After breaking off for the Christmas holidays and essentially spending all of my time revising for January exams, I needed a break. That was when the opportunity to go and see The Hobbit came up and, as a huge fan of the Lord Of The Rings movies, I was not going to turn this one down...even if it did cost me an insane amount of money and I had to wait for an hour and a half beforehand for the projector to get fixed (even the student cinema projector doesn't break for that long).
As the prequel to the LOTR trilogy, The Hobbit tells the tale of Bilbo, his encounters with dwarves and elves and how he came across the one ring. As the book is to be turned in to 3 films, the first introduces the main characters, sets out their quest and tells of how it began (it includes a bit of Gollum as well).
It was always inevitable that this was going to be compared to it's predecessors, and when they have several Oscars between them, that is a pretty tall order. But with all the hype and promotion, does it live up to the expectations?
I would say that yes, it does. The tone and standard of LOTR has been continued into this series with many aspects of the film being truly outstanding. Every part has been superbly cast, yet again, and everything from the locations to the special effects and make-up is incredible. Martin Freeman seems to have been born to play the role of Bilbo Baggins, and Ian McKellen returning as Gandalf made the film for me (because Gandalf is awesome!!). New Zealand is shown in all its glory once more, making the film spectacular to watch, and all of this within a brilliant story; what more could you ask for?!
A highlight for me would have to be the re-emergence of Gollum. It is clear that the technology has come on a long way since those initial films and the film-makers have used this to their full advantage. With a full range of facial expressions, agile movement and seamless interaction with the rest of the cast, Andy Serkis' performance is once again brilliant, and now the technology can highlight his talents even more.
There are only two drawbacks to this film that stick in my mind. The first (as is always the case, I find, with 3D films) is that in some parts, particularly those with a lot of action, the screen became blurry and made it quite unclear as to what was going on. Due to this, I missed large chunks of quite a lot of the action as I simply couldn't make out what was happening (it sounded interesting though). As well as this, and no one is particularly to blame, they should have made these films first. Anyone who has seen the LOTR films can pretty much guess how the story of this is going to go even if they haven't read the book, so trying to build up tension for things that quite clearly don't happen seemed slightly pointless.
Overall, this is a great first part to the new trilogy. I am not entirely sure what Peter Jackson is going to fill the next two films with, after all, the Hobbit is not exactly a tome. I just hope that the best of the trilogy is yet to be seen.
