A web series fantasy tale, with its tongue nestled nicely in its cheek, about a group of misfit adventurers on a quest to find a mystical sword. Riddled with fantastic (no pun intended…) characters – such as the hapless wizard, the droll elf, the apathetic paladin and the moronic brave knight (who is “far too brave to grant mercy”) – and endless witticisms, we follow a young enthusiastic Bard who is recording the epic story with journalistic prowess.

Why you may have missed it:

Most people miss web series, so it is easy to do so, but word of mouth is getting strong on this one. A Dead Gentlemen production – the same guys who did cult hit films The Gamers and its sequel The Gamers: Dorkness Rising – the show is almost entirely fan-funded. It stands on the principles of ‘no studio, no networks, no cancellation’ – as long as the fans keep chipping in the show will continue on its merry way, which I hope it will.

Why it’s worth catching up on:

Well written and uber-dorky the show is a lot of fun. The seemingly endless array of characters could have been ripped right from a D&D game and as the show progresses the characters start evolving in strange ways and then it gets really fun. Once the second season hits, the production values and episode length increase and it starts feeling less like a web-produced show and something real and mighty.

The quest and the story are inconsequential; I’m in it for the humour. At one point the knight defends himself from a warlock by telling him to “save your riddles for the literate”, and upon seeing the wizard’s crappy milk-summoning spell, an Orc refers to him as the “lactomancer”. Gold.  Also, the Bard Academy is a stroke of pure genius.

The cast is great and seems to be having about as much fun as we are. The ever-amazing Fran Kranz turns up in the second season and steals the show as a womanising bard luminary, but really, all are in the spirit of the fun.

Any show that opens with a group of Orcs accosting a woman and she baring a badge and declaring “Bardic immunity!” is a show you know will be a good time. Also, at less than 10mins an episode, it won’t take long to get through, and allows for many, many re-watchings.

This is the love-child of:

World of Warcraft and Joss Whedon’s Brain.

Catch a glimpse of it here:

http://www.journey-quest.com/

Another year another round of Oscars. Unlike other years, the nominations weren’t the worst this time around, so Elizabeth and I decided to get on our horses high and judge them in almost staccato bursts of critiquism. Agree or disagree? Film talk times are fun times.

Amour:

Harry – Whatever. I didn’t need my heart anyway, tragic and beautiful old people.

Elizabeth – Makes The Notebook look like a lighthearted whimsical rom-com.

Argo:

Harry – Most suspenseful movie you already know the end of ever. Stick Affleck behind a camera and he is god.

Elizabeth – Intense, absorbing and I’ve never felt so stressed in a film as I did during the climactic scene. Great as a movie, questionable as an interpretation of the true event.

Beasts of the Southern Wild:

Harry – Little girl wins heart of the world and out-acts the shit out of everyone ever.

 Django Unchained:

Harry – Christoph Waltz and Leo Dicaprio being amazing in the most fun film about slavery of the year that also contains inexplicable Aussie ockers.

Elizabeth – Like a modern day Blazing Saddles where Jamie Foxx and Christoph Waltz shoot people and collect bounty. It’s pretty excellent.

Les Miserables:

Harry – Wins with live singing and Hathaway and Jackman, but loses with irritatingly repetitive close up solos and Russell Crowe’s vocals. Save by the ever amazing music.

Elizabeth – I similarly dreamed a dream that Russel Crowe was not playing Javert. Strong performances and interesting risk with the live recording. However not as epic as anticipated.

Life of Pi:

Harry – Proves in the last ten minutes that it is so very much more than just a beautiful visual smorgasbord. Stunning.

Elizabeth –  A boy, a boat, and a tiger shouldn’t be so visually stunning or engaging but it all just works.

Lincoln:

Harry – Daniel Day and Sally Field being amazing in the most surprisingly dull film about slavery of the year. Someone please give Spielberg back his sense of adventure.

