These past Holidays, I've managed to watch a number of
movies that I had missed out on. Luckily, on the last day I had off, I squeezed
in The Hobbit with my nephew. He'd already seen it, but we had made plans a
while ago (which I had kept putting off, first because I was sick, then because
I was busy). We finally managed it yesterday (Yes, today I was at work. It's no
fun, but a paycheck beats no paycheck with a stick).
I was pleasantly surprised where the movie started. Not the
previews (Man of Steel, Oz: the Great and Powerful, Jack the Giant Slayer), but
the actual movie itself. It brought back Elijah Wood and Ian Holm to reprise
Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, the day of Bilbo's 111th birthday party. In
fact, after a brief flashback to the dwarves losing their city, it takes us
right up to when Frodo leaves to go read a book and meet Gandalf. It also
reuses some terrific musical cues from the original film (Concerning Hobbits).
Anyway, then the movie goes back 60 years ago, to when Ian
Holm looked like Martin Freeman, and had no adventures, which is just how
normal Hobbits like it. Young Bilbo meets Gandalf (who still looks like Sir Ian
McKellen), and then he meets a bunch of dwarves, and after a rather long
introductory sequence, they go off on an adventure together, normal Hobbit behavior be damned. Bilbo is part Took after all, and Tooks are somewhat odd
Hobbits who don't really conform to normal Hobbit-ish conventions. Good for
them! Being shackled by society's conventions is no fun, no matter how
fictional that society may be. Stand up for yourselves! Go on adventures! Be
back home for supper! Oh, um, maybe that's not how adventures work in Middle
Earth.
Adventures seems to be mostly the same, though, because I
thought I saw this movie before, and it was called Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. A group of people traipse around a place that looks an
awful lot like New Zealand ,
and fight off increasingly ugly creatures. They even go underground, where they
have to fight off and escape from a horde of enemies, including one giant one.
On the other hand, just because I've seen the movie before,
doesn't mean it's not a good movie. And this movie is good. It might not be
quite up to par with the other LOTR movies, but I think that's just because it
took too long to get going. Mind you, Return of the King took about 20 minutes
before any action happened. This one goes quite a bit longer with only a
chaotic scene of Smaug the Dragon devastating a town before capturing all of
the wealth in a nearby mountain as an action scene amidst a series of talky
shots.
So, all in all, it's a theatre movie. Takes a while to get
going, but good music, good action, awesome scenery, good humour. Takes me back
to the days of the Original Trilogy. And definitely better than that other
Prequel Trilogy (which if I had my way, would be permanently erased from both reality and memory. Forever).
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