I Saw Another Hobbit

About a hundred years ago I posted after seeing Peter Jackson's first Hobbit movie.  At the time I gave it a decent grade, but over time my impressions soured and I became less and less enchanted.  Too much silliness, too broad; too much fighting, too little Hobbiting.

Now I'm just back from seeing The Hobbit Part 2: The Desolation of Smaug: The Desolationing with my son and his friends for his 10th birthday.

This movie *is* better than the first. While it suffers from a lot of the same action-movie excess, there is also more atmosphere and less absurdly broad humor. There's no loopy Radagast Jar-Jar business here, and no full equivalent to the roller-coaster ride through Goblin Town. It's telling that this movie is nearly as long as the first but feels much shorter.

Deviations from the beloved-children's-book-that-wasn't-quite-yet-a-prequel-and-that-I-read-almost-a-dozen-times abound.  Here are my spoiler-heavy impressions:

1) Legolas exists (which he didn't in JRRT's Hobbit), and he gets screen time across the whole second half of the movie.  It's definitely more than the cameo some of us expected.  Of course his presence in Mirkwood does make sense; he is the son of King Thranduil, who rules there.

This movie's Legolas is kind of dour and severe--there's nothing of the charm and wide-eyed wonder seen in the LOTR movies.

2) The female wood elf Tauriel is invented from whole cloth for the movie and is almost a major character.  She is romantically linked to Legolas but somehow falls for Kili, presumably because he is The Sexy Dwarf.  This dwarf-elf attraction would be more interesting if it didn't seem completely unearned.  I don't mean the basic fact of Dwarf-Elf mutual racism but that Kili seems to win Tauriel's attention with a joke about what's down his pants.

She follows the dwarves to Lake-town and ends up using the Athelas plant to save the wounded Kili from a Morgul blade in a weirdly complete and unnecessary prefiguration of Arwen healing Frodo in LOTR.

Despite her odd role in the plot, I quite like her as a character.  If elves are generally androgynous anyway, female elves ought to kick as much ass as male ones.

3) Jackson hints very early at the power of the ring over Bilbo.  Bilbo drops the ring, then fights like a madman to get it back from one of the spiders in Mirkwood.  Afterwards, we see his mingled relief and horror at his own violence, and already we have the sense that the ring is pulling at him.

Nothing like this appears in the book, but it makes perfect sense and fits very nicely we everything we know about the ring.  I like this moment a lot.

4) I love PJ's depiction of the Woodland Realm. Thranduil has an edge of sexy menace that actually works.  Wood elves are supposed to be somewhat more feral than their high-elf kin, so they ought to be this dangerous.  Also, playing down Tolkien's oddly Edwardian drunk-scene dialogue between the Butler and Chief Guard was the right choice.

5) Rather than escaping Thranduil's realm in sealed barrels, the dwarves ride out in open barrels and must survive a running battle between orcs who are trying to kill them and elves who are trying to recapture them.  This is just another excuse for a heavy action sequence with lots of 3-D, but it's also plenty fun.  The sealed barrels of the book are memorable, but they wouldn't make great cinema.

Later on the dwarves do get covered up in the barrels another way, which is funny.

5) Gandalf's investigation of the Necromancer (who is actually Sauron) is not depicted in The Hobbit but is based on canonical explanations.  As shown here, Sauron is building an army of orcs in Mirkwood, which I don't recall as being part of the standard history.  This implies that the orcs who will be fighting at the Battle of Five Armies are in Sauron's power rather than simply pursuing their own nasty interests as (IIRC) they're doing in the book.

I do wish the movie had given us less Orlando Bloom and more Sir Ian.

7) Also more Stephen Fry, please.  He is wonderful as the Master of Lake-town (a locale that emerges with far more personality and feeling here than it did in the book).  His oily little minion is also excellent, a sort of Blackadder version of Grima Wormtongue.

8) Azog's orcs, who have been pursuing Thorin's company throughout both movies, infiltrate Lake-town and attack the dwarves there (or at least the ones who are left behind there because of Kili's wound).  This is an excuse for more fighting and more heroics by Legolas/Tauriel, who are also unexpectedly at Lake-town.  I found this to be a distraction from the real drama.

9) Smaug is excellent:  majestic and terrifying.  This is exactly how a dragon ought to be, inside Tolkien or out.

