The Hobbit: An Unexpected Trilogy

I don't think this math is right...

I experienced something of a first this weekend after seeing The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: I was accused of not being a Lord of the Rings fanboy. Needless to say, this description wounded me to the quick, and I don't think it's fair to question my nerdly resolve just because I thought that the first third of the film adaptation of the tale was painfully long and stuffed with far too much meaningless filler. (Also that the high frame rate was a pointless, inexcusable gimmick that has no reason to ever catch on ever.) And even though I loved Peter Jackson's first Lord of the Rings movies, I loved J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels even more. So while I would still consider myself a fanboy, I would have to qualify that by saying I'm a fanboy with extremely high standards and who's fiercely dedicated to the source material.

And while there was undoubtedly a whole lot of source material packed into this newest film, there was also a lot of superfluous action added in there that slowed down the story and pulled me (at least) out of the experience. When I first heard that The Hobbit was being split into three movies - a book which, at 255 pages, is 65 pages shorter than the shortest book in the trilogy (without the appendices, Return of the King clocks in at 311) - I didn't immediately despair. With some interesting additions from some ancillary works and a nice, fast pace, I could definitely see Jackson & Co. coming up with three enjoyable movies. That is, until I heard the running time: a butt-numbing 2 hours and 48 minutes. It was at that point that I knew we were in for no shortage of Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens-inspired extras.

One of the few scenes that actually took place in the book...

You'll recognize these types of tacked-on time-wasting story points from the first trilogy: stuff like adding in a red-herring death for Aragorn in The Two Towers. Or completely altering Faramir's character to make him exactly like Boromir. Or having Frodo and Sam get in a friendship-threatening fight for no apparent reason at a critical point in Return of the King (as if that movie wasn't long enough already). And what's up with Elrond showing up at Dunharrow to deliver Aragorn's sword to him - a sword that defines his character and which he should have had at his side since the Fellowship left Rivendell? You'd think 1,086 pages would be enough out of which to adapt three three-hour movies without adding useless filler.

But you know these Hollywood types: always having to change stuff around and add their own stamp on things, otherwise they don't feel like they're doing their jobs. And the job that Jackson and his screenwriting team did on The Hobbit gets you yawning right from the start. I remembered thinking how much I couldn't wait until all three Hobbit movies come out on DVD, so that some clever, enterprising Tolkien nerd with film editing experience could put together a fan-edit of the trilogy, ideally clocking in at just under three hours for all three movies combined, with all the treacle cut out and the story arranged in a way that could actually hold an audience's attention.

First on my list to cut would be anything involving Saruman, Radagast, and the White Council. If you need material to pad nine hours' worth of movies, the story from the appendix dealing with the Necromancer in Dol Guldur is a good place to look, but a) there's no reason to make nine hours' worth of Hobbit movies, and b) according to said appendix, that storyline took place a full 91 years before the events of The Hobbit, with Gandalf the protagonist instead of Radagast. (How do you think he acquired the key that he gives to Thorin? He took it from his father, Thrain, who was imprisoned in Dol Guldur.) And don't get me wrong, I like Radagast as a character... for all of the three pages of Fellowship in which he appears. I just didn't like the comic relief gimmick with bird shit in his beard that he became for the movie. And I know that Christopher Lee is the biggest Tolkien nerd of the entire cast, the only member of which to actually meet J.R.R. himself, but it honestly looks as if it's time for him to hang up his staff and fake-ass looking beard. I don't think he's got much left in the tank (which would be understandable at 90 years old) since he looked absolutely miserable in his scene.

"Radagast the Brown. Radagast the bird-tamer. Radagast the simple.
Radagast the fool." - Saruman's description of the character in Fellowship.

Notice how my list of things to cut didn't start with the trudging prologue introducing the plight of the Dwarven city Erebor, which feels like it takes up an hour before the real action even starts. In fact if I had my choice, I would keep some of those images, but I'd move them to a little later on. The movie would start where the book starts, with Bilbo's narration explaining what Hobbit life is like. (This means we'd have to cut Elijah Wood's cameo as Frodo, because why the hell would Bilbo need to explain the inner workings of a Hobbit hole to someone who spent his whole damn life living in one?) No, I would intercut the visuals of the prologue with the Dwarves' song they sing by the fireplace. (Howard Shore's haunting melody, incidentally, and the leitmotif it becomes, is still in my head, three days later.) That song has a full ten verses in the book, only two of which appear in the movie. If that sequence was extended a little bit and beefed up visually, kind of like an epic music video, it would set up the Dwarves while also giving us some more nice music.

I would have also liked to see the elimination of Azog the Defiler except in flashbacks (his character, after all, died more than 150 years before The Hobbit took place), the stone giants (although they did appear in the book, for about a sentence's worth of time), and about three feet off the Goblin King's scrotum-chin (maybe it was just the high frame rate, but I swear I could discern at least one testicle floating around in there). But with two more of these epic mistakes coming down the pipeline, it's silly to agonize over each one. So until we finally get to see that fan-edit, I will do what I always do with a piece of entertainment I desperately wanted to like more than I actually did: I'll accept the good parts, and mentally replace the bad parts with what I would have liked to see. This doesn't always provide me with a crystal-clear view of the actual movie, but I sure do leave the theater feeling a lot happier...