Ian McKellen – People Talking

Movie Review: ‘The Hobbit’ – An Unnecessary Trilogy

The Hobbit
Directed by Peter Jackson
Written by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Guillermo del Toro, based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien
Cast: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage, Ken Stott, William Kircher, James Nesbitt, Stephen Hunter, Mark Hadlow, Graham McTavish, Dean O’Gorman, Peter Hambleton, Aidan Turner, Jed Brophy, John Callen, Adam Brown, Cate Blanchett, Hugo Weaving, Christopher Lee, Bret McKenzie, Sylvester McCoy, Lee Pace, Orlando Bloom, Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, Stephen Fry, John Bell, Craig Hall, Benedict Cumberbatch, Billy Connolly, Thomas Robins, Antony Sher, Manu Bennett, Andy Serkis, Barry Humphries, Kiran Shah, Elijah Wood, Ian Holm, Dan Hennah
Soundtrack: Howard Shore

Oh, my head.

Yesterday, I made the decision, perhaps foolish, to see all three Hobbit films in one sitting (at my old favorite, the Alamo Drafthouse Theater in Yonkers, NY).

I had not seen the previous two Hobbit films at all, frankly, because I wasn’t really interested in seeing another three movies about Hobbits and Dwarves and whatnot in Middle Earth, but, ultimately, the opportunity to see a complete trilogy, with fresh eyes, in a theater with plenty of food and drink at hand, was too enticing to pass up, even if I did have to take time off from work to do so.

Was it worth it? In the end, I suppose so, if for nothing else than it gives me something to talk about. It’s not often that I get to write about a movie (or series of movies) before most people get to see it, so here goes.

Now, when I first heard that J.R.R. Tolkien’s [roughly] 300-page novel, The Hobbit, was going to be adapted into not just one film, but a whole trilogy of films, I said to myself, “It’s going to be the Star Wars Prequels all over again,” in that a later-produced trilogy that takes place before the events of the original trilogy could not possibly live up to the original, and might even leave a black mark on the whole franchise.

Now, is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit anywhere near as bad as Star Wars: Episodes I-III?

No, of course not.

Unlike the Prequels, which are almost completely irredeemable as films, there are many enjoyable aspects of The Hobbit movies, but there are a few themes, somewhat reminiscent of Episodes I-III, that run throughout these films and make it difficult for me to recommend them as presently constituted.

What am I talking about?

1. The Characters (aka “Who’s the protagonist?)

This is, in fact, a very minor complaint, and I don’t actually mind movies straying away from traditional storytelling and featuring multiple leads, but for what is essentially a nearly eight-hour long motion picture called The Hobbit, there are an awful lot of long stretches where the title character isn’t around, or, if he is, the story is not from his perspective. I get that Peter Jackson essentially raided the Tolkien library for any other unadapted source material related to Middle Earth to pad out the running time (which is the proper way to do so; add more STORY…we’ll come back to padding later), but, at times, it’s just a little tough to reconcile how much of The Hobbit is told without him, and how often it feels like the Dwarf or Wizard show.

2. Tone (aka “You’re making a movie for children, right?”)

One issue with the Star Wars Prequels, and it’s echoed almost perfectly by The Hobbit, is that the movies get darker and darker as the trilogy progresses, as if the filmmakers think they need to compensate for something. Now with the Prequels I think this was entirely intentional, as a response to the negative audience reaction to Jar Jar Binks and other such attempts at “comedy.” With The Hobbit one could argue that it’s part of the natural progression of the story, and at the end of the day I don’t specifically have a problem with Peter Jackson wanting to make an adaption for mature audiences, but at the same time he’s making an adaptation of a children’s novel, complete with lots of kid-friendly moments (like dwarves doing annoying dwarf things). Do we really need to also see decapitations and people burning and dead children? Again, who are these movies really for?

Which leads me to my next point.

3. Excess (aka “I may have gone too far in a few places.”)

Peter Jackson is a huge Tolkien fan.

He’s also arguably the most excessive director working today, and has been going all the way back to his schlock horror days with movies such as Dead Alive (aka Braindead) and Meet the Feebles. Now, excess can be good when properly channeled (think Quentin Tarantino), but a three-hour long King Kong movie that nobody wanted or needed, and fails to justify its own existence (unlike certain other ape-themed movies which are fantastic), is not what I had in mind.

The core problem with these movies isn’t just how long they are, it’s WHY they’re as long as they are; and while there are other Tolkien works folded into the story, the excessive running times are ultimately due to excessive action scenes, some of which look fine, and others of which look like cutscenes from videogames (and I don’t mean no PS4; I’m talking XBOX 360 at best). In fact, a great deal of tension is lost from our heroes actually physically behaving like videogame characters; with such speed, strength, and agility that they basically become unbelievable within their own fantasy universe.

