Thumbs up for the 'Bagginses'

I've seen 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' twice now, once with each of my Nates.  It's pretty long at 3 hours, and it's only the first of a trilogy.  The look and feel of the movie matches 'The Lord of the Rings' very well, and I think that's the main thing the filmmakers were trying to accomplish.

Lovers of  J. R. R. Tolkien's books are well aware that 'The Hobbit' is a much slighter, lighter story than the LOTR. It's not concerned with the end of the world, but with a bunch of little people that are going off on an adventure.  There are small hints in the text and the footnotes that the world is not as it should be, and that evil is getting stronger, but nothing is too explicit.  Peter Jackson and his colleagues have taken those hints, expanded them, and used them to tie this prequel to the LOTR.

Jackson and Co. have also brought in several other characters, such as Galadriel, that never appear in 'The Hobbit', and have given names to some of them, such as the King of the Woodland Elves, that never are named in the book.  Some of that detail comes from 'The Silmarillion', and some from the various appendices that Tolkien wrote.  I think that after 'The Hobbit' was successful Professor Tolkien realized he was onto a good thing, and started to expand his world as much as possible.  That 'back story' forms a lot of the additional material in the films that purists will say is just filler.

To my mind, the biggest change in the film from the book is the motivation of the dwarf band.  The movie has Thorin Oakenshield leading a bunch of freedom fighters, who are like the Jews banding together to reestablish their homeland after 1948.  That sounds pretty noble, but it's not the way Professor Tolkien wrote it.  In 'The Hobbit', the dwarves are primarily interested in getting their gold back - the wish to recapture their ancient kingdom under the Lonely Mountain is secondary.  The big battle at the end of the book is ALL about the gold.  Everybody wants a piece of it.  I expect that the filmmakers were falling in with a modern sensibility which says that heroes should NEVER be motivated by greed.  Profit is crass these days, right?

All in all though, I have to say I enjoyed the film very much. I always like a big, sprawling story with a lot of things going on, and Mr. Jackson and his colleagues certainly know how to deliver that.  It's well worth your money, if you get a chance to see it.