The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Yep, I’m about to knock out this whole trilogy today! Here we go!

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
 Dir. Peter Jackson
 Writ. Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens
 Stars: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Richard Armitage
 Rated PG-13
 169 mins.
 Fantasy
 IMDB 8.0

When this movie came out, I was super excited because, as you can probably expect, I LOVE Lord Of The Rings. However, one BIG difference is I really wasn’t a fan of the Lord Of The Rings books. They rambled WAAAAAY too much. The Hobbit, though, was a MUCH better book, and I loved it! So I had really high hopes for these movies!

And man, they didn’t disappoint.

The first one, which I’ll call from here on out An Unexpected Journey to keep from having to type the full title to make the distinction between the 3 films, is the beginning of the journey! It’s Bilbo meeting Gandalf (well again, since they met when Bilbo was a kid), and his very reluctant start to the journey that changes his life! For anybody who doesn’t know at this point, the entire story of the Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit is in a world called Middle Earth that’s inhabited by many races of people, the focus of which are the Hobbits, the Dwarves, the Elves, the Men, and the Orcs. And our main person in this movie is Bilbo Baggins.

Bilbo, played by the amazing Martin Freeman, is really funny in An Unexpected Journey. One of the principle dislikes you hear about this movie is that it’s kind of silly, but honestly that’s one of my favorite parts. The Hobbit is meant to be just a little more lighthearted. Obviously things still get pretty damn serious, but there’s a lighter side to the story. And in An Unexpected Journey, you get a healthy dose of amusing because the really heavy stuff hasn’t happened yet. It’s going to come later and anybody that knows anything about this world is aware that things are going to get pretty damn intense.

The acting in An Unexpected Journey is great. Yes it’s a bit silly at times, but it’s well acted silly. Martin Freeman is incredible, this wasn’t news to me, Ian McKellen is PHENOMENAL, again, not news to me, but the ‘whoooaaa’ performance for me was from Richard Armitage. I’d never seen him in anything other than ‘that Nazi who killed Erskine in Captain America’ so I had no clue he was such a great actor. There were moments where just his eyes said volumes! It was just absolutely great.

All in all, this movie has the awesomeness that you can expect from a Peter Jackson film.

My Rating: 8/10