Hobitit (Lord Of The Rings)

You're getting to be
a Hobbit with me

Hobitit (Lord Of The Rings)
Finland 1993 Directed by Timo Torikka

Oh dear. If someone told you there was a Finnish attempt to film J. R. R. Tolkien’s wonderful novel Lord Of The Rings as a TV show but that it only had nine episodes ranging from between 20 - 25 mins apiece, you’d be hard pushed to see how this magical feat could be done right? Furthermore, if they told you that the budget for said show would be... well, what seems like less than you could buy a pair of shoelaces for... you’d be thinking this thing was impossible right? Even Gandalf couldn’t pull that one off without it being absolutely terrible.

Well, there was such a thing, in Finland, in 1993. And, yes, it is quite terrible, to be sure, although it also has a kind of appealing charm of its own. And, at the very least, it’s not as terrible as those bad Peter Jackson adaptations of the novels. However, this one does firmly sit in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category and, therefore, is quite entertaining in its own way.

The budget and time allocation are not the only thing which mark this as bad but they go a long way to the noble failure of Hobitit. The sets and level of professionalism are not much more stepped up than those old editions of Jackanory where Bernard Cribbins would read The Hobbit to viewers. And, to be fair, Hobitit does share some of the same aesthetic because the whole thing is being narrated to a bunch of child Hobbits by an aged Sam Gangee, many years after the events we see depicted took place. What this means is they can leave the ‘action’ at any time and cut back to Sam telling the story to smooth over the many areas where special effects and extras aren’t able to solve the fairly obvious needs of the story.

Indeed, I was getting quite anxious to see what would happen because... well, when we get to the very brief sequence in the Mines of Moria, there’s no Balrog in sight (although he is mentioned later on in an episode)... Gandalf just seems to fall down a big hole. And by the end of the sixth episode... well, we were just at the end of The Fellowship Of The Ring so... just around an hour to do the other two books. That’s where Samwise’s narrative came in handy, of course, as he manages to take a minute or two of expository dialogue to wipe away the contents of about a book and a half in one go. No big battles or Ents for us. Just a mention of them in passing. Indeed, even when Gollum (who seems to be played by a complete nutter... Kari Väänänen, who you might remember from some of Aki Kurasmaki’s movies and who also plays Strider/Aragorn here) leads the Hobbit’s to Shelob’s lair, you don’t actually see Shelob. It’s over so quick... one minute they’re standing in a cave and then Frodo disappears round a crevice and he’s in a web with the conclusion that Shelob ‘got him’. Not that they take any time whatsoever to explain to the viewers who or what Shelob is.

Other things that may or may not infuriate is that there’s no quarter given in terms of respecting the sizes of the different species depicted. Indeed, the Hobbit’s don’t live in Hobbit Holes, more of a very small village of wooden huts but, like the various dwarves, elves, wizards, men and Orcs etc in the story... everybody is the same size as everyone else. Which is kinda strange when the characters talk about the ‘small’ Hobbits when, you know, some of them are taller than the characters saying this.

Okay so... the one thing where this production kind of holds up... kind of... is the acting. I mean, okay, so generally in this the acting is quite laughably bad and some of the miscast characters seem to be putting on some incredibly silly accents. One actor who seems okay, though, is Taneli Mäkelä, who plays Frodo. He starts off quite bad, actually but, by the last few episodes, he does seem to take on the weight and tragedy of Frodo clings onto it quite well. That being said, though... getting to that point is kind of gruelling in terms of the acting and, for some reason, Frodo has a quite sudden change of voice for the last four or five episodes. It goes from a kind of ‘exaggerated stupid’ to a sudden low, raspy voice which, by the end of the show, you realise is supposed to sound more like Gollum and the voice was actually deliberate (the actor didn’t just suddenly get a cold while he was filming then, as I’d originally thought) to show the great toll the bearing of the One Ring is having on him. So, yeah, the sudden and less than subtle shift of voice is a little disconcerting but, like I said, the best acting is done in the last three episodes by him so... swings and roundabouts I guess.