10) At the end of the movie, PJ inserts a long and complicated fight between the dwarves and Smaug at the Mountain before the dragon heads off to attack Lake-town.  This is the one part of the movie I absolutely didn't like.  The violence is far too over-the-top and features some unbelievable and silly dwarf "ingenuity" being used against the dragon.  In the end it comes to nothing anyway.  I wish this part had been cut entirely.

11) Most of all, Martin Freeman is a perfect Bilbo Baggins. He is full of clever wonder and appropriate dismay, finding his way in a strange and dangerous world that is no longer entirely new to him. The movie suffers from every moment that he is not on screen or is relegated to the background. 

More on the First Hobbit Movie Because Words

Here's something more on the first Hobbit movie before seeing the second...

First, a reconsideration.  Back when I first impression'd PJ's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Series of 3-D Action Sequences, I gave it a hazy 85%.  That was then.  I've now seen the movie again (at home this time), and I've decided that Peter Jackson has far too much money and cred to deserve a B just for trying.

Seeing the first movie again, not so flushed with the sheer happiness of just being back in cineMiddle-earth, I'm disappointed with many of the choices made.  Lots of people have already remarked on the frantic, manic quality given the action.  Plenty have complained about the departures from the novel's plot.  A necessary and sufficient number have been offended by Radagast. 

What tipped it for me, however, was the erasure of William's, Bert's, and Tom's best lines.

William, Bert, and Tom, of course, are the three trolls encountered by the party on the road east of the Shire in Chapter 2, "Roast Mutton." In Tolkien's book they are every bit as Cockney and rough as in PJ's movie.  They are definitely played for larfs; they're even drunk.  And they treat the dwarfs at least as cruelly as their movie counterparts do.  The difference is in the escape and how the sticky situation is resolved.

     "No good roasting 'em now, it’d take all night," said a voice. Bert thought it was William's.
     "Don't start the argument all over-again. Bill," he said, "or it will take all night."
     "Who's a-arguing?" said William, who thought it was Bert that had spoken.
     "You are," said Bert.
     "You're a liar," said William; and so the argument beg all over again. In the end they decided to mince them fine and boil them. So they got a black pot, and they took out their knives.
     "No good boiling 'em! We ain't got no water, and it's a long way to the well and all," said a voice. Bert and William thought it was Tom's.
     "Shut up!" said they, "or we'll never have done. And yer can fetch the water yerself, if yer say any more."
     "Shut up yerself!" said Tom, who thought it was William's voice. "Who's arguing but you. I'd like to know."
     "You're a booby," said William.
     "Booby yerself!" said Tom.
     And so the argument began all over again, and went on hotter than ever, until at last they decided to sit on the sacks one by one and squash them, and boil them next time.
     "Who shall we sit on first?" said the voice.
     "Better sit on the last fellow first," said Bert, whose eye had been damaged by Thorin. He thought Tom was talking.
     "Don't talk to yerself!" said Tom. "But if you wants to sit on the last one, sit on him. Which is he?"
     "The one with the yellow stockings," said Bert.
     "Nonsense, the one with the grey stockings," said a voice like William's.
     "I made sure it was yellow," said Bert.
     "Yellow it was," said William.
     "Then what did yer say it was grey for?" said Bert.
     "I never did. Tom said it."
     "That I never did!" said Tom. "It was you."
     "Two to one, so shut yer mouth!" said Bert.
     "Who are you a-talkin' to?" said William.
     "Now stop it!" said Tom and Bert together. "The night's gettin' on, and dawn comes early. Let's get on with it!"
     "Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!" said a voice that sounded like William's. But it wasn't. For just at that moment the light came over the hill...

The voice that sounded like William's but wasn't is of course Gandalf's, and he has been ventriloquizing half of the argument to keep the trolls bickering until the sun comes up.  The mixture of humor and danger is top-notch, like Abbott and Costello with baseball bats, and the stakes are high.  The trolls are defeated in the book just as soundly as in the movie, but they're defeated by their own defining stupidity, and they're defeated with words.

Peter Jackson, for some reason, decides to replace this whole dialogue with a medley of snot jokes, fart jokes, eye pokes, and yet another fight scene.

Unfortunately, this isn't the only place where Peter Jackson ignores or dismisses JRRT's fun with words.  The substitution of huge heavy action sequences for important language is at least partially inevitable when translating a sprawling novel to the big screen, but it is also sometimes symptomatic of a failure of imagination and a failure to apprehend themes.

