Movies With Butter

Weren’t it for the goblins and the uniquely disturbing orcs, this would be the most kid friendly Tolkien adaptation Peter Jackson’s done yet. The jokes skew broad (from “Wow, dwarves eat a lot!” to “Gee, trolls are dumb.”) and the heroism is largely focused around one kid-sized hobbit.

Gandalf (Ian McKellar) is still a “grey” wizard, and the way he pushes Bilbo (Martin Freeman) into his journey from the warm and homey shire is like the cajoling of a fun uncle: “why stay home when you could get into so much trouble?!” The congress of Dwarves that eat Bilbo out of house and home declare him a burglar, though one unfit to find the magic door to the Mountain that used to be their kingdom. A blue dragon, Smaug, has roosted in their bottomless piles of gold, supplanting their king and leaving them homeless and in this, the first of three films leading the team of 15 to the Mountain, we only get far enough from the shire to see our destination in the distance. Two long films lie ahead.

Bilbo takes the challenge in the most Christian of ways: he gives to these dispossessed because the gift of his security begs he give to those without. The parables of choice (choosing the good of humility or the evil of endless power) that were the concern of the Lord of the Rings trilogy are like high school math compared to the elementary level conflicts present here. And yet the vengeful orc the Dwarf prince maimed is far scarier than the orc slain at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring--go figure. The battle scenes move at a breakneck pace without resorting to unclear visuals or messy camera work, and the action is interspersed to keep things movie--and at nearly three hours, that's a necessity. Also, apparently dragons are greedy—it’s one of a thousand tiny morsels of lore that fill in the universe Jackson's made so sweeping and bright, and those under his spell will be happy with this film, because with more songs, side stories and tourist porn of rural New Zealand than ever, this one seems poised to lure in even the margin of public who missed the trilogy. And whatever magic that minority wields, I wouldn’t mind them sharing a bit with me. I could use less Hobbit in my life.

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