The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (PG-13)

Roughly a decade ago, “The Lord of the Rings” film trilogy grossed nearly three billion dollars at the box office. Considering this staggering profitability, fans of the writings of Oxford professor and philologist J.R.R. Tolkien expected a lush film adaptation of his other well-known work set in Middle Earth, “The Hobbit,” to swiftly follow. What transpired instead was seven years of uncertainty due to lawsuits between the celebrated director of the trilogy, Peter Jackson, and distributor New Line Cinema over peripheral royalties, along with wrangling between the Tolkien estate and MGM over the rights to “The Hobbit” (not to mention MGM’s bankruptcy), and various additional complications.

In the midst of this growing debacle emerged virtuoso filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (best known for helming the 2006 dark fantasy, “Pan’s Labyrinth”), who stepped in to direct and subsequently spent two years working with Jackson and others on the script and early production design (with the film not even officially green-lighted), before he was forced to move on in the face of seemingly-endless delays and setbacks. Finally, with Peter Jackson’s lawsuit quietly settled, the trilogy’s original director returned to helm the long-awaited project, only to see “The Hobbit,” a book barely one-fifth the length of the trilogy, stretched into a trio of three-hour films in a baldly avaricious cash-grab.

So, after all of that, has it been worth the wait? Diehard fans of the book will surely be pleased by the film’s attention to detail, but “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is padded with relentless digressions and leaden pacing that robs the material of a real sense of adventure.

The plot is simple enough (it does, after all, cover a scant one-third of the book). Venerable wizard Gandalf (Sir Ian McKellen, reprising his role from the “Rings” trilogy) arrives at the home of a young Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular, diminutive hobbit, with the offer of an adventure. Despite his misgivings about leaving home, Bilbo accompanies a dozen dwarves led by displaced king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), as they quest to free their ancestral home from Smaug, the terrible dragon who has taken up residence in the Lonely Mountain. On their way, the party encounters trolls, elves, orcs and goblins, among other denizens of Middle Earth.

First, the good: The acting is solid; McKellen is both warm and fierce as the great wizard, Freeman spares us the excessively twee antics of the prior films’ hobbits, and Armitage is sufficiently haughty and bold, if not particularly regal. The production design (props, costumes, sets, and art direction) is absolutely top-notch; this is the very best vintage of high fantasy available in film, and it matches perfectly with the look and feel of the “Rings” trilogy.

Computer-generated imagery is prevalent, and it does as good a job of any modern film at bridging the uncanny valley (even the albino orc villain, Azog – rendered almost entirely in CGI – is effective). Fans of the book will find everything from architecture to weapon and armor design to match the aesthetic of each fantasy race, and the proceedings are handled with the utmost fidelity to the book.

This obsession with recounting everything, however (along with the decision to carve the story into three protracted installments) mangles the pacing. The first hour is wall-to-wall exposition, and we are frequently subjected to flashbacks of historical battles and meanderings into needless side-stories. The most flagrant is the sub-plot of woodland wizard Radagast the Brown, who yuks it up while playing with rabbits and nursing a sick hedgehog back to health. His story has minimal bearing on the overall plot, and it all feels like material that should have been relegated to DVD special features. The party fights, flees from enemies, rests, and does it all over again, ad nauseam.

We also endure far too many agonizingly-slow conversations, afforded an excessive and unnecessary degree of pomp. Still, when the film hits its stride (not until toward the end, however), as in the battle among the spectacular squalor of the underground goblin warrens, it’s hard not to have fun. It just shouldn’t take so much work and patience to get to the good parts, however, and stretching the story out over nine hours has made what should have been a treat into a chore.

– by Demian Morrisroe