PPP1 Research: The Hobbit An Unexpected Journey

Over the Christmas holidays I was very privileged to be able to go and watch Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and watch it twice. It is a beautiful story set as a prequel to The Lord of the Rings and follows the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins on his 'Unexpected Journey' across Middle Earth. It begins with a visit from Ian McKellen's character of Gandalf the Grey inviting Bilbo on the adventure, in which he then meets all of the dwarves that are led by Thorin Oakensheild, a King by right, who is trying to take back his kingdom from the dragon Smaug, The overall theme to the film is quite centered around being for children, as this is what the book was originally produced for, and the writers have done an excellent job in portraying this. The film itself it humorous and includes fantastic CGI and motion capturing that is also seen in the original Lord of the Ring's character Gollum.

My expectations of this film was immensely high to begin with due to the success of The Lord of Rings which in a way was unfair as this film is set for children and does include a less confusing and more humorous storyline as well. Once I had seen the film however my expectation did not decrease. I thought the film had been executed perfectly and all of the characters where portrayed correctly and wonderfully by the skilled  actors playing them, which really made the characters come alive. Looking at the quality of sound in this film, as expected of it, it is a very high and good quality standard, along with the music used it creates a beautiful atmosphere, especially the moment when they see Rivendell for the first time and there is an orchestra playing, it really creates the mood of the Elvish Refuge. Along with the quality sound I also got the chance to watch this film in 3D which has recently been made huge in the film industry as it is an amazing breakthrough in technology. The stunning graphics are only made better in 3D, and along with the brilliant amount of CGI in the film everything is superbly created.

As someone who had read the book previously though I was a little disappointed in some aspects especially in terms of characters being created so that it could be made into 3 films. I believe that this was only done so that it could be the same length as The Lord of the Rings; the only problem with this being that was originally 3 books where as this one is only one book long. This put aside the film altogether was beautifully created and one of my favourite scenes in this film is the chase scene through the Goblin Kingdom. Although the Goblin King himself was well animated through 3D modelling; in my opinion they excelled themselves further by creating the whole kingdom that Gandalf and the dwarves run through due to the amount of detail that was added into it and the general cave like feel it had to it.