![]() ![]() It involves him in joining a party of dwarves as the team's "burglar" on a mission to regain their ancestral lands and wealth from Smaug, the dragon guarding them beneath the Lonely Mountain. It sets up an invitation to Bilbo Baggins to take part in an adventurous quest proposed by the wizard Gandalf (the splendidly authoritative Ian McKellen). This extremely violent event, involving much death and destruction, warns the audience that it's a film for extremely hardy kids. ![]() ![]() What we get at first is a back story from a posthumously published Tolkien work explaining how a blight fell on the underground city of Erebor when fire-breathing dragons, hungry for gold, attacked it, driving its dwarf inhabitants into exile. Given three films, each presumably close to three hours long, Jackson and co have plenty of time on their hands, and 20 minutes of the film has passed before the immortal "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" is spoken. Now the New Zealand screenwriter Peter Jackson, who followed up the Lord of the Rings trilogy with King Kong and The Lovely Bones, has returned to his old hobbits, and in collaboration with Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Guillermo del Toro, has turned the initially modest The Hobbit into a full-scale trilogy of its own. For some reason he wrote on it: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The line isn't exactly "Call me Ishmael" or "Happy families are all alike", but this first line of what was published in 1937 as a children's book began what has proved to be a literary phenomenon, an alternative religion, an endless invitation to exegesis and a major industry that has led to an immensely successful trilogy of books and films about life in Middle-earth. Back in the early 1930s, when he was an Oxford don, JRR Tolkien was marking exam papers for the now defunct School Certificate when he came across a blank sheet. This week's principal film, The Hobbit, began life in a not dissimilar fashion. In last Sunday's Film of the Week, the protagonist, a Hollywood screenwriter played by Colin Farrell, had a title for his drama, "Seven Psychopaths", but no plot. ![]()
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