More on that in a later post.

Galactica Season Two Impressions: Space is Dark

Season Two is dark.  Besides the usual bang-up violence (with attendant blood and bruising), some things we've seen include alcoholism, cancer, terrorism, torture of prisoners, fascism, rape, contempt for dissent, martial law, forced impregnation, forced abortion, soldiers shooting civilians, prostitution, child trafficking, and assassination.  This is just so far; I'm still working through the episodes.  A lot of these things (and not just the ones you'd expect) have been perpetrated or at least intended by the show's good guys.

I really do like all this murk, at least as drama, and all the more because much of it is impossible to endorse.  Characters here often make the wrong decisions, and the show doesn't always follow up with correction, nor does it attempt to concoct justifications.  We're still unsure, for instance, how to take the brutality with which Colonials treat their entirely humanoid Cylon prisoners.  It's one thing when the abrasive and cruel Admiral Cain does it, but one of the most memorable incidents was Starbuck's, and we're supposed to love her thoroughly.

The politics of BG are hazy and variable, hard and soft by turns, not quite incoherent but definitely inconsistent.  In this, the show really does reflect the War on Terror that is both its context and its uneasy inspiration.  I'm sure some people have written off the series as ridiculously right-wing (or left), but I think it's somewhere else.  More than anything, it reflects the insecurity and discomfort of our uncomfortable search for security since 9/11.

The Economicon

What does it tell you when significantly influential economists are putting out lists of the science fiction you should be reading?

Noah Smith's List
Paul Krugman's follow-up

Science Fiction and the Age of Sail

What threatens to make realistic SF impossible is that space is big.  The gulf between things is so vast that there's no way to wrap our frames of reference around it.  Traveling to another star isn't like traveling to another country or another continent; no continent is far enough away for that comparison to make sense.  What does "travel" even mean if it takes a lifetime to move a couple of short steps away from where you started?

The basic problem, if you haven't been thinking about the issue, is this:  modern physics can't conceive of any speed faster than that of light, and it's impossible for matter approaching the speed of light to continue to behave as matter should.  This is important for science fiction because your characters are very likely to be made of matter.

And remember the unimaginable vastness of space?  It gets even tougher when you realize that light still takes decades or centuries to reach even the closest foreign stars.

But that's why they call it science fiction:  when reality is broken, you make up science to fix it.  Authors have tried this many different ways, but it usually comes down to the same sort of technological hand-waving.  The usual solution is warp drive, jump drive, hyperdrive, or any of a dozen other names for Faster-Than-Light technology that requires not only undreamt-of machinery but also the assumption that our understanding of physics is extremely and conveniently wrong.  This is necessary.  Take the FTL out of science fiction and you don't get far.

Most of the time, an SF story simply insists on FTL and leaves it at that.  Star Trek's warp drive is the classic example:  we have awesome engines that get us where we're going as quickly as the plot requires.  Occasionally we run out of Dilithium Crystals, or Scotty tells us he can't give us any more power, or Tribbles get into the engine room, but otherwise the mechanism and its implications are invisible.  Warp speed means never having to think about scale.  Space is no bigger than California.

Battlestar Galactica's jump drive works pretty much the same way, although some effort is made at consistent limitations.  Apparently it takes some time for a ship to calculate a leap, and the show's premise requires coordinating a whole fleet of ships (some of them rustbuckets) jumping individually to the same spot.  Tension in the favorite first-season episode "33" is built around the need to keep one jump ahead of the pursuing Cylons.  In BG's early episodes, at least, FTL travel looks like something that makes passengers nervous, as if no one ever really gets used to whatever it does to you.

The most interesting treatments of FTL imagine it as something other than just fast travel.  The interstellar society of Frank Herbert's Dune is made possible through the power of the spice melange, which allows Spacing Guild navigators to psychically "fold space."  This would be just another jump drive if the political economics of spice and the mental powers it facilitates weren't central to the plot and to the protagonist's own story.

Norman Spinrad's under-appreciated The Void Captain's Tale does something similar, except with orgasms.

Some time ago I wrote a science fiction novel set two hundred years in the future.  I wanted to avoid space opera--it wasn't that kind of story--and I wanted to keep things as realistic as I could.  At the same time, I needed another planet for the action.  I settled on a scenario in which humanity has made its first, halting steps among the stars, but things are going slowly.  The novel's action takes place on mankind's first (and already failed) extrasolar colony.

