How Much of The Hobbit Can You Read During the Running Time of The Hobbit?

With the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Peter Jackson has given the world 174 minutes of imaginative visions never before realized on a movie screen, save for those in Jackson’s previous 12 hours of Middle Earth adventures. It’s not bad; it’s just stubbornly pokey and almost never grand.

As Voice film critic Scott Foundas puts it, during the long first third you “can feel the hair on your feet growing longer.” Or as Frodo might moan, it feels like too little butter spread over too much bread.

That said, there’s no denying that the last hour captures some of the spirit of The Lord of the Rings films, and there is at least one thing new here: Never before in a movie have I seen the cast offered a video-game style side quest. (Gandalf doesn’t yet take up Radagast the Brown’s mission to defeat a necromancer, but maybe he will in movie three, once he’s done some leveling up.)

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