THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

(Peter Jackson, 2012)

There's a particular sort of shot that Peter Jackson mastered with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Its a sweeping view of an epic action sequence, the camera looping and perhaps turning too as it approaches  the heroes - generally in a group, in motion - and they move through a space, the geography of which is  established by the vertiginous action of the camera. Theres a lot of cgi involved in these shots. Cgi figures throng, and the landscape - the mines of Moria, the tunnels inside a Goblin stronghold, an ancient Elvish citadel, whatever - is generally mostly created inside a computer too.
In the first and best Lord of the Rings film, The Fellowship of the Ring, there are only a couple of these shots. Jackson was working, then, with restrictions. The film had not yet become the critical and commercial smash it eventually was. It was still a huge risk for New Line, the studio financing it. But after that, Jackson could do what he wanted, really. With success, his vision bloated and expanded. The films swelled on dvd with extra scenes and longer episodes. The Hobbit, a story which could make a good three hour film, has been cut into three episodes of over two hours each, and the result, in this opening episode, at least, is almost unbelievably tedious and mannered.
The story is set decades before the events of The Lord of the Rings and follows Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), the titular hobbit with an unusual thirst for adventure, after he joins a band of dwarves on a long journey back to their ancestral lands in order to recover gold from the dragon Smaug. They are accompanied by the Wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and after an extremely slow, talky opening hour or so, encounter a series of creatures and perilous situations, including Orcs, Goblins, trolls, Wargs and Elves. This all feels thoroughly samey - reams of CGI, familiar creature design and the usual dynamics governing the set-pieces ensure that these are sequences resembling many other sequences in other such movies beyond Jackson's own.
Aside from that, it is strangely unengaging. The characters are that peculiar Tolkein mix of tweeness and pomposity, the comedy is excrutiatingly unfunny, and the pacing is so leisurely it feels almost insultingly padded out. The cast do their best with these strange collections of tics they are playing; Freeman is a winning lead, McKellen is solid and Richard Armitage is charismatic in the Viggo Mortenson role as Thorin, leader of the dwarves, but the whole thing only feels like its anything more than an exercise in stalling with the arrival in the last act of Andy Serkis (by way of CGI) as Gollum.
His scenes with Freeman in the caves beneath a mountain are by a long way the most compelling in what is otherwise a pointless, even painful, affair, so bloated and obsessed with its own mythology it feels like it represents much of what is wrong with modern blockbuster cinema.
Oh, and those swooping shots I mentioned earlier? The Hobbit is full of them. Only where they were once exciting, even thrilling, now they just feel like Jackson repeating himself, like another set of failures of the imagination in a film stuffed with failures of the imagination.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN

(Steven Spielberg, 2011)

For all that Spielberg and Peter Jackson's spectacular and expensive adaptation of Herge's popular creation has it's many pleasures, it never quite feels right. It never quite feels like Tintin. It feels as if they sought to make a Tintin film, were denied the rights by Herge's estate, and instead made a blatant knock-off in which everything is extremely similar, but nothing is really how it should be. Given that they weren't denied the rights and that most of the details of Tintin's distinctive fictional world are here recreated with painstaking detail and love, that's something of a major worry.
Part of the problem is the animation. Using the near photo-realistic motion capture and cgi technology beloved of Robert Zemeckis allows for massive invention and precision in so many of the visual particulars that it's easy to see why it appeals to filmmakers. But it also means that the "uncanny valley" is a problem throughout, one only complicated by the decision to render many of the characters - Captain Haddock, most obviously - in a sort of realist-caricature style. It also has its drawbacks in the areas which seem initially like Pluses. Athmosphere seems like something that can be painted into the corners of a scene, augmented by accenting the detail of the objects in a room, sharpening the colours of a palette, softening the lighting, allowing shadows to run longer. But it's more complex than that. The scenes of exotic North Africa and the middle East in the Indiana Jones movies are effortlessly, pungently atmospheric in a way simiiar scenes in this film are not. The Indiana Jones films were made on location, in ancient towns and baking deserts. Here, most everything feels hermetically sealed, without any grit or soul. The same problem afflicts the many, often brilliantly conceived, thrillingly "shot" action sequences. The level of detail and inventiveness is truly incredible, but that somehow only emphasises our distance from such patently made material, and is indeed even a distraction.
The screenplay, by the dazzling trio of Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish and Steven Moffat, is solid, working a traditional Tintin mystery and a Spielbergan set-piece roller coaster into the same film and making it work, and seamlessly for the most part, though there are a few clunky lines scattered throughout. The cast is impressive, everybody nailing the spirit and personality of hs character. And there are some nice visual gags and slapstick here, together with many beautiful images. But the whole thing, which is breathlessly paced most of the way, ends in a horrendous anti-climax, followed by the inevitable threat of a sequel. And while it may work to some degree with its target audience of 10 year old boys, as Spielberg adventure films go, this is strictly second rank.