So Hobitit is a conglomeration of cheap, crude and wobbling all over the place sets which lack detail, some practical effects which are anything but special, mostly bad acting and some really, out of place and perhaps sometimes unintentionally comical underscoring. That being said, it does include Tom Bombadil (finally) and it does have a kind of low rent, token version of The Scouring of The Shire... so yeah, like I implied earlier... in your face Jackson! I probably won’t mention the musical interludes. Of course, the less said about Mount Doom the better but, heck, I’m gonna say it anyway...

All the way through we see the somewhat less than impressive but sizable model of Mount Doom projected at the back of the landscapes. Alas,when we finally see Frodo climb to the top, it becomes evident they didn’t switch the scale of the models because he seems to be almost as tall as the model he’s climbing. Which made for a wonderful moment where my brain did a kind of double take as I realised the Hobbit’s were possibly not much smaller than Mount Doom. So... yeah, really not sure what’s going on here, to be honest but, you know, entertaining, nevertheless.

If I had to say whether I liked Hobitit I would have to conclude, resoundingly, yes. It entertained me no end. If I had to recommend it to someone I'd probably say... if you really like Lord Of The Rings... not as good as the Raplh Bakshi version but probably a lot more satisfying, if not for the best reasons, than the inferior Peter Jackson version. Almost certainly not something you’d want to see twice but if you are a Tolkien fan then I’d definitely urge you to check this out on You Tube (remembering to enable the English captioning) and give it a look. It’s certainly a conversation piece if nothing else. The road goes ever on.

The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies

Look Who’s Tolkien

The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies
2014 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Peter Jackson
Playing now at cinemas in the UK.

Well then.

I come to what is hopefully my last, somewhat samey review of another film in the completely superfluous Hobbit trilogy. Why you need a trilogy of overlong movies for a book with a relatively low page count, I’ll never know.

Oh, wait. Yes I will... they can charge you a minimum of three times to see the movies and a minimum of three times if you like them enough to buy the three DVDs or Blu Rays. And then, as an extra special bonus, they can gouge you for the three extended cuts the following November.

What a cynical money making exercise this has become. And all in the name of adapting Tolkien who, to be honest, doesn’t really have much to do with this second, prequel trilogy of films. Much less, even, than the botched attempt at “adapting” Lord Of The Rings a while ago. You guys know The Battle Of The Five Armies lasts just about one chapter in the book, right?

Okay, so, all that being said...

The Battle Of The Five Armies is not a bad little entertainment. It’s certainly not terrible... at least not in terms of the kinds of values placed on movies by Hollywood these days... possibly it’s morally terrible but, I think I’ve already covered that ground just now and in my two previous reviews here and here.  What it does have going for it, perhaps, in comparison with the other chapters in the trilogy, is its pacing.

It’s a speedy movie and the reason for this is it’s really, in some ways, just like the last third of Return Of The Jedi (reviewed on this blog soon). That is to say, it’s just pretty much one, big, long action scene taking up the whole movie with only a few bits of talking to break it up at odd intervals. And because the special effects in this installment are, mostly, pretty well done... it’s pretty impressive eye candy for a lot of the time. It doesn’t hurt that the performances of all the actors, stars and character parts alike, are all extremely good. You will believe in the people who are fighting their battles and you will, I’m delighted to say, feel for them to some small extent too. There’s a fair crack at an emotional hook between two of the characters in this segment... not a great one, to be fair, but it is present and so there’s a humanistic context to be had here... even if the two characters I’m talking about are a) an elf and a dwarf and the fact that b) one of the characters, the elf, isn’t a character from any of Tolkien’s works and made up for a specific actress to play.

The battles are exciting and, surprisingly, Jackson and co have managed to edit them, while using a lot of cross cutting from scene to scene and character to character, in such a way that it all makes sense in your head and it’s unlikely that you’ll get confused during the action scenes. Which, being as the film is pretty much just one giant action scene, as I said before, is an obvious bonus here.

Howard Shore’s score, though, is still the real star of the picture. I might never watch the movies again in my life but I’ll certainly give the soundtrack albums a spin or two over the years. The final song isn’t exactly great but the music throughout the movie is another mini masterpiece written by a genuinely great modern composer and... I suspect... they’ll be playing in concert versions and classical album selections for many decades after he, and I for that matter, are long dust in the ground.