Elizabeth – Follows the last few months of Lincoln’s life as he attempts to put through the 13^th amendment. Slow, long and could benefit from being edited down about an hour, any Oscars that this film gets should go straight to Daniel Day Lewis.

Silver Limings Playbook:

Harry – Great actors going to town on a fantastic script in a genuinely moving film about many shades of depression and mental illness.

Elizabeth – The poster doesn’t do justice to the gravity and importance of this film. A realistic portrayal of mental disease wrapped in a package that screams “chick flick”. Weird marketing, good film.

Zero Dark Thirty:

Harry – more like Zero Dark Whatever, amiright? I was actually really underwhelmed by this, I don’t even care enough to critique properly. Jessica Chastain was good, but her character had no depth whatsoever.

Creator of Wild Horse and self confessed “target audience member” Rowan Roff leaves the despair squid behind and just goes with it in his discussion of the long awaited Red Dwarf X.

After Roger Federer’s disappointing loss to Andy Murray in this year’s Australian Open, many critics have begun saying his glory days are behind him. He’s too old. He doesn’t have the hunger anymore. He’ll never return to world #1 and he’ll never win another “Grand Slam” tournament. But if Roger is still playing quality tennis and still making a living doing something he loves, why would he stop playing? Oh wait, this is a Red Dwarf review.

The Red Dwarf series is now in its tenth season. It’s been almost 25 years since the show first aired and over 13 years since the last proper season aired. Red Dwarf X maintains the usual setting of being 3 million years in the future on the Red Dwarf mining ship where Vending Machine Service Technician Dave Lister is joined by his usual gang of misfits: The hologram of his immediate superior Arnold Rimmer, the fabulous-feline creature known only as Cat, and a rescued service mechanoid Kryten. (Sadly, the on-board computer Holly is absent completely and, not-so-sadly, so is female crew member Kristine Kochanski).

Although that may sound like a typical sci-fi setup, at its heart Red Dwarf has always been a show about four conflicting personalities living in a confined space. While the plots of the episodes are often brilliant exercises in science fiction writing with plenty of parallel dimensions, time shifts, alien encounters, and alterations to the laws of physics, most of the humour is derived simply from the interactions between the crew, or witty one-liners: “I am Holly, the ship’s computer, with an IQ of 6000; the same IQ as 6000 PE teachers.” Red Dwarf’s success can be attributed to the perfect relationship between these two elements. It is no surprise then, that when the combination of writers was broken and Rob Grant left Doug Naylor to his own devices in season VII, the formula they had going was also thrown out of balance.

Perhaps Naylor picked up on this because Red Dwarf X picks up right where season VI puts it down. Seriously. If you were hanging out to see how the cliff-hanger at the end of season VIII turned out, forget about it. If you were wondering if they would make any reference to the Back to Earth mini-series… nope. If you naturally assumed Kochanski would still be around, you would again be incorrect. And there is no mention of why not. (Actually, Naylor has apparently dropped hints that there is a “missing” season in there somewhere that ties everything up, but after reading a billion-word fan written essay on the matter I have come to the conclusion I don’t care anymore.) For all intents and purposes season VIII and IX never happened or happened in some alternate reality or something. Whatever. Just go with it.

Actually, there’s a lot you will have to “just go with”. For example, yes, the crew has noticeably aged, but doesn’t it make sense that Lister would indeed grow older, and so would the Cat, although I suppose a hologram probably shouldn’t age, although perhaps the computer is making Rimmer appear older to make it easier on Lister, although, although… – As Lister would say, who gives a smeg? Perfectly aligned continuity is not really what the show’s about. Once the jokes start flying all the little inconsistencies are quickly forgotten.

