The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) is a movie I originally saw in theaters, is in my DVD collection and I recently rewatched with my daughter on HBOMAX. The storyline for this picture involves our old friend, Bilbo Baggins, as a youth when Gandalf the wizard shows up at his door about an adventure. Bilbo says no but that night 12 dwarfs show up at his door and tells him a story about a dragon that stole their homeland and gold. They would like to return home, regain their kingdom and need Bilbo's help to make that happen. Bilbo will try to say no, but we all know he can't.

This movie is directed by Peter Jackson (Bad Taste) and stars Martin Freeman (Black Panther), Ian McKellen (X-Men), Andy Serkis (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), Richard Armitage (Into the Storm), Graham McTavish (Rambo) and James Nesbitt (Match Point).

The settings, cast, special effects, attire and props in this are absolutely out of this world. The introduction of the characters is hilarious and very well done. I adored how well the perception of the characters of each other is depicted and how that evolves over time. There's some war scenes in this that's awesome and every scene with the orcs riding the wolves is tremendous. The goblin king sequence in the cave is well executed and it's impossible not to love the riddle game with Gollum. The final battle at the cliff was perfect.

Overall, this is an underrated gem that gets overshadowed by the greatness of Lord of the Rings. I would score this a 9/10 and strongly recommend it.

With nearly the same creative team behind the masterfully made Lord of the Rings trilogy, why did The Hobbit trilogy fall so flat for most viewers? Was it merely that the bar had been set too high by LOTR? Here are the most plausible reasons I can come up with.

1) They Tried to Remake LOTR

This is the single biggest problem with The Hobbit movies, the kernel of their woes. If not for this, they might have let del Toro remain as director. If not for this, they might have had good original score instead of derivative music with not a single memorable track. If not for this, they might have kept it as one or maybe two movies instead of stretching it into a trilogy. The money people wanted another generation-defining hit and, in their greed, they ruined any hope for The Hobbit to be good. The tone of the films does not at all match the tone of the source material. They used the source material as a plot guide while overlaying the tone and epic scale of LOTR - it just doesn't work. The Hobbit was a wonky children's story but the investors wanted another mature, adventure fantasy epic. The whole adaptation process was confused by this contradictory creative impulse.

2) Poor Source Material

The Hobbit is an inherently challenging book to adapt to the screen. For one thing, there are too many Dwarves in Thorin's company. I consider myself a hard-core Tolkien fan but I can hardly remember more than half of their names. I certainly can't connect names to the faces of actors and it doesn't help that, unlike the Fellowship, their names all sound alike, all derived in some form from the Poetic Edda. The Dwarves in the company don't really do anything in the story either. They're just sort of there because 13 is an auspicious number. The only real characters in the company are Thorin, Bilbo, and Gandalf (Balin's role in the expedition to reclaim Moria having been retconned later on). The Battle of Five Armies isn't the climax of the story either, it's more like a dessert, a bit of action for the kiddies. It's described in all of like two pages but in the movie they tried to portray it like the Battle of Minas Tirith. The Hobbit simply does not exist in the same universe as LOTR or the Silmarillion or etc. - the lore links were penciled in later by Tolkien for those other works. The episode with Galadriel, Saruman, and the Necromancer doesn't even show up in The Hobbit.

3) Over-Reliance on CGI

The LOTR trilogy was already suffering from this before it was through. In Viggo's words, The Hobbit was at least 10x worse. Characters feel weightless, their movements lacking the subtle imperfections of real people. The CG orcs look too clean, too crisp and the fact that there is not a single practical effects orc in the trilogy subconciously tells us there is no real antagonist - our heroes are just fighting a render (or worse, a dude in a suit with little balls all over it). There is no synchronization between action and audio. Weta Workshop's concepts are still just as good as the first trilogy, maybe a little high-fantasy by comparison, but their realization mostly or exclusively in CGI is extremely disappointing.

4) Creative Exhaustion with the Source Material

They should have let del Toro direct. We would have gotten an original take on Tolkien's work which is exactly what was needed because, as previously mentioned, The Hobbit and LOTR don't exist in the same universe. PJ poured his soul into the original trilogy and he didn't have any gas left in the tank for The Hobbit - the money people brought him in because they thought it would make the investment safer. As it turns out, lightning doesn't strike twice even when you reassemble the same cast and crew. I think this is probably the least important of the reasons why The Hobbit failed, the financial pressures of the studios and the political situation in New Zealand might even have been more important factors, but I won't get into that.

As this film opens an elderly Bilbo Baggins explains how the once great Dwarfs were forced out of their mountain kingdom by the dragon Smaug. He begins to talk of a great adventure and we are transported back to shortly before the adventure began when a young Bilbo meets the wizard Gandalf the Grey. He invites Bilbo on an adventure but he declines; the next day thirteen Dwarfs turn up at Bilbo's home believing that they have been invited. They tell him of their quest but he initially refuses; he has no desire to leave home. The next morning he changes his mind and so begins a quest that will see them fighting trolls, orcs and goblins as well as meeting elves, another wizard and in Bilbo's case the somewhat crazed Smeagol who will become a lifelong enemy following the theft of a certain ring.

Before watching this the main criticism I'd heard was that breaking the story into three long films was a mistake; having seen it I'm inclined to agree. The story took too long to get started and when it did it got nowhere fast; the party had a succession of battles but there was never the sense of danger that there was in the Lord of the Rings films. Another weakness was the fact that the party was a large group of dwarfs with one hobbit and one wizard rather than the more mixed group in the earlier trilogy; only a couple of them stood out from the group; the rest were very much the same. On the plus side the film looked great with many sweeping shots though action set in a spectacular landscape and the actors did a decent enough job; I particularly enjoyed seeing Andy Serkis' return as Smeagol even though he is doing motion-capture work for a CGI character. Overall I'd say this is worth watching if you enjoyed the Lord of the Rings trilogy even though it isn't as good as those films… hopefully the next instalment will improve matters.