis of it some time, but a couple of notes:
– It is a bit too slow. It tries to establish characters and show the historical context of things that follow (in LotR), but that is not good for this film as an individual work of art.
– HFR 3D actually worked fine. It is a bit hyper-realistic, but you will get used to it. Seeing New Zealand scenes this way was really beautiful in many places.
– The screenwriters had done rather ok job in finding the philosophical key lines from this text, that is a children’s book after all. The epic and the silly clashed a bit occasionally, though.
As a summary, it is a fine, a bit slowly proceeding work of action fantasy cinema. There were only a couple of truly emotionally moving scenes in the film, but that is more than in several standard representatives of the genre, so I was not disappointed. But similar achievement this in not as the LotR films, but I was not expecting it to be such, neither.
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