Martin Freeman grows some hair on his feet, shrinks and moves into a hole in the ground. Sir Ian McKellen then rocks up at Martins door with a bunch of dwarves among which is Richard Armitage. They all have a little meeting which lasts about 20mins real time and eat a lot of food. These guys then convince Martin to go questing to try and get Richards castle back from a dragon and also this mountain crystal thing. Along the way they run into trolls, orcs, goblins and big dogs. There are also some elves and wizards who talk weirdlike about bad people. This all takes about 3 hours and nothing really gets sorted.
The lord of the rings trilogy is brilliant. All three are a joy to watch and completely envelope you in a world of swords, shields and short people. The books of lord of the rings are mahoosive and are full of fluff that is not really needed in the film world. Peter Jackson realised this and cut a lot of crap out and still was left with 9 hours of greatness. The reason I mention all of this is that the book of The Hobbit is about half the size of one of the books of the lord of the rings yet the plan for the film adaptation is exactly the same, three three hour films. I have read The Hobbit and cannot honestly see how they can make three long films from it. That isn't to say there isn't 9 hours worth of stuff in the book but like most books there is a lot of fluff and unfortunately this film suffers slightly for it. The main area that drags is the start. They seem to spend forever in Bilbos house chatting, singing and eating and it makes you want to shout at them to just get the hell on with it. Thankfully once they do the pace picks up and familiarity returns dragging you back into the fantasy world. Many special effect and costumed monsters turn up and look fantastic and the battles they are involved in are typically epic in scale. As you can tell I enjoyed the film very much despite the slow start. I am still skeptical about how they will stretch it to three films and worry that the 2nd one especially will suffer for it but I will reserve judgment for now. Good stuff.
Verdict: 4.5/5
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