I kept the math simple.  The colony world orbits a star twenty light years from Earth, and I arbitrarily decided that my future technology could move a spaceship at half the speed of light.  This means that a one-way trip requires forty years of travel, something conceivable if the people making the journey are put into suspended animation and awakened when they reach their destination.  Communication is also limited by distance:  even light-speed messages from the colony take twenty years to reach back to Earth, and then you wait twenty more for the reply to your original message, now half a lifetime out-of-date.

What this gives you is a universe where space colonization is feasible but where the colonists are very much on their own.  This kind of science fiction is sometimes compared to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century "Age of Sail," when travel was difficult, dangerous, infrequent, and often one-way, but still possible.  Interstellar distances push these difficulties to the limit of what human beings might be willing to undertake, but perhaps not beyond them.

I tried to make use of the distance in other ways.  All the time required for travel allowed for the development of a secret history unknown to the travelers before their arrival, and the distance, isolation, and sense of loss were thematically useful from the beginning.  Most of all, it gave me a story that focused on what the characters had to do and decide rather than on the magic their machines were capable of.   And anyway, warp drive would have solved my novel in three or four pages, and where's the fun in that?

I'm rewriting this novel now in the hope of making it more what I want it to be:  out with the tiresome expositions, in with a little more action, over there with some characters taking up too much of the floor.  But I won't be changing the timeline or the technology.  That's the part of the story that has always made just the right amount of sense.

---

EDIT: A few days after this post, Slate.com produced a neat animated graph on SF travel times.

BatGal: First Season Impressions

I’d forgotten that the new Galactica appeared in 2003, and that its premise and themes stake out a kind of post-9/11 science fiction.  Early episodes traffic in echoes:  burning towers, a suicide bomber, walls of photographs, and a morally ambiguous scene in which a fully humanoid Cylon is waterboarded while he insists on his capacity to feel pain.

Fortunately, the show pulls back from taking the comparisons too far.  This isn’t a historical parable, exactly, and the parallels are too weak to sustain one.  (Al Qaeda is a twist on David, not Goliath.)  What’s most interesting in the comparison is how fully, so far, the show seems to be complicating and humanizing its religiously motivated terrorist villains who aren’t even human.

By the end of season one, we still don’t know exactly what makes the Cylons tick, but we know it isn’t something as simple as pure evil.  It’s perhaps not even pure ideology.  Plotwise it’s still a mystery, and the season ends precisely where the premier began:  on Caprica, and somewhere else, with a beautiful Number Six Cylon gazing in wonder on the beauty and promise of an unseen infant.  There has been a certain amount of meandering in the series so far, but in the final minutes the entire season suddenly (in fact very suddenly) pulls taught.  Events at the finish abruptly demolish the patterns into which everything seemed at risk of falling.

But, wow, these people spend a lot of time having the hots for each other.  Perhaps that comes with having a species to reinvigorate, but in story terms it’s a bit much.  Between all the M/F couples coupling in bunks, airlocks, fantasy bedrooms, and the rainy forests of occupied planets, the show is pretty aggressively hormonal.  I guess it’s worth noting that about half of these people are Cylons, so maybe it’s something else.  Robosexual?  The appliances we were warned about?  (Honestly, I was kind of hoping that Starbuck would be gay, if only because “Kickass Lesbian Fighter Pilot” is an archetype just waiting to be realized.  Come on, SF.  You can do this.)

It’s at this level that the soap opera threatens to overwhelm space opera.  At times BG plays fast and loose with character development, building it mostly through personality conflict.  The under-motivated tantrums and improbably constant insubordination seem more high school than high frontier.  Not all of these people act like adults.  I enjoy Gaius Baltar, and the complexity of his relationship with his own Number Six is something very original in SF TV, but I could do with a bit less of his comic relief.  Colonel Tigh’s wife, meanwhile, obviously belongs on the Love Boat, not the Galactica.

Nearly everyone on the show is very blandly beautiful, with the dramatic exception of the Commander, who is gravitas craggily personified.  There seems to be a whole career visible in the wrinkles of Adama’s eyes and the seams and pocks of his cheeks.  Among all the special effects, the planetary vistas, the expensive sets, and the lesser and lovelier actors populating the fleet and what’s left of humanity, Edward James Olmos’s face is the most visually interesting thing the show has going.

