After a week in the theatres, Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit : An Unexpected Journey” has brought in around 85 million dollars in box office revenue, and I am proud to say that I contributed to that amount not once, but twice.
Myself, and my fellow diehards, packed the theatre for the midnight showing last Thursday anticipating another great installment from Middle Earth, and “The Hobbit” did not disappoint. Any fan of the “Lord of the Rings”(LOTR) series would agree that this movie and the LOTR series are two very different things, but nonetheless “The Hobbit” is just as enjoyable. For starters, The Hobbit is a prequel, and lighter than the rest of the series, which you can definitely feel while watching the movie, not only with the generally warmer picture but in the way that Jackson decided to show the orcs and goblins, which were all animated.
The special effects in this movie make Golum, who appears in just one scene, look entirely real and believable, making that scene one of my favorite in the movie. To top it all off, “The Hobbit” has a score that leaves the audience humming it for the next few days. The music in this movie is as epic as it is great. The movie follows the book extremely well; although some parts were added in, they were harmless, and adding harmless cameos is better than taking out parts of the book.
“The Hobbit” is not just adapted well for the big screen with how it follows the book, but Peter Jackson could not have chosen a better actor to play Bilbo. British actor Martin Freeman turns Bilbo into a character the audience can love and root for. Freeman works well with a diverse cast of dwarves and the famous Gandalf, who we see a lot more in this movie than in the others, making it just that much better. The movie starts out slow, but once it starts to get exciting it stays that way till the end, and the slow beginning provides a backstory that is essential to the movie, and gives the audience a better look into the lives of the dwarves, which we don’t see in the LOTR.
Basically, the only reason someone wouldn’t enjoy this movie is because they went into it expecting the LOTR, which is a sorry mistake on their part. When it is all said and done the LOTR and “The Hobbit” aren’t comparable, only because they are two very different movies, and “The Hobbit” is a very good movie in itself. As a first installment in a trilogy “The Hobbit” has succeeded in making me look forward to seeing the next two on opening night.
