The Hobbit A Truly Unexpected Journey (Review)

I've finally seen the movie last week. It was as expected awesome, the story however was truly 'unexpected'. I would have thought Peter Jackson would stay more loyal to The Hobbit but what I think happened was he thought this series of movies would be the last of Tolkien's work to ever be filmed, so he worked a lot of little stories from The Silmarillion into the plot of The Hobbit. I liked it.


One thing was it felt a little too much like I was watching an extended version of the original movie. There were too much long-looks, too much detail given at times than necessary and scenes felt a little stretched out. Which doesn't bother me really, if there were to be made extended versions of the movies I would've preferred them anyway but I believe it may effect the general critique of the movie.
The most excited I was about the movie was the effects have definitely were up to and more than our expectation. It feels like special effects, visual effects, costume and make-up Academy Awards are not a miss this year. Directing and movie nominations are a maybe. I don't know much about the acting, Richard Armitage (Thorin) or Andy Serkis (Gollum) may get nominations, that's a maybe too. Sorry to Martin Freeman but I hear he has 2 more movies to prove himself in the role of Bilbo Baggins.

That is another thing Peter Jackson confirmed The Hobbit to be a trilogy. He says they decided to turn the two movies into three movies after the post-production, as in the video blogs of the production he referred them being two movies. There are talks about him milking the one book but I think it may turn out to be a good thing to include the The Silmarillion stories. they did spend an awful lot of time on those scenes and fights were indeed worthy. I think he is doing a lot to make the true fans happy as there are many many characters in the movies just to make one last tribute to them. Old Bilbo (Ian Holm), Frodo (Elijah Wood), Elrond (hugo Weaving), Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), Saruman (Christopher Lee) - who, couldn't come to New Zeland due to his very old age, so Peter Jackson came to him in London to shoot his part of the Rivendell scenes- weren't really essential in the scenes.

Additionally Radagast who is not even in the book himself, is playing a good part of informing Gandalf of The Necromancer. I guess they are going to get back to Necromancer in the other two movies because Benedict Cumberbatch is listed as the voice of him in all of the movies. As well as the voice of Smaug, the dragon.

Another thing I loved loved loved in the movie was, we never saw Smaug as a whole. In the story at the beginning I was afraid we would see him but we saw only his breath of fire (which by the way looked a lot like fire catapults) and at the very last scene his eye. I was really afraid something frightening was going to happen at the end because of the 3D, his eye looked really really big, don't you think?

All in all as a very hard core fan of anythong to do with Lord of the Rings, I liked it and I think it was worth the time and money Peter Jackson put into The Hobbit.

Lego has designed special Hobbit pieces and the pictures were too cute not to include in here, so here are some of them, if you type in 'lego the hobbit actors' into Google there are all of them in the images.

 And lastly the very first image of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is released. also some of the official posters include some scenes from the next movies. I can hardly wait another year for the movie but since I don't want them to end too fast so I'm in really deep dilemma :)