Me, Writing

I started this little blogilla way, way back with the intention of posting snippets of drafts of my exceedingly rare and lovingly cask-aged fiction.  Along the way I learned that this is entirely verboten per the verlagen, since posting things online constitutes “publication” in a not merely technical way.  Apparently this is true even if no one ever reads your blog. 

Caring about this rule is a sign that I am serious, you see.

Anyway, sometime next I will outline a few of the projects I have going, which is to say, both of them.

Battlestar Galactica (The New Show)

Most storytelling starts with the characters:  Who are these people, and why should I care?  For better or worse, though, SF usually has to start with world-building.  Sometimes the most important questions are the world questions:  How is this place different, and how is life different in it?

The two-parter miniseries that kicks off the new Battlestar Galactica is unusual SF because it's dressed in only a thin veneer of difference.  The BG world has no connection to Earth but feels very much like it:  people wear suits and ties or jeans and t-shirts, they sleep in beds with sheets and pillows, they read printed books, they frame pictures on the wall.  Their architecture could be any large American or Canadian city.  At the same time, this is a star-faring culture spread across several planets.  High technology is present here but nearly invisible until we find ourselves aboard a spaceship.  The overall feel is that their civilization is basically ours but with the somehow-not-very-radical addition of jump drives and sentient killer robots.

All this familiarity makes the slight touches of otherness more notable.  There are suggestive details here and there:  their printer paper is hexagonal, their booze is bright green, and their clothing is just slightly unusual enough to give pause.  (I’m estimating here, but I have the impression that they mostly wear 1990s cuts of 1970s fabrics.)  Some of the most interesting SF touches are actually retro ones:  Galactica is an older ship that lacks wireless networking and even cordless phones; the Vipers that survive the Cylon assault are vintage models, space fighters with analog instruments out of the Vietnam War.  All in all, however, these people’s attitudes are ours.

They are, however, polytheistic.  The names of their pantheon are those we know from ancient Greece:  Artemis, Apollo, Hera.  What worship and liturgy I’ve seen bears no resemblance to anything Homer would have known, but of course it doesn’t have to.  Anyway, I suspect that we’re supposed to take all this familiarity not as verisimilitude but as a kind of analogy. 

But the simple fact of religion being here at all is amazing because mainstream SF has rarely dealt with religion in any serious way.  This is not to say that the show is about religion, or at least not yet.  So far I’ve watched the first ten episodes, and while religion has been established as a background condition of human life in this world, no one seems exceptionally wrapped up in it.  (The leading clergywoman we’ve seen has a kindly Desmond Tutu quality about her, but there is certainly no sense that the temples actually run things.)  It seems more the case that these people worship at Christmas and Easter (mutatis whatever), and of course also at the many funerals we’ve been shown.

Most interesting of all is the relationship between religion and the Cylons.  Unlike the humans so far, the Cylons are devotedly pious and theological.  Religion seems to fill their worldview and inspire their violence.  They love to talk about their faith.  They are also determined monotheists, insisting that there is but one God, and that they are His children, and that He is Love.

Battlestar Galactica (TOS)

The Geek vs. Cool dichotomy was already well-established by fourth grade.  In that 1978 you could love Star Wars or you could love KISS, but it was not culturally acceptable to love both.  I think, at the time, I had the sense that liking Gene Simmons was akin to rooting for Darth Vader, which was of course exactly the point.

The original Battlestar Galactica premiered in September of that year.  All of us nerds were primed for it:  the commercials had been running all summer, there was already a comic book adaptation, and we were all, although no one would admit it, a little tired of seeing Star Wars for the eleventh or fifteenth or twentieth time.  (Twenty-two, actually.)  In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that they were able to produce and mount a ready-for-TV knock-off of Star Wars’ unimaginable success in little more than a year.  Who says the world moved more slowly back then?

The night BG premiered, it was interrupted and delayed by TV news coverage of the actually very important Camp David Accords.  There’s still a part of my brain that believes that science-fiction television might in some way someday be responsible for peace in the Middle East. 

When the show finally showed, we all loved it:  Cylons were creepy, Galactica was mighty, and Vipers were zippy and cool.  Nevertheless, this was 1970’s television, and there was no way it could measure up to Industrial Light and Magic even when both were still stuck using models with wires and drawing lasers by hand.  While BG may have been something of an achievement by TV standards, there was still a severe clunkiness about it.  Cylons were obviously off-brand Stormtroopers, and Vipers never really had the elegance and style of X-Wings.  (It’s worth noting that Air Force pilots at the time adopted “Viper” as the unofficial nickname of the F-16, a mid-budget jet fighter that never really compared to its F-15 big brother.)  The show was formulaic.  Its characters were flat.  It had a robot dog that would have embarrassed Sid and Marty Krofft.