I will however admit that my mind was absolutely blown in episode 2: Fathers and Suns when Lister recorded a video of himself on a VHS tape. Aren’t they 3 million years in the future on a spaceship? Why would they still be using VHS? Oh that’s right, Red Dwarf is a show from the 90’s. Wait, this was filmed in 2012! So I’m watching a TV show set in the future, conceived in the past and constructed in the present? Meta…

But never mind all that background stuff, Red Dwarf X at its core is brilliant. And just in case you think I’m just giving the perspective of someone who has loved the series all the way through, let it be clear that I am. I fall squarely into the “target audience” category and the odds were pretty much 1:1 that I’d enjoy the latest instalment. But I don’t care; I’ve waited over ten years for it and gotten exactly what I was after. Classic Red Dwarf. Great jokes and interesting scenarios. The chemistry between the characters has always been the show’s strength and it shines through especially well in the new season. Episode 5: Dear Dave in particular, I would go as far as to rate as one of my favourite episodes ever, due largely to an incredibly funny scene in which Lister is wrongfully accused of getting intimate with a vending machine. More than anything, the return of Red Dwarf has emphasised what has been missing on television for the last ten years.

Red Dwarf X will likely suffer from comparisons to previous seasons. And unfortunately it does fall slightly short of the “golden” period of the series. My hope is that it has done enough to warrant another season. And I’m quietly confident that it will. It seems to have been generally well-received and according to Naylor, “the ratings have been terrific.” The new episodes might not be on par with the old ones, but if people like watching it and the writers and cast still enjoy making it, why stop?

And that’s why Roger Federer will hopefully be around for many more years to come.

Rowan can also be found at Wild Horse.

The film is smartly made by second time writer/director Craig Zobel, creating a creepy atmosphere in this fast food restaurant with inter cutting macro shots of the food deep frying; of customers calmly eating their food; of people’s eyes and mouth as they try to comprehend what is going on, and the heavy strum of the cello a perfect musical accompaniment to the horror unfolding. Strong performances from everyone involved, in particular Ann Dowd as the ‘helpful’ manager, help the uncomfortable reality of the situation perfectly. Dreama Walker (from TV’s Don’t Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23) is effectively subtle as the poor young employee who spends most of the film naked and is humiliated – it can’t have been an easy role to play and the dead look in her eyes she evolves is truly heartbreaking– she has given in and given up, the system has beaten her. The caller’s power at manipulation is a marvel, asking questions basic enough to get real answers out and using flattery and threats in equal measure to use these people for his game.

The film is polarising people, and I think that’s fantastic. People are walking out disgusted they were made to watch such an uncomfortable film, that something so vile has been made and that cinemas would subject people to such filth (I work in a cinema –I have heard all this and more) and, ironically, that the film managed to manipulate these people into watching it and complying with its 96 minutes of screen time, is perfectly delicious. In actuality, the film is pretty tame. It is shot in a beautifully subtle way that what is happening is mostly up to your imagination and that I think is where people’s minds go apeshit. They assume the worst,  go for it and are angry about it.

In hindsight I think it is ridiculous and I would never go along with such an idiotic hoax – if someone told me to strip and spread as they search my colon for money I would tell them to fuck right off – but actually, when I was watching the film I can see why these people were doing so and that they were at the hands of a very talented puppeteer and maybe I would have complied, who knows. Some people, however, are actually really mad. I would love to know who they are mad at most: the filmmakers for making the film, the cinema for showing the film, or themselves, for perhaps this film made them realise a part of their human nature that they weren’t aware of, and that terrifies them.

The violence of the film has been a major issue, particularly surrounding the Aurora shootings. Originally featuring a scene where Cohen’s men appear by shooting through a cinema screen with machine guns, the trailers were pulled and the release date pushed as the cast re-assembled to film a new version of this, moving the location from a cinema to a Chinatown street.

Gangster Squad is without doubt a very brutal film. Within the first five minutes you see a man being torn in half by two cars. Despite this, cinematographer Dion Beebe does a remarkable job creating some beautiful shots surrounding this ugliness, making art of a cigarette lighter being flicked on, or of bullets passing by in slow motion.

