The Hobbit, an unexpected journey: movie review

This the movie review you've all been waiting to read before your Christmas holidays and New Year, so I am going to make it short and sweet so you can go back to your loved ones and spend a great holiday season after getting a second opinion on the movie you'd like see.

• Should you go to see The Hobbit? Yes
• Should you expect it to be epic? ...somewhat
• Should you expect it to be LOTR kinda-epic? No

I have seen the Hobbit last week and I enjoyed it, yet I was surprised to sit in my comfy chair at the cinema and discover that I wouldn't see Smaug and the end of the tale that night. "What? a trilogy out of the Hobbit?" "Yes and no, there is also stuff from the Silmarillion in it" "Bah".

This looks like a desperate attempt to replicate the success of the Lord of The Rings especially from a box-office point of view. Having each viewer pay $30 for the whole story sounds more juicy than having to produce one, well summarised, epic movie with a gross revenue per viewer of less than $10.

It's easy to make an epic movie in 3 hours or more, not to mention 9 (think of Ben-Hur!) but is no easy task to make a movie so memorable that will stay forever in the history of cinema in less than 2 or 3 hours like, say 2001 Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick). I'd define the script and direction of the Hobbit as syncopated, slow and fast at irregular intervals. Also there were parts of the movie that in other occasions would and should have been cut, and maybe kept in the extended versions for the geeks to see in their living room. I am referring to:

• The conversation between Galadriel, Saruman and Gandalf. Long, superfluos, confusionary and also weak.
• The song of the dwarves during the dinner. Again superfluous to the level of boring and especially not very touching... don't know if this is the work of Howard Shore or someone else, but it was icky that's sure.
• The riddle scene. Way too long and slow.
• The white ogre storyline. Why is that even there?

There were also good things about the movie that made up for the painful exit from the Shire and the awkwardly good looking dwarves. I didn't know there could be such interesting dwarves...

• The beginning of the story was told very well. The whole connection between Bilbo's party, Frodo and the dwarves quest was made very simple and well summarized.
• The movie preserved the witty tone of the novel, although it tried sometimes to make it more serious than it was intended by Tolkien himself.
• Photography was amazing and I haven't seen the high frame per second version in IMAX 3D!
• Martin Freeman and Ian McKellen are really good and you can feel the lightness of the story in respect to the Lord of the Rings when they approach the idea of the quest.

In summary, the Hobbit an unexpected journey is a good movie, way too long that depicts the Shire as a place that is very hard to leave, almost as much as Russia was before the fall of the wall. Go see it to make yourself an opinion, but if you don't want to spend three times the money to know how it ends, consider the idea of renting it on Netflix once all three of them are out or better, buy the book on Amazon.