It's Been A Hobbit Kind Of Day

 

I woke up this morning with no intention of watching the first two chapters of the Hobbit trilogy. They just happened to be showing one after each other on the satellite - In HD of all things. Without other things to distract me I totally got lost in the story and the characters. Great to get caught up before seeing the final chapter this afternoon.

Was the tale padded with unnecessary moments? Sure. How else could they get three movies out of the available material from the original book? Luckily the fact that the Lord of the Rings came first gave the writers lots of ways to insert backstory when necessary into The Hobbit. They are creating a whole world here and sometimes to tell a book on screen, you need to take liberties with the original source material. Nothing they made up or modified seemed out of place. I feel like I got what I wanted and more from the Hobbit experience. Not that it didn't drag at times, mostly during the endless last minute escapes and protracted fight scenes.

Did they add new characters that were never in the original novel? Sure, but they work within the larger MIDDLE EARTH saga that Peter Jackson has created here. I feel that Tolkien himself would have been very happy with everything he saw on screen. I could have dealt with about an hour less of story because it needed to be trimmed in places. Then again I thought the same thing about the Lord Of The Rings until I saw the extended version of that trilogy. I somehow feel that with the Hobbit, less would have been more here.

This is a love letter to fans of Middle Earth. The entire series is a gift to literacy and literature so my complaints are just minor quibbles.