Maybe you know this: when ordering a pizza you add all your favorite toppings, making the result ranging between „hard to digest“ to „inedible“. The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey is like the pizza

The movie has about 3h running time (with a short, sudden break in the middle). It’s shown in 3D and is using as first movie ever  High Frame Rate.

Things I liked

On the one hand the movie is quite close to the source material (including songs taken literally from the book), on the other it’s more serious/complex than the book, although there are some scenes where you can very clearly see that „The Hobbit“ is a children’s book. Also the movie blends much better into LOTR than the book (characters in the „The Hobbit“ are behaving much more differently in LOTR). The scenery shots were very well done, the special effects were – with some exceptions – quite good and convincing. Fun fact: Sylvester McCoy (better known as Doctor Who) was portraying Radagast the Brown – I didn’t recognize him till the credits 😀

Things I didn’t like

The length! The film is the apotheosis of „overlong“! Short scenes in the books have been stretch, scenery porn galore – I was wondering if I was in a long touristic ad for New Zealand. There also was a premier: I nearly dozed off – despite the loud music & effects 😳

Radagast the Brown was portrayed as a bumbling, silly character which he was definetely not in LOTR (if I remember correctly, he wasn’t mentioned in The Hobbit at all). At the end of the movie I head quite an headache, 48p and High Frame Rate nonwithstanding 🙁

The Gist

Peter Jackson should have remembered how to order a good pizza – there’s a German saying „less is sometimes more“. The book just hasn’t got enough content for such a long movie (let alone three of them!), it reminded me of  Star Trek: The Motion Picture – although The Hobbit got superior scenery porn.