You see, Peter Jackson and George Lucas both failed to realize that even in this amazing age of digital technology, just because you can dream something, and just because you can create it in a computer, does not outright mean you should commit it to film. And it also seems like both of them are in favor of pushing technology in the wrong direction: Lucas, to further his own laziness, and Jackson, well, I guess to make 48fps telenovelas about Middle Earth.

Anyway, I could more easily accept a Hobbit trilogy if it was three 100-120 minute films, or like a 6-8 part TV miniseries; but three two-and-a-half to three-hour long films is just insane, and I’m not just saying that because I saw all three in a row. Remember, this whole thing is essentially based on one 300-page children’s novel. The Rankin/Bass animated version from the late-1970s clocks in at a crisp 77 minutes, and while it does leave some story elements out, does Peter Jackson’s version really need to be over six times as long? I argue no.

Now I’ve spent nearly a thousand words hammering what I don’t like, and why I don’t recommend this trilogy as it stands, but I don’t want to end on a totally down note, because I don’t actually hate these movies. In fact, you could say I really want to like them, but overwhelming factors prevent me from doing so.

If you’ve already seen Journey and Smaug, going #OneLastTime to see Five Armies can’t hurt, but if you haven’t seen any of them before, I say don’t bother with them.

I hope there will come a day, after Five Armies is released on home format, that someone in the fan-edit community will take all the footage available and compile together a reasonable-length version of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, because as I said before, there are plenty of gems to find: good performances; emotional moments; all the wonders of a fantasy world.

Right now, it’s just not worth 8 hours (474 minutes, to be precise) of your time.

But we can always dream.

Overall Rating: ★★½ (out of five)

Twofer Movie Review: ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ and ‘Godzilla’ (2014) – Why So Boring?

I never anticipated that I’d be formally reviewing these two movies, as I’m trying to stick to ground less traveled here, but I had the…experience…of seeing both this past week, and they coaxed almost the exact same reaction out of me: disappointment.

X-Men: Days of Future Past and the new Godzilla are the latest members of a growing and increasingly wearisome club of “big” summer movies whose trailers make them look fantastic, but the movies themselves leave much to be desired (perhaps the most notable example of this from 2013 is Man of Steel, though at least the first half is worth watching). I understand movies are a business, but at this point I’m just tired of all the lies.

So, here I am, reviewing these films that many, many people have seen already, but I want to warn others while they’re still at risk of wasting their time and money.

Directed by Bryan Singer
Written by Simon Kinberg (Screenplay and Story), Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn (Story)
Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Halle Berry, Nicholas Hoult, Ellen Page, Peter Dinklage, Shawn Ashmore, Omar Sy, Evan Peters, Josh Helman, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Lucas Till, Daniel Cudmore, Booboo Stewart, Michael Lerner
Soundtrack: John Ottman

I had such high hopes…

Before I get too ahead of myself here, I will point out two scenes in this movie that are quite well done, without spoiling too much (not that it really matters):
1. An action scene that takes place in a famous government building where our heroes have to break someone out. It is the best scene in the film (though not worth the price of admission), and makes great use of Quicksilver (Marvel’s version of The Flash, if you don’t know).
2. A more poignant scene where the two Xaviers (past and future) are talking to one another. It’s the only scene that really connects on an emotional level to any significant degree.

That’s about it. Two scenes.

The basic premise of this movie (we need to fix the past in order to save the future) is interesting enough to keep you going for the lengthy running time; I was never so bored that I just wanted to go to sleep, but there’s a substantial gap between being passively interested and actively invested, and this movie consistently fails to fill it. If I was so inclined, I could complain about lots of things like plot holes, anachronisms, and various other X-Men problems that I know nothing about, but even before all of that, this movie constantly fails to be compelling. I was expecting Days of Future Past to be big and emotional; it is neither of those.

Whatever needs to happen to advance the story happens in short order, leaving very little room for dramatic tension. We need to find the professor? We find the professor. We need to find Eric? We find Eric. We need them to reconcile? They reconcile in two minutes (even though “they’ve never been further apart”). And so on and so forth. Not only that, but they couldn’t seem to figure out an interesting way of delivering mass exposition, which leads to more tedium as a viewer.

Now, again, I know very little about X-Men, and I’ve certainly never read the Days of Future Past storyline in the comics, so I can’t tell you how good of an adaptation the movie is, but, you know what? I know very little about Captain America and S.H.I.E.L.D., and I really enjoyed The Winter Soldier. I know very little about Iron Man, and all three of those movies are fantastic (Iron Man 2 is actually my favorite of the trilogy). All four of the movies I just mentioned work as movies first and worry about the other comic book stuff later, therefore I recommend all of them, but I cannot recommend this new X-Men film (outside of a Netflix/Redbox sort of viewing if you’re that curious). X-Men: First Class had its problems, and I did not recommend seeing it in a theater when it came out, but there are at least some compelling storylines and interesting cinematic goings-on to get you moderately invested; it’s not a total flop. I can’t say the same for Days of Future Past. Ordinarily I’d offer up some sort of suggestion on how to improve the film, but I honestly don’t know about this one outside of having a completely different creative team leading the charge.

