Movie Review: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey **

Stars: Martin Freeman, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt.
Director: Peter Jackson
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 170 minutes
Adventure, fantasy

For those who simply cannot get enough of Middle Earth, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit promises to be the ultimate Travel New Zealand mini-series. He and his Lord of the Rings team have taken J.R.R. Tolkien’s dense but slight and more comical Rings prelude, a simple quest to rob a dragon, and blown it up into a trilogy.

And since the first instalment, An Unexpected Journey, clocks in at almost three hours... well, you see what lies ahead of us.

The settings are gorgeous. The effects are spectacular. (Well, most of them.) Gollum looks more real than ever.

But in adding a prologue, in transposing characters from the Rings films into the narrative, and in having the luxury of including “Hobbit” minutia by the bushel basketful, I have to say the bloat shows. The hardcore faithful won’t admit it, but less cynical studios could have told this entire tale in three hours.

Scenes and sequences are rich, but they go on too long, which turns this Hobbit from a brisk stroll into a bit of a slog.