The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

I think everyone who has seen this movie has questioned the wisdom of splitting a book up into three movies, and has really questioned the wisdom of making the first of those movies three hours long.

After having sat through The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey I think I've worked out what Peter Jackson is up to.

I think he's trying to film the book.

Not all of it.  I'm not quite sure of the order of events in The Hobbit, because it's been at least ten years since I read it, but I'm pretty sure there will be things left out and other things added in.  

But nevertheless.  I think he's trying to get as much of the book onto the screen as he can.

This is an unexpected undertaking.  Audiences are used to adaptations; we're used to the idea that you can't have the entire book up there on screen.  I don't think it's something we will see too often either.  Imagine the number of films involved in the Harry Potter series if the screenplay had tried to place the book on the screen!  Still...with The Hobbit it might be possible.  And it's one heck of an opportunity.

The thing about adaptations is that, inevitably, it's a translation and in the manner of all translations it betrays some part of the author's intent.  I don't imagine we're seeing Tolkien's version of his book, but one reader's interpretation of it.  Given the amount of time that we spend looking at the landscape, assuming Peter Jackson's intent wasn't to create the longest advert for New Zealand tourism possible, we're actually seeing him try to put the journey up there for us to see.  We can also experience it.  Yes, three hours is a long film...but I grew up on Hamlet and three hours is honestly nothing.  It flies by, too.

I don't want to do a review, because everyone and their dog is doing a review.  Instead, it occurs to me that this is one of those rare times when a movie that makes a lot of money will actually do something artistic.

Text being what it is, one of the first things a reader does with any text is form a relationship with it.  There's the intentional one that the author wants you to experience, an experience the author has spent however long crafting.  Then there's the reader's version of that experience, which is where we sit with a text and react to it, or decide how the characters look, or what they sound like.  For the imaginative reader, this is the payoff and also the hook.  This is the bit where you decide that there's more to Bilbo than a chummy fuzzy footed foodie, that the Virgin New Adventures Doctor really is more than just a Time Lord, where you start flipping back page after page to experience Tyrion snarking at his friends and foes alike.  There's also the bit where you decide whether you want more (as in a re-read) or whether you want to see the next novel from this artist right now!

I think it's clear that Peter Jackson wants you to understand how much sheer scale the novel has.  I think what's going up on the screen is as clear a view of his relationship with the material as he can manage.  Stephen King once said that writing was the closest thing a human can get to telepathy...I think Peter Jackson wants to take that a step further.

It's a position only a director can really be in.  If they can get the studio to keep their hands off the print, if they can negotiate the various slings and arrows, they get to show us what they were imagining.  

Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit is likely never going to be as good as the version going on in the heads of the people who read it before seeing his film(s).  No matter how enthralling and personal his vision, it's not MY version.  Even if his Gollum is better than the one I imagined.  But it will stamp his vision over the imaginations of all the people who see the films and then never read the book.  This isn't as bad as it sounds.  If I'm right about his intentions it places him in an oddly vulnerable position, but it also shows us the sort of honesty that we don't often see in movies of this type.

Three hours is a long movie.  But perhaps more movies should show us what the director enjoyed so much about the books they were based on, and maybe more movies should try to somehow put the whole book on the screen.

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A Doctor Who thing

Doctor Who has a problem.

Doctor Who has lots of problems, but the specific issue I noticed during the recent Xmas special has actually prompted me to think about it and then to write about it.  This is unusual.  The Moffat Era Who is happy and bouncy enough that, for the most part, I don't want to think about it much.  I watch it, generally enjoy it a lot, and move on.  

However, the plight of a specific character moved me to words because it's symptomatic of a something Doctor Who does often.  It can be summed up in the single phrase "Poor bloody Strax".

Remember Strax?  At some point in the past he ran into the Doctor and incurred his wrath to the point where the Doctor engineered a humiliating punishment for the Sontaran warrior - Strax became a nurse.  Since the Doctor isn't normally one to carve out a specific situation to punish a foe, we have to assume that Strax caught his attention in the same way that The Family of Blood did.  So Strax must have been an effective Sontaran.  Probably a cruel one too.  When we catch up with Strax during The Snowmen, there's no sign of this.  Moffat writes him as a clown.  Even in the trailers and teasers, Strax is an idiot who wants to invade the moon in order to pre-empt an invasion by Moonites.  He's Baldrick to the Doctor's Blackadder.

Not all the time, of course.  Strax turns out to be perfectly capable of thinking and planning, as long as the situation is military and tactical.  The Doctor even approves of this  situationally correct thinking.

Why is this a problem?  Two reasons.  Firstly, it seems clear that outside of military SF - a subculture of it's own - writers don't like portraying the military as competent.  It seems there's a real issue with recognising that a warrior culture can be anything other than limited and blunt.  Secondly, the portrayal of Strax sucks the threat out of the Sontarans.

Let's deal with that in reverse order.

The Sontarans are a clone warrior species.  They're short, but massively strong because they evolved on a high-gravity planet.  In the past, the Doctor has been really quite worried about going toe to toe with one because he knows full well that a Sontaran can cheerfully beat the bejebus out of him.  They've been at war for 50,000 years and have developed a quite terrifying level of technology.  Forget the guns and so forth, they've got a system of teleportation that doesn't rely on reducing a person to energy and re-assembling them at the other end.  How do I know?  They clone themselves in tanks of goo.  If they had a Star Trek transporter they could pump energy in one end and produce copies of the same Sontaran from the other.  That means they've got something like a point to point wormhole generator and they use this for short range transport.

At this point, I have to assume that they still use personal firearms because dropping one end of a wormhole onto the battlefield and anchoring the other end in the photosphere of the local star is simply no fun.

If you look at the Doctor's other foes, then the one species that could give the Sontarans a bad day would have to be the Daleks.

Have we had a comedy Dalek?

No.  But we've got comedy Sontarans.  Since the Sontaran Haka wasn't quite enough to devalue them as a threat (don't worry, lads, we've got about two minutes while the bad guys have a bit of a dance), we've now got Strax the Clown.

Why?

Doctor Who doesn't glorify violence, generally.  Well...there was that brief interlude in the 80s when Doctor Who tried to embrace nihilism and the Doctor shot some Cybermen but the less said about that the better.

If the show doesn't like to glorify violence and the hero is expected to solve the problem of the week without picking up a weapon and laying waste to the enemy then you can't really show it as