And that’s about all I’ve got to say about this one, I’m afraid. This is an extremely short review, for me, and I apologise for that but, asides from keeping me entertained for a few hours, I really can’t find myself inspired by it enough to be able to dredge up anything else about either the technical merits of the movie or the way the story works. It is what it is, a Hollywood style cash in trading on the name of a much loved writer. If you’re a fan of heroic fantasy action cinema and have no interest in the source, then you should be fine with this latest pseudo-adaptation of The Hobbit. If, however, you’re not someone who can divorce the movie from its original source, and I am almost certainly guilty of doing this myself, to an extent (but at least I am trying to be objective about it), then this probably isn’t going to fill your heart with too much of anything except maybe rage. So see this one or don’t and you may, or may not, have a good time with it but... there are much better movies out there worth your time, I’m sure.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug

Hobbituary! 
The Desolation Of Tolkien

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug
2013 USA/New Zealand
Directed by Peter Jackson
Playing now at cinemas in the UK.

Okay then. I suppose I’d best write this thing... although I’ve not been looking forward to it.

The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug has a great musical score by Howard Shore... and that’s one of the very few positives I can really identify in it.

To elaborate on that first item... Shore did wonders with his scores to similarly bad adaptations of the works of Tolkien for Peter Jackson and his score here, both in the film and as a stand alone listen, is no exception. It is a work of beauty which will live on long after the film has been forgotten. Absolutely gorgeous.

As to the rest...

Well this film takes bits of Tolkien from here, there and everywhere and tries to weave them into the basic, compromised skeleton of The Hobbit at every twist and turn of the narrative. Some bits come from Tolkien and other bits are merely stolen from him. The orcs, for example, if memory serves me correctly, have no place being in The Hobbit. If people were worried about a thin children’s book being turned into 9 hours plus of movie just to try and capitalise in the success of the hasty pseudo-adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, then this film in particular shows them that they had every right to be. It’s padded out almost beyond recognition and even the casual reader of Tolkien (I admit, it’s been about three decades since I last read his stuff) will detect the extensions and travesty at large throughout the movie.

As much as I am still angry about all of the stuff Jackson left out and abbreviated in Lord Of The Rings, I am as angry about all the stuff he’s mockingly stuffed into these so-called prequels. I recognised occasional feint bits of Tolkien amongst the wreckage that is The Desolation Of Smaug and even the comical barrels sequence had been enlarged to a kick ass battle/chase sequence involving orc and elf carnage which turned it into an epic instead of staying with the modest childrens book that The Hobbit was intended to be. The Lord Of The Rings was an epic book... The Hobbit was not. The only thing that really bound it to the sequel that Tolkien went on to write, was the one ring. And while Tolkien was indeed guilty of making changes to the original text for future editions after the success of his more adult themed sequel, and I’m thinking of the changes to Smeagol’s character to make him more obsessed and hostile to Bilbo regarding the ring, he never went fully gung ho “George Lucas, Greedo shoots first” revisionist on his original tale the way Peter Jackson is trying to use The Hobbit as a lead in for his original trilogy of films.

As a movie, divorced from its relationship from the original work, I’m afraid it doesn’t do much better. I quite enjoyed, to an extent, certain passages of the initial movie but this one didn’t nearly keep me as entertained as the first one did and it’s not what I’d choose to see at the movies if I wasn’t already invested in it by having seen the previous four...

It’s well acted, more than competently edited, has great special effects and, as I remarked at the start of this review, has an incredibly beautiful score. It’s just such a shame that the intent behind the decision to layer on all this extra and unwieldy stuff into a trilogy just to make tons of money from the initial audiences to the first trilogy are the main motivation behind the decision to make these films. It shows itself up in every frame of film. It even has something not dissimilar to the furnace scene from Alien 3 spliced into it when we get to the scenes of Smaug. It just felt wrong.

So... brilliant music, which was expected and which I will continue to listen to for a long time and catch any concerts I can if Shore tours it like he did with his music from The Lord Of The Rings. However, like so many gorgeous scores written for bad movies (Jerry Goldsmith was a master at getting those kinds of projects to work on), the film fails Tolkien quite badly, in my humble opinion... although it’s obviously going to make tons of money. So Jackson and the studios can certainly sleep well on that. Job done.

At some point, though, I’d love to see some proper movies made from Tolkien’s original books.