[troutman]

Dislike Peter Jackson's The Hobbit? Then You Don't Know Tolkien


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-a...b_2342591.html

Why Critics Will Come to Regret Their Relentless Savaging of the New Film

Despite tentatively positive reviews from The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, National Public Radio, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, and several smaller urban newspapers, if you've heard much about the first entry in Peter Jackson's much-hyped Hobbit trilogy, it's probably that, well, it isn't very good. Right now the nearly three-hour demi-epic, controversially shot at double the frame-rate of most Hollywood features, is sporting a dispiriting 42% on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-review aggregator that certifies movies as "fresh" or, as in the case of Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, rotten.

Would a film critic reviewing a Jane Austen adaptation be forgiven for exhibiting little knowledge of (and little willingness to embrace) the film's source material? How about Tolstoy? The reviews of The Hobbit don't just indulge, they indeed rely upon both the critics' and readers' ignorance of Tolkien's tale and what it was actually intended to be by the time of the novelist's death and (more to the point) Jackson's mid-nineties discovery of it as a possible cinematic blockbuster.

So when The Atlantic opines that Jackson's The Hobbit should have been "slender and simple" like the book, indeed "innocent and intimate," and that any reference to the "necromancer"-cum-Sauron in The Hobbit is merely "Jackson cross-promoting his earlier films," don't listen to it for a moment--and don't be fooled by the legerdemain of that magazine's film critic, who drops esoteric references to the books as though he understands them well and has considered their scope and intersections in writing his review. Likewise, when CNN says that there's "so much less at stake" in The Hobbit, and that the movie should acknowledge this by avoiding any "dark forebodings of impending death and destruction," this too is a betrayal of Tolkien's literary legacy. This is not, as CNN would have it, a mere "caper." Nor is it, at The Washington Post and others absurdly posit, reminiscent--either visually, tonally, or otherwise--to "The Teletubbies." This is dark, mature subject matter involving a cast of characters still unaware enough about what's going on around them that they can still take time to laugh and (admittedly, on occasion) make bad jokes.

Moreover, critics seem to be whitewashing the flaws of the original movie trilogy. The Washington Post complains of a lack of "engaging character development" in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, as if that had ever been a hallmark of Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. The original trilogy was itself a plodding, portentous affair with a good deal of unbearably melodramatic dialogue and head-shaking archetyping. We permitted it, as moviegoers, because The Lord of the Rings was and is an allegory, because it was and is beautiful to experience, because it has ever been intended as a lengthy and immersive experience, and because it tells a story of massive scope and scale: all things which, as it happens, are true of Tolkien's (and Jackson's) The Hobbit.

As the years go on, critics will return to the first entry in The Hobbit trilogy with a more favorable tone than they have approached it with thus far, and will be embarrassed for having rated it barely above George Lucas' thoroughly execrable Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (38% on Rotten Tomatoes). Here's hoping that reversal comes sooner rather than later.