Most of all, BG lacked the full-fledged vision of a Gene Roddenberry, who genuinely believed that SF would bring peace to the Middle East, and that this was in fact its role.  BG fell into most of the traps of TV crime and adventure shows, seldom allowing anything like a theme or character arc to jump the boundary between episodes.  While the extended plot of the search for Earth was something new in SF TV, the gnawing desperation of fading humanity’s grim situation never seemed to affect the characters themselves.  And when they did at last find Earth—well, the less said about that, the better.

Nevertheless, there it was, and there it went.  BG was cancelled after one season.  While no one really missed it, it had marked out its position in geek history.  If nothing else, it served as a counterpoint and a placeholder while we waited for The Empire Strikes Back.  I doubt that anyone expected that Battlestar Galactica would be revised and reborn as a new world of television a full quarter of a century later.

But now, look.  Here we are, and it’s something altogether different from what the nerds in 1978 thought possible.

Blogging Battlestar Galactica

Because I need to do something with this blog, and because I believe writing helps to keep the Black Dog at bay, I’m going to start a series on the latest (wow, last-decade) incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.  Here it comes.

Despite a life of loving Science Fiction, I’ve never stayed current with SF TV.  I missed most of the 90’s and all of the 00’s, including Babylon 5, Buffy, Firefly, and the entirety of BG’s run as a new show in 2004-2008.  (I did track down new Trek, though not exhaustively.)   I haven’t had cable since leaving home, and it wasn’t convenient to catch up via the early internet, so I let the whole thing go.

I knew at the time that BG was thought good, and I knew Starbuck was now a lady and that Cylons looked hot and worshipped God, but that was really it.

Now, Hallelujah.  I have Netflix, and BG is streamable.  The world breathes anew.  I’ve just recently started watching the show, and I’m going to capture impressions and criticisms here.  While I’ve encountered a few spoilers before now, I don’t think they’re tremendous.  I’ve begun from the beginning, and there are, what, 75 episodes ahead of me?  It looks like fun.

I Saw The Hobbit, a Film

Back to Middle-earth.  Much time has passed since my last post, but with the passage of time come new Peter Jackson adaptations of Tolkien, so there you go.

I saw The Hobbit with a group of 9-year-olds, one of them mine.  We'd already read the book together and were geeked for the movie, but then I'd also read certain weak reviews.  I was ready to be disappointed, but in the end I enjoyed it pretty consistently.  If PJ's LOTR was 100%, I'd call this Hobbit about 85% enchanting.  The kids loved it.

I won't really review it here, except to say this:

--The whole opening sequence of Erebor getting blasted is great.  The other opening sequence with Elijah Wood hanging around Bag End making noises about the Big Party feels forced and artificial.

--Then everything gets nice because Martin Freeman is terrific as Bilbo.

--I could listen to Ian McKellan talk all day.  He could probably tell me about his laundry and I would find it enthralling.

--Most of the battle sequences and fast action business, however,  feel far too busy, as if they were designed merely to give the 3-D something to do. The tempo and noise and violence don't mesh with the rest of the movie even as well as they did in LOTR.  

You'll recall that I don't believe violence is exactly Tolkien's thing, but it is clearly Peter Jackson's.  It risks a certain bland dichotomy to say that the most bloodyactionistic scenes are both the most cinematic and the least literary, but that's what we have here.  Middle-earth is many things, but it is not a kinetic roller coaster, or shouldn't be.

--I could also have done with a less ridiculous Radagast. He was entirely too dopey. Plus, while one rabbit-sled chase might be acceptable, two is far too many.  At a few points Radagast comes embarrassingly close to channeling JarJar Binks.  I hope his action figures sell poorly.

--Whatever flaws exist are redeemed by Gollum. The whole riddle and escape episode between Bilbo and Gollum is absolutely superb. Andy Serkis is just as compelling here as he is in LOTR.  While his Gollum was just one of the great things in the earlier trilogy, he is far and away the best thing in this movie.

--Thorin Oakenshield is far sexier here than I have been accustomed to imagine in my reading.  This I can accept.