The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes place before the Lord Of The Rings trilogy. It's a film that follows Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit from The Shire, and his journey across Middle-Earth with a wizard and a gang of unorganized dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield. Their quest has one purpose, to slay a dragon guarding the dwarf kingdom, Erebor. Throughout the journey, the encounter many obstacles, including orcs, goblins, and moving mountains. While lost and alone on this quest, Bilbo meets Gollum, a creature that shows to be more than a single being in one body. He finds Gollum's precious ring and keeps it for himself, driving Gollum insane and aggressive towards Bilbo. When Thorin is about to be slain by a creature named Azog, an old enemy, Bilbo comes to his rescue and finally finds his place in the group.

The sounds of Middle-Earth were usually handled well with a plethora of background noise and chatter. While in a home, you could hear people talking in the other room and plates clinging together like they were truly elsewhere. However, there were some scenes when dialog took the primary role and the background audio suffered because of it. Camera angles were beautiful, all of which utilized the surroundings, delivering an awe factor with the beautiful landscape and construction of sets. The editing kept a forward motion present where battle scenes and action were present, cleanly keeping sword swings and motion lined up perfectly.

I have to admit, I was not impressed with this film. When compared to the original Lord of the Rings, I feel like computer were turned to for many of the effects. Multiple scenes were painfully computer generated, sticking out compared to the live shots on location. As for the location, Peter Jackson managed to shoot the film in a beautiful landscape which made up for much of the computer generated scenes. I know that The Hobbit is a fictional story, but I felt like this film stuck out with it's far-fetched moments. Mountains that break apart to fist fight, rabbits pulling a wizard of a sled, even down to the distance Bilbo fell without injury while in the Orc's underground lair shocked me. I believe the movie was executed well, but details and physical effort for props and scenes could have been pushed more.