It is now
official.
Peter
Jackson is in fact George Lucas.
The
Hobbit is to The Lord of the Rings what The Phantom Menace was to the
Star Wars franchise.
After
sitting through it I have come to the conclusion that it is little
more than a cash generator.
Not the
sort that has the obligatory tracksuit wearing lad with an x-box 360
under his arm hangs about outside, but the sort that is a movie that
is churned out to line the pockets of a studio.
That they
made a trilogy out of such a slim volume from Tolkien should have
rang alarm bells, but there was so much goodwill left over from the
Lord of the rings that I suppose many of us were willing to wait and
see if the reason was that Jackson and his crew were going to make a
super literal adaptation and blow our tiny minds with it.
Sadly
that doesn't appear to be the case and the first instalment is more a
snide dipping of our pockets.
It's not
all bad, but it's also very far from being all good either.
Is it
possible that they slashed the SFX budget so they could pay their
extras?
I don't
know, but resurrecting a tired and battered old Morph from Take Hart
to play the Pale Orc wasn't that impressive.
Morph
looks as if he has hit the crack cocaine since his days of
riding high as a children's favourite to.
I kept
expecting him to ride into battle with a piece of cardboard
proclaiming he was homeless, hungry, and in need of urgent dental
treatment.
The CGI
baddies were shockingly retro looking as a whole to be honest.
Films
with a fraction of the budget that this had often do a better job.
Even the
make up department need a good talking to.
As the
movie is set before Lord of the rings then couldn't they have put a
bit more slap on Gandalf?
That was
something that was pointed out by a friend (Hi Claire), and another
was that if the bird could have taken them straight to the ancestral
home of the dwarves then they could have covered the story in two
films rather than three.
It's all
true.
I'm open
to the trilogy redeeming itself over the next to installments but
right now I'm largely unimpressed with the taster we have before us.
The
Hobbit is a bit like those smaller studio films that you get that
ride in on the coat tails of the big blockbuster.
The ones
that are £3 in Tesco and are probably overpriced by at least £2.90.
