The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Somewhat an appendix to Jackson’s LOTR films; somewhat a noble effort to adapt a story we all read as children; somewhat a retrospective on the cinematic language he built to disclose a magnificent literary mythopoeic work.

Back in the day

I think it’s easy to forget how those original films changed our expectations as nerd cinephiles. It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to keep alive that feeling of watching a film called “The Two Towers” so soon after 9/11… The apparent variety of possible interpretations that emerged from that juxtaposition… A multi-polar world at war, the onset of apparently endless violence; I shall save all that for another review, perhaps… It felt important. It begged to be analyzed. Now I analyze everything.

I remember walking out of Return of the King thinking I should forgo the ride and walk all the way home in tribute to the three years I’d just had. I was, in a sense, inconsolable. And when you watch the endless making-of content, you can feel the woe from all those actors and craftspeople and so on. They knew in the year 2000 that what they were all a part of should never have ended, that working on that project had lent meaning and purpose to their lives in a way that couldn’t be supplemented by future projects. Somehow I can feel the echo of that woe in these Hobbit movies.

An exhausting year

It’s as if this experience I’ve known cannot exist or be rekindled on the other side of the war on terror, or the trauma of my early adulthood. The Hobbit films exist on the other side of Pirates of the Carribean 3, Shrek 3, Spiderman 3, Die Hard 4 (all 2007, an exhausting year).

What set me off

It indicates to me (then and now) that what set me off over grass and stone, through shadow and fire, and so on, has not yet turned me fully ‘round. I met this movie as a familiar stranger on a misty road. I bowed and carried on.

Perhaps one day my heels will turn and I will head back toward that time before all this when the world seemed to crack open and my attention found its purpose. I might collect Jackson’s Hobbit on my way back there. It’s hard to talk about, it is.