If Gandalf Can Call the Eagles, Why Doesn’t He Just Do That
The man sitting next to me laughed at everything. Not the jokes—the silences between the jokes, the quiet dramatic beats, the moments the film was gathering itself—all of it met with the same wet, honking laugh arriving half a second too late. The woman next to him spoke no English and spent three hours asking what words meant. "What does ’dwarf’ mean?" "What does ’precious’ mean?" I sat two seats over watching The Hobbit, thinking about how 48fps technology works and about what a shame it was that it couldn’t make skulls explode.
Anyway. The film. I liked it. Let me get that out of the way.
I’m a casual fan of this mythology, which means I know the shape of it—the Ring, Frodo, Gollum, the large battles—and forget every name, place, and subplot between the opening and closing credits. My engagement with Tolkien’s world starts and ends at the surface. I haven’t read the book. I’m the laziest person alive, and also I figure the dragon probably isn’t going to be that big a problem.
What I can never shake while watching these films is the logic. It screams at me, every time, from somewhere I can’t shut off. If Gandalf can summon enormous eagles at will, why don’t they just fly the entire journey? The secret moon-script only appears when the moon is the right shape—and, what luck, this is exactly that moment! A magic shockwave sweeps through a cave and kills ten million goblins in one pass, but ten fully-armed fighters perched in a tree are screaming for rescue from a dozen wolves? Come on. I’d have been Tolkien’s worst editor.
None of it stopped me from enjoying the thing. The dwarves are genuinely funny. Some critics found the comedic register tonally wrong, mismatched with the grandeur—I didn’t. I liked it. And Bilbo is a better protagonist than Frodo by a wide margin. Frodo is a passenger in his own story, moved by events and other people’s decisions. Bilbo chooses to go. That makes him interesting in a way Frodo never quite managed.
The 48fps cinematography is strange. Everything has too much presence, too much clarity—the uncanny valley applied to physical reality rather than faces. You adjust after twenty minutes but the adjustment itself is unsettling. It might be the future of cinema. It might also just be wrong.
What I’ll be waiting for across the rest of this trilogy: a female character who actually exists. Not backdrop, not cameo. Someone to anchor a scene. Three hours of barrel-chested dwarves marching through mountains is entertaining but it wears on you, even if you love the genre. Give me someone to actually watch.