The Trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Arrives

Though this has always been a blog strictly about television, I would like to break with that trend for just one time, because something so awesome has occurred that I couldn’t possibly not talk about it. And that something is the arrival of the trailer for the first half of Peter’s Jackson film adaptation of The Hobbit.

Now, I first encountered The Hobbit when I was in the fifth grade. No, wait. Strike that. I unfortunately first encountered The Hobbit in either the third or the fourth grade, in the form of the 1977 Rankin-Bass animated version. While I now recognize that it is just absolutely terrible, to my young self it was a revelation, and an important introduction to the world of fantasy. I also believed that seeing the animated film first made it easier for me to follow along with the book as a 10 year-old, even if the former completely bungled the plot. (I mean, it’s not that the book would have been difficult to understand had I not seen the movie, but I could tell that it gave me a leg up over some of my other classmates since not having to worry about following the plot meant that I could pick out some themes and narrative devices that the animated film didn’t even cover.)

I’ve read The Hobbit a few times since then, which best the whole one time that I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s not that I prefer one to the other as piece of storytelling, but rather I’ve always been impressed by how Hobbit keeps its storytelling cleaner and simpler. There’s nothing wrong with complex storytelling – indeed, I credit the complexity of the source material, along with some choice story editing on Peter Jackson’s part, as the reason that The Return of the King pulled in so many more Oscars than the previous two films. But it’s the simplicity of The Hobbit that always brings me back, both because it’s less of a time commitment on my part, and because it’s just an easier book to get sucked into.

And that’s why, based on the trailer anyways, I’m slightly worried about this film adaptation:

Now, watching it, I can’t help but get excited, and I doubt that there’s anybody who would watch this and wouldn’t want to see the movie. But as a trailer it’s obviously meant to evoke the fact that the films plays along the same aesthetic and narrative lines as the film trilogy, and given that it’s from the same author and director, that makes sense, and if this was based on any other book, I might be okay with it.

But this is The Hobbit, perhaps the simplest story JRR Tolkien ever wrote. A lot of fuss has been made over the fact the book will be split into two film, and while I express some doubts as well, I also would rather (given how terrible that shortened Rankin-Bass movie was) Jackson air on the side of length. (After all, the LOTR films were pretty damn long, and they didn’t even cover everything that happened in the books.) Which of course raises the question of how Jackson’s going to pad out all this time without destroys the beautiful simplicity of the source material. I have no answer for this, and I choose to believe that as a passionate fan Jackson will make the right artistic choices, but it’s certainly something I’m going to keep my eyes on.

In that vein, I have one other, less troublesome quibble to make. As a prequel that’s released after the films its comes before plot-wise, there must be some great incentive or impulse to put a lot of knowing winks concerning the sequel trilogy into the film, and the trailer seems to indicate that will be the case. And you know what? I hate that. I hated in when the Star Wars prequels did it, I hated it when the Foundation series prequels did it, and I hated it when those flashback episodes of Everybody Loves Raymond did it. (Sorry about that last one. I ran out of better examples.) Sure, showing connections between the past and the present can make for good storytelling (especially when it’s Tim Minear who’s writing the flashbacks), but if it’s not playing of character background, it’s just not worth it. And The Hobbit is so disconnected from LOTR both character-wise and plot-wise that I don’t think it should go there.

But I’ll open up the floor to the rest of you. What do you think of the trailer? Does it work for you? Do you see any of the problems that I discussed above, or am I just being a cranky pants?