Directed by Ruben Fleischer (Toto, I don’t think we’re in Zombieland anymore), the plot is basic, but enough to serve its true purpose – as a vehicle to allow seven really interesting characters and a token female to interact in extreme circumstances. It has a good premise, and both aesthetically and in terms of plot, Gangster Squad channels the noir films of the era it is set in.

The problem with filling a film with so many engaging characters is that there was not enough time to explore all their stories to any great depth. The only one we really get to know is Josh Brolin as the tortured Sergeant O’Mara, whose motivation is to return Los Angeles to the paradise he fought to return to, and to make a better world for his pregnant wife and unborn child.

Ryan Gosling is strong as O’Mara’s partner Sergeant Jerry Wooters, demonstrating his range playing someone who lies somewhere between the player he was at the beginning of Crazy, Stupid, Love  and his nameless character in Drive. He initially appears to have given up his ideals in favour of a life of apathy and cynical comments, and despite many moments where it seems like we’re going to, we never find out what really “broke him”. Which is a shame. Maybe they should have taken time out from the romantic scenes he shared with Grace Faraday, a character which woefully underused Emma Stone’s acting ability to the degree that they may as well have just put a mannequin in a series of expensive looking dresses and stamped “I have unexplained emotional turmoil and no back story” in a speech bubble over its head.

The film also features a tortured gunslinger, his sidekick, a beat cop waging a one man war on heroin, and a wire-tapper. They work well together, and this film would have been equally interesting if this cast was performing a bank heist or planning an elaborate college prank. But they are not, they are fighting against a villain. A true villain; the kind who is mean to women, who will smash up nice things, and who will kill your whole family if he suspects disloyalty.

And here is where my main gripe comes in. Gangster Squad is advertised as being “inspired by true events” – one of a chain of movies sporting the same line. It’s clever wording, which on closer inspection actually means “while this film is loosely tethered in reality, what we’re really doing is making shit up about real people”.  John O’Mara was real. His wife was real. His partner was real. Mickey Cohen was real. He was a friend of Frank Sinatra, something alluded to in the film. He was a mob leader. The Gangster Squad was real.

The film is based on a series of articles and book by Paul Lieberman which by all accounts is fairly acurate. However, when it comes to the film it seems someone decided to take a group of real people and shoehorn in a whole bunch of violence and stylised motivations. In an article by Sierra O’Mara Schwartz she wrote ”my grandfather shot one bullet in his whole career in the LAPD. And that was a warning shot”

It doesn’t really seem right to place people who actually existed in a predominantly made up plot, marketed in a way to manipulate people into believing it to be cold hard fact.

Josh Brolin did an excellent job of playing a John O’Mara who fired more shots than go down the throats of teenagers on spring break.  He did as good a job as Sean Penn did of playing a Mickey Cohen who is severely unhinged and actually pretty terrifying, that Jesse Eisenberg did at playing a Mark Zuckerberg who drinks appletinis, or that Ewan Stewart did turning Titanic hero First Officer William Murdoch into a corrupt officer who commits suicide out of guilt.

But it’s a good film. As a piece of fiction it is very watchable. And I guess a mob boss going to jail for tax evasion doesn’t really make for sexy viewing. Other than when Sean Connery is involved.

What is it?
Harper’s Island is the ideal location for a wedding retreat if you overlook the gruesome killing spree that took place there seven years earlier. For everyone other than Abby,whose mother was one of the original victims, enough time has passed and they can just shake it off like a bad ghost story. The murderer is long dead, the week is just starting, and hey, Cousin Ben probably just missed the boat. It takes them a while to notice that the party’s numbers are gradually dwindling, one by one…

Why you may have missed it:
Loosely based on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, the series ran for 13 episodes and is more like an extended suspense movie rather than a television show. As a result, to miss a single episode means confusion, havoc and, in most cases, giving up. As more and more people dropped off, the program was moved to a progressively later and unpopular timeslot until it inevitably slipped into the land of infomercials and obscurity – a spot usually reserved for Joss Whedon shows. 