Frankly, and this will sound harsh, I think Bryan Singer himself might be the biggest problem here. Now, he did write and direct the first two X-Men films, and they’re solid, I guess (it’s been a while since I’ve watched them), but on the whole I think his career path is much closer to M. Night Shyamalan than his hero, Richard Donner. I suppose based on his original X-Men work he was able to wrangle a lot of creative control for Superman Returns, and that movie suffers many of the same problems as Days of Future Past. Granted, I really enjoyed it when I first saw it in theaters, but I was a younger man, and highly nostalgic for Superman I and II; watching it again though, that movie’s a mess (Lex Luthor wants real estate again, really?), and a good chunk of the running time simply isn’t compelling. I can understand the studio’s desire to return to the guy that put X-Men on the cinematic map, but, at this point, it seems that Bryan Singer is damaged goods, at least for superhero movies.

★★☆☆☆

Directed by Gareth Edwards
Written by Max Borenstein (Screenplay), Dave Callaham (Story)
Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, CJ Adams, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Richard T. Jones, Victor Rasuk, Jared Keeso
Soundtrack: Alexandre Desplat

The most common comment (and I uttered it myself many a time) I heard in anticipation of Godzilla was, “Bryan Cranston’s in it,” and that is a true statement; Bryan Cranston is in the new Godzilla, and he’s really good in it when he’s in it, but he’s not in it nearly enough to save it.

This movie started off with a lot of promise. In the first 15 minutes or so, we see that Bryan Cranston plays an engineer at a nuclear power plant in Japan who’s concerned about a repeating pattern of seismic tremors (whose origins we as the audience already know something about) that might cause his plant some trouble. Sure enough, he’s right, and the plant suffers a terrible accident as a result of a mysterious earthquake, and, of course, this comes at a great personal cost to our beloved engineer.

BOOM. That’s a great intro, and a great way to get your audience invested into your movie. BUT, they then proceed to almost immediately scrap that for a shift in perspective to a different character. Bryan Cranston’s engineer comes back for a little bit, and you find out what he’s been doing for the past 15 years and it leads to the next plot point, but after that he’s done. See ya never.

This is my first big problem with this film. They get you emotionally invested, but then throw it away and give you characters that you just don’t care about; you can’t care about them, at least not in the same way. The engineer’s character’s arc coulda/shoulda/woulda made up the whole movie, or at least the first half of it. But jettisoning it so quickly into the run time (no matter who was playing him, really) was a huge mistake in the writing; and replacing him with such boring other characters compounds the problem further. Let him hang around a lot longer, and you’ve instantly got a better movie; hands down.

My second big issue is creature design; not so much for Godzilla, he looks alright, I guess, but the other creatures (this is not a spoiler; they’re in the trailer if you look close). They just look so generic, like they got focus-grouped to death or something. I don’t know, they just don’t look interesting or very creative. This is where maybe a little more liaising with Toho would have reaped huge benefits. I mean I know this is a ‘murican Godzilla movie, and I appreciate that they moved the story along more so than a standard reboot, but when your film features giant monsters, those monsters need to be engaging, and they almost completely failed in that respect.

My third and final problematic issue with Godzilla is too much tease and not enough payoff. Say what you want about Pacific Rim (I’m not that high on it myself, but it’s okay), but you can’t deny that they went all out when it came to showing you the monsters. Now I’m not saying Godzilla has to be that explicit, but the title of the movie is GODZILLA. A Godzilla movie should have the payoff of seeing Godzilla doing Godzilla things, and he does, eventually, but even when it’s an all-out brawl, they still cut away and tease you in the midst of it. It doesn’t come as a fully-satisfying payoff; it’s just more frustration at the end of an already frustrating movie.

What’s also frustrating is that they gave this movie to a promising young director, Gareth Edwards (not to be confused with Gareth Evans, who’s making the fantastic Raid series), whose first feature was also a monster movie called Monsters that appears to be much more worthwhile than Godzilla.

Now, is Godzilla a better movie than X-Men: Days of Future Past? Yes. It at least gives you an initial emotional connection, and though you’re largely waiting for something to happen, it does draw you back in a couple of times with legitimate suspense (something X-Men particularly fails to do); not to mention the visuals are much better on the whole. But it’s not good enough to warrant a better rating, unfortunately.

★★☆☆☆