Great The Hobbit Unexpected Journey UltraViolet
Where Elijah Wood played his hobbit, Frodo, as a picture of childlike innocence in a big world, Martin Freeman plays Bilbo as a flustered everyman. His essential Edwardian Englishness, based on predictability and decorum and stability, is almost the exact opposite of the dwarves he accompanies, led by Richard Armitage (who will surely become a name star behind this film). And that tension drives this story forward.
Tolkien's mythmaking, which is perhaps less sophisticated than in "the Lord of the Rings" but no less compelling, relies on two visions of England. The dwarves, eager to reclaim their homeland, are an older, more virile England, that of Shakespeare, Wellington, and the Norman Conquests. Bilbo, with his corduroy jacket and pipe, is the inward-turning England of the years after the empire. Take away either, and England would lose its Englishness.
Bilbo thinks the dwarves savage, unkempt, and barbaric. The dwarves consider Bilbo sedentary, effete, and useless. Director Peter Jackson plays this out longer and more explicitly than Tolkien did in his book, which took such distinctions as written. This film is about how the young man and the old man can't stand each other, even as they need each other, and the one gradually turns into the other.
Jackson takes pains to emphasize this film's connections to his previous LotR trilogy, finding ways to incorporate sets and characters from the prior films, whether or not they were in the book. But he also distinguishes this film from the prior. Its humor is more explicit and its characters more archetypal, less gritty. And as a story involving no humans, this movie is more absolutely fantasy than Jackson's prior trilogy.
It would have been easy for Peter Jackson to produce "LotR Redux," and it probably would have made him even more famous. But he thankfully makes this a different movie, with its own identity and themes. He takes risks where he could have played it safe, alternates smartly between boldness and subtlety, and spends more time than before on themes. That difference is what makes this movie work so well.
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