Having a week between episodes just doesn’t work. You need to sit down, lock all the doors, and bunker down with all the lights on until it’s over.

Why it’s worth catching up on:
This is a very elegantly constructed murder mystery which is also surprisingly terrifying. An episode ends. You think you’re fine. Then you realise you need to go outside to get something and all of a sudden you need a friend to accompany you to the bathroom at all times and start shying away from all trees. And pools. And churches. And boats.

Each character has their own absorbing storyline, nefarious motives and background, and the plot is unpredictable, full of twists and shocking. It will toy with your emotions more than an Adele CD. Also the titles of each episode are onomatopoeic of the sound made by the character which was killed off, e.g. Whap, Ka-Blam, Thwack and Sploosh. Amazing.

This is the love-child of:
Murder on the Orient Express, Cluedo, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer.

Catch a glimpse of it here:

Life of Pi brings a whole new meaning to the nautical term “there’s no room to swing a cat,” with the bulk of the film being centred around the 227 days protagonist Pi (Suraj Sharma) spends trapped on a boat with a tiger named Richard Parker. It sounds like it could be boring. It sounds like it could be preachy. It sounds like it could be a film pretentious people go to see so they can tell their other friends how cultured they are. But it is not. It is an engaging, strange tale interweaved with at times breathtaking visual elements.

The story is structured in a vaguely Titanic-esque way. Writer finds man to tell him about his infamous shipwreck story, which he has been told will “make you believe in God”. From the comfort of a well-lit and cosy living room, Pi begins his story through a long flashback.

Pi is a boy named after a swimming pool and who follows three separate religions, much to his father and brother’s amusement. Having spent his childhood growing up in a zoo in Pondicherry, French India, his father decides to sell up and move the family and a few animals to Canada, which is how Pi finds himself on a Japanese ship in the middle of the Pacific as a storm is about to hit. Forced into a lifeboat, Pi is the only survivor, bar a hyena, a rat, a zebra with a broken leg, an orangutan, and a tiger.

3.141592653589793238462643383…

This film is based on the 2001 novel by Yann Martel, a book where the author’s note legitimately blurs the line between truth and fiction. It was adapted for the screen by David Magee and directed by Ang Lee, who it would seem is the man to finally make 3D a worthwhile experience.

For me, Life of Pi was consistently entertaining and overall thought-provoking. The visual elements were constantly surprising, from the opening credits, the transitions, to the mind bendingly spectacular flashback to Piscine Molitor – the pool that Pi was named after. I could have happily re-watched the latter scene over and over again just to try and get my head around the camera angles and editing.

What’s more remarkable though is that this film is Suraj Sharma’s first experience with acting. He turned up alongside 3000 others to the auditions because his brother asked him to, and promised him a free meal. He commands every scene he is in which is no mean feat when in most of these scenes he is alone – but for a tiger.

Life of Pi is the kind of story your English teacher would have happily dissected three times over, and then asked you to reassemble into an essay in fifty highly pressurised minutes. It is filled with philosophy, metaphor and ideas about human (and animal) nature, and is one of those rare films that will have you thinking about specific aspects of it days later. It also provides enough material to fuel several dinner parties worth of conversation and theory swapping.

The film will appeal to a wide audience, with the exception of those who need action in order to sustain their interest for 127 minutes (I’m looking at you, man in front of me who spent the entire film focussed on chewing what seemed like a never-ending bag of crisps as loudly as possible). It also isn’t a film for children. Yes it has animals, no that doesn’t make it Madagascar 4: The Pacific’s Most Stranded.

Life of Pi will not make you believe in God, but it will make you believe in Ang Lee – and in the idea that 3D can be used non-gratuitously.

I sure do love chocolate Hubba Bubba

Full disclosure, I am not a massive Tolkien fan. I tried to read Lord of the Rings and put it down after several chapters due to excessive boredom. I have seen the trilogy of films and really enjoyed them but never went full fan-boy.

