Carpal tunnel syndrome has kept me off the computer except for what I had to do for work, so I am late in continuing with my “Hobbit”-related posts. Since the movie has been out for over a month now, I will dispense with issuing alerts against spoilers and will assume that you’ve either seen the movie, or don’t mind spoilers, or you won’t continue reading this particular post.

So, to get a few things out of the way:

• It was 20-30 minutes too long. Did the fights have to be so extravagant?
• It is for teens and older (much violence, and its length tries the patience even for oldsters like me).
• Martin Freeman was terrific. He was a perfect Bilbo.
• How does a round door work, exactly? Do hobbits have a special magic to make a single hinge hold a door without needing daily adjustment?
• I had a sense that I’d seen far too many wargs in the space of 3 hours.

I think Jackson did not do unforgivable violence to the heart of the story, for which I am grateful. I will particularly single out for praise the scene where Bilbo must act to escape the goblin mines, when the option to kill Gollum, who stands between him and the passage out, seems to be the only possibility. The camera stays for a long moment on Gollum as he looks, unseeing, toward the invisible Bilbo, and the moment is prolonged enough to let Bilbo, and us, see the pitiful side of Gollum, and so allows us to see and feel the pity that motivates Bilbo to take a chance on leaping over Gollum. That was well done. Amid all the crash, smack, ow, boom, erg, oof, argh, and whatnot of the action, I’m not sure I would have noticed if that critical incident hadn’t been done thoughtfully, but I’m certainly glad that it was.

It partly makes up for the over-the-top absurdity of the dwarves’ battle to escape the goblins.

The filling-in of the Necromancer story and the White Council with Saruman the White wasn’t objectionable, and the expansion of the role of Radagast was kind of fun. It made me regret that the movie wasn’t suitable for young folks because they would have loved the hedgehogs and the hare sled in Radagast’s scenes. Kids would have loved the dish-throwing at Bag End, too.

The movie could have been suitable for kids and adults both, if it had been less enamored of the fighting. Really, where’s the sense of building up to something? There is a battle in the climax, when there’s a dragon hoard to fight over, not to mention Smaug’s attack on Lake Town, and is Jackson going to make that battle last an hour and deaden our senses with an assault even greater than in Hobbit part one? And of course there will also be the wizards’ assault on the Necromancer at some point, so there will be a tremendous amount of hurly-burly for the viewer to get through. But I suppose this is what Jackson specializes in now; in the LOTR he acquired his audience of those who come for the battles, and he is loath to change direction now. Perhaps in a future installment he’ll throw Radagast’s rabbits into the fray and we’ll get to see bunnies slaughtered by Sauron. Now that’s entertainment.