The Hobbit: A Fully Expected WIN!!!

So I just saw The Hobbit (THANK YOU WORLD FOR NOT ENDING SO I COULD SEE THIS), and it was just as badass as one would expect. The Lord of the Rings is one of my all-time favorite movie trilogies, and this left no doubt in my mind that Middle Earth still has a few movies ready to be made.

Peter Jackson is doing the George Lucas approach by making a trilogy prequel to the original three movies, and the prequels will be not nearly as good as The Lord of the Rings. But it's still miles away from The Phantom Menace. Instead of centering around Frodo, this trilogy has Bilbo as its star, and he performs admirably. Whereas Frodo is occasionally boring and exhausting to watch, Bilbo is full of energy and a lot less morose than Elijah Wood. Plus, Gandalf the Grey is much better than Gandalf the White. Yes, I am a f**king nerd. You don't need to tell me.

Unfortunately, it did suffer from certain problems. No plotline will top the original trilogy (one ring to rule them all and one ring to find them... come ON), so it's a little less satisfying when we find out that all The Hobbit is about is killing a dragon. Also, it doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as The Lord of the Rings, for better or for worse. The dwarves add a lot of much-needed but occasionally unwelcome levity to the story.


So, final score for The Hobbit? 8/10 stars. It's like The Hangover Part II. Seeing a movie with these same characters again is never going to go badly. It just might not live up to the high standards set by the originals. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 65%, but that's a little unfair. As long as you don't go in expecting The Lord of the Rings all over again, you'll enjoy it plenty.

There are two more movies I'll see this year-- Django Unchained and Zero Dark Thirty. After that, I'll open the polls to decide which movies of 2012 get voted into the top five for The Grahammies, my personal film awards ceremony. From there, I'll decide the winner. To remind you, the possibilities are: Chronicle, 21 Jump Street, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, The Dictator, Men in Black III, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, Ted, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider-Man, Total Recall, The Campaign, Resident Evil: Retribution, Looper, Taken 2, Argo, Skyfall, Flight, Lincoln, The Hobbit, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty. Yeah, I watch a lot of movies.

Bye!