Yesterday I ventured out of the safety of my quiet, dark house and went to the cinema which appeared to be under attack by hordes of teenagers. Avoiding their stench of aura of self-entitlement my friend and I purchased two tickets, dropping over $50 to see the 48 FPS, 3D xtreme-Screen magic. (Cinemas take note: this is why people download movies).

As our previous review showed, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is an amalgamation of several of Tolkein’s books. Also, being a trilogy it is one of the few examples of the film version taking longer to get through than the original book.

Viewers of the movie will experience a first-hand sensation of the relativity of time. When I left, the clocks outside said we had been in there for three hours but my watch’s battery had died and the watch itself rusted away with age. I saw the couple next to me grow old and die while their children managed to escape the theatre to hopefully lead full and active lives.

The movie opens with about an hour’s worth of ads. At one point they played a public service announcement on how to avoid deep vein thrombosis during the film. The film opens with some lovely exposition courtesy of Iam Holm and Elijah Wood and some long shots of The Shire. What followed was a bizarre scene involving dwarves eating and hurling plates around the room in a first-year university animation student display of CGI.

Most of the CGI was incredible (particularly the close-ups of Gollum, holy shit…) but the plate tossing looked awful and a later scene of Radagast leading some orcs on a merry chase on his rabbit sled felt like it was shaking me and screaming “GREEN SCREEN” while spitting on my face.

Then, like a true LotR films we got a lot of walking interrupted by a lot of fighting. I’ll talk about one scene in particular, a moment where they discover some trolls have stolen their horses.

The trolls were speaking with rough, British accents and idioms in an attempt to be funny. An attempt that both failed comedically and dramatically. It was as uncomfortable as watching a stand-up comedian bomb on stage. You could see how hard they were trying to be funny but nothing was working. I felt bad for them and wanted to leave.

I hate this place

On a dramatic level, the humour was inserted so badly into the scene that it felt jarring. Now as I said before I haven’t read The Hobbit so I don’t know how true to the book this scene was but quite frankly, I don’t care. I was not watching a film adaptation of a treasured childhood tale, I was watching a movie. The misplaced attempt to combine the light-hearted feel of a children’s story with the darkness of the LotR trilogy failed miserably. At times I wasn’t sure what type of movie I was watching.

I felt the exact same way during Barry Humphrey’s embarrassing turn as the heavily goitred Goblin King. A vaguely serious scene with vaguely funny jokes thrown into it, both styles cancelling each other out and leaving me bored and restless.

Both of these scenes (plus more, unfortunately) led to the title of this review, Gandalf Ex Machina. The original phrase deus ex machina literally means ‘God from the machine’ and is a reference to the old plays where everything seemed lost at the end until one of the Gods was lowered onto the stage to save the day. It is now a derogatory term used when a writer can’t think of a way for their heroes to escape and just throws in an easy solution.

The film was full of it. I lost count of how many times all hope seemed lost until Gandalf suddenly appeared and saved the day. I was left feeling completely unmoved by the story. At no point did I feel worried about them not surviving. Not once did I think to myself, “How are they going to get out of this?” It was all too easy. A lack of tension does not a good story make.

Basically, The Hobbit left me cold. Too long, too crammed full of rubbish and too muddled. Don’t expect to see me at the sequels.

PS: Why are there no intermissions any more? I think any film clocking in at 3 hours or more should legally be required to have a toilet break in the middle. More people got up to head for the toilets than at 4am in a retirement village.

Opening with a cute montage of pictures and clips of the cute couple we soon find out they’re separated but still sickeningly close – their ‘friendship’ borders on the grotesque love of idiotic teenagers – but that’s just them. Celeste and Jesse are just best friends who no longer work as a couple, so have amicably split. Or so we think. The film gets really interesting when the emotions start flowing, in ways I wasn’t expecting, and that is the power of this little gem.

