Reviews for this film from our members:
- Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: Jackson, pur raccontando una storia apparentemente più semplice e lineare, la affronta con lo stesso spirito avventuroso e la guasconeria sfrontata e malinconica, che ne hanno fatto il degno erede di George Lucas.
- Dragan Antulov @ Draxblog VI [Croatian]
- Rick Aragon @ Rick’s Cafe Texan
- Excerpt: The first part of The Hobbit Trilogy, like the first Star Wars prequel, goes through a lot of material, takes a long time going through it, and ultimately ends up saying very little.
- Sean Axmaker @ MSN Movies
- Excerpt: [Peter Jackson] directs the entire film with the same gravity and sense of peril as we experienced in “LOTR”… which seems like overkill to this smaller scale story.
- David Bax @ Battleship Pretnsion
- Excerpt: In The Fellowship of the Ring, Wraiths and Orcs offered palpable danger and the undertaking of the film’s central mission was not a thing done lightly. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has no stakes and, therefore, it lacks any reason good enough to make seeing it worthwhile.
- Steve Biodrowski @ Cinefantastique oNLIN
- Excerpt: Unfortunately, instead of simply adapting J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, Jackson has opted to use the story as a jumping off point for a convoluted prequel that threatens to do for Middle Earth what George Lucas’s STAR WARS prequels did for a galaxy far, far away.
- Luke Bonanno @ DVDizzy.com
- Excerpt: It’s clearly a stretch for The Hobbit to fit the epic mold that Jackson and New Line Cinema have nearly three billion reasons to believe that moviegoers want.
- Tim Brayton @ Antagony & Ecstasy
- Excerpt: Full of stuff… all the way up to a bloated 169-minute running time. But stuff is not exactly the same thing as having a rich and complicated plot.
- [New – 11/7/13] | Matt Brown @ Twitch
- Enrique Buchichio @ Cartelera.com.uy [Spanish]
- Excerpt: A pesar de los esfuerzo de Peter Jackson por revivir la magia de Tierra Media, la historia de El Hobbit es menos interesante y menos épica que la de El Señor de los Anillos, y probablemente no justifique una nueva trilogía.
- Daniel Carlson @ Pajiba
- Kevin Carr @ 7M Pictures
- Excerpt: The action is solid, and the effects are awesome. With a decade of digital evolution since the last set of films, this is easily the best-looking Tolkien movie yet.
- Bob Cashill @ Popdose.com
- Excerpt: There and back again with Peter Jackson.
- Bill Clark @ FromTheBalcony.com
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: …for the faithful. For everyone else, it will probably prove the same as any long journey, periods of discovery and excitement countered with long stretches of boredom.
- Jim Dixon @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is long, and it is more of the same, but truth be told, that’s what the fans wanted. There may not be a lot of new ground broken here, but the journey back to Middle Earth does deliver what it promises.
- [New – 11/7/13] | M. Enois Duarte @ High-Def Digest.com
- Mark Dujsik @ Mark Reviews Movies
- Excerpt: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey … is clumsy where Tolkien’s book is streamlined — filling in the gaps where the novel is vague…
- Dustin Freeley @ Movies About Gladiators.com [French]
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Grandiose and visually spectacular, although the visual effects overwhelm the narrative.
- Steven D. Greydanus @ National Catholic Register
- Excerpt: Almost all highlights and bombast, with little if any room for subtlety or poetry.
- Vadym Grygoriev @ kinoblog.com [Ukrainian]
- MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: More than a bit like slogging through overly completeist volumes of fan fiction, and that is going to bore more casual moviegoers, and also some serious fans.
- Oktay Ege Kozak @ Oregon Herald
- Benjamin Kramer @ The Voracious Filmgoer
- Josh Larsen @ LarsenOnFilm.com
- Excerpt: …after seeing The Hobbit I couldn’t wait to see it again – projected at 24 frames per second and without 3-D.
- Matt Looker @ TheShiznit.co.uk
- Excerpt: The Hobbit may be a different story to The Lord Of The Rings … but there is really nothing all that unexpected about this journey.
- Wesley Lovell @ Cinema Sight
- Excerpt: Returning to Middle Earth is like returning to a favorite vacation retreat and with The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the audience is quickly and easily transported back to the places that they fell in love with 11 years ago.
- Joe Lozito @ Big Picture Big Sound
- Excerpt: Get ready for a more heated debate than any election season. Is Peter Jackson’s ambitious, overblown adaptation worth it, or is it a flagrant attempt to create a cash cow out of a children’s book? The answer is yes.
- Marty Mapes @ Movie Habit
- Excerpt: Tolkein geeks rejoice
- Piers Marchant @ Sweet Smell of Success
- Excerpt: Peter Jackson returns us to Middle Earth — but everything is depressingly the same.
- Jason McKiernan @ Next Projection
- Excerpt: An Unexpected Journey begins to suffer from its overstretched material, resembling a less engaging Fellowship of the Ring until the most memorable portion of the material – the Gollum-Bilbo confrontation – kicks the film off in earnest and holds us in its grasp until the credits roll.
- Brent McKnight @ Beyond Hollywood
- Ryan McNeil @ The Matinee
- Excerpt: Nine years after the king returned, Peter Jackson is taking us back to Middle Earth to show us how it all began. The question is, will the prologue measure up to the wonderful chapters we’ve already read?
- Simon Miraudo @ Quickflix
- Darren Mooney @ the m0vie blog
- Excerpt: Worth a trip.
- Jason Pirodsky @ Expats.cz
- Excerpt: I enjoyed The Hobbit just as much as – if not more than – the previous LOTR films, and appreciated the leisurely, easygoing pace.
- José M. Robado @ CineCritico [Spanish]
- Diego Salgado @ FanDigital [Spanish]
- Márcio Sallem @ Cinema com Crítica [Portuguese]
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: And by the way, couldn’t our heroes just ride Gandalf’s birds all the way to The Lonely Mountain? Ah, but that would result in fewer films, and think of the billions of dollars that would be lost.
- Amir Siregar @ Flick Magazine [Indonesian]
- Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Peter Jackson has formally moved away from the artistic act of directing, and into the business of creating synthetic movie “product.”
- Frank Swietek @ One Guy’s Opinion
- Excerpt: The unhappy truth [is] that this return visit to Middle Earth is a bloated letdown.
- Phil Villarreal @ Becauseitoldyouso.com
- Excerpt: Like that sad, bug-eyed creature, moviegoers may not have realized how much they missed movies like this onscreen in the past several years. Yet we now have our precious back in hand, and here’s to two more years of wild, sure-to-be-met expectations of supreme Tolkien mastery.
- Ed Whitfield @ The Ooh Tray
- Andrew Wyatt @ Look / Listen (St. Louis Magazine)
- Excerpt: While the events of An Unexpected Journey take place against the backdrop of fallen kingdoms, whispered prophecies, and age-old racial enmities, its story lacks the apocalyptic, Wagnerian sweep of Rings. Jackson studs his vision of the The Hobbit with plenty of fantastical action set-pieces, but generally conveys a mood that is more homespun and cheeky.
- George Zervopoulos @ Movies Ltd [Greek]