The thing I loved most was the complete power swap in this couple. At the start Celeste is successful at work, getting on with her life and everything is perfect. Jesse is living in her bungalow and struggling to find motivation to even apply for jobs, preferring to sit around cry-watching the Beijing Olympics, clearly still wallowing in the failed marriage. As the scale starts to shift balance, the film evolves perfectly. Watching Celeste crumble is one of my favorite character transitions in recent memory. Witnessing the insanely beautiful Rashida Jones turn into a bong smoking, mayonnaise eating, drunken, rude slob was nothing short of delicious. She has a really nice screen presence and it was great to see her get down and dirty with this turkey-sub of a role. Andy Samberg is also impressive as the pathetic, weeping mess of a man who gets his shit together and decides to grow up.

With the exception of Elijah Wood’s bizarrely awkward gay work colleague dude, the supporting cast are great – I always feel safe when sexymanlips, I mean Chris Messina, is around – and Emma Roberts as Ke$ha-esque pop trash is a lot of fun.

Rashida Jones co-wrote this with Will McCormack (who also plays their token oddball friend ‘Skillz’) which proves that she is not just a pretty face. The banter between friends is natural and nice and while it does have shades of first-screenplay-itis, it is a pretty great debut and I can’t wait to see what she comes up with in the future.

Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) just wants to be left alone to blow smoke rings and eat a healthy six meals a day. What he doesn’t want is a flood of dwarves raiding his larder and a wizard telling him to be more like his younger, adventurous self. Despite this, less than twenty four hours after Gandalf (Ian McKellen) scratches a mysterious symbol into his newly painted door, Bilbo is off, without a handkerchief, on a quest to help the dwarves reclaim their home from the grips of a dragon.

That is the basic plot of The Hobbit (book). The Hobbit (film) is still essentially this at heart, but, much like a real heart, whilst integral in keeping something alive, only makes up a small part of the bigger picture. The original book was penned with children in mind, and is therefore less dark in terms of content and a whole lot more twee than its sequel. It is also significantly shorter.

So, keeping in mind that you could pretty much use The Hobbit as a bookmark for The Lord of the Rings, it is interesting then that it is also going to be split into three instalments at around three hours each.

In order to accomplish this, the novel has been padded out with material from the vast range of supplementary texts Tolkien produced about the history of Middle Earth, including The Silmarillion and the appendices to The Return of The King. The first film, The Hobbit: an unexpected journey, in particular draws on The Quest of Erebor from the posthumously released Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. This additional material gives greater background to the dwarves’ mission, and paints a more detailed picture of the Middle Earth which existed sixty years prior to Frodo leaving The Shire. It’s absorbing and interesting and I loved every minute (with the exception of the thirty minutes of back and forth banter between Bilbo and Gollum. Important exposition: yes. Frustratingly drawn out: also yes).

The constant nods to The Lord of the Rings and appearances from Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Andy Serkis and a host of others makes me happy in the way I get from watching the bit in Back to the Future II where Marty is visiting the scene from the first film, and will probably appeal to other similarly well-adjusted level 7 Tolkien dorks. On the flip side, however, this also makes the film less accessible to those completely new to the series. The plot will still make sense, but will appear to have a few holes. Plus they won’t be able to gasp when significant plot points are introduced and will probably be all “what is a Bagginses?”

Peter Jackson is clearly trying to make The Hobbit as epic as The Lord of the Rings, which is going to cause a divide in opinions. To me, the added depth adds to the original story despite being a bit at odds with the tone of the book.  

Tolkien’s supplementary texts can probably never be films in their own right. Whilst being filled with interesting back story to well loved characters and places, they are also densely packed with at times stiflingly detailed fantasy concepts and a lot of them remain unfinished, having been published posthumously. It’s a shame.  Jackson has seized on what is a unique opportunity to bring it to the screen through enriching the Hobbit with additional lore, which I think is a very good thing.

The Hobbit is not what you think it is going to be if you go in expecting the book. Instead, it is a film akin to The Lord of the Rings in terms of scope, cinematography and feel and which keeps the essence and humour of the novel. Like Tolkien says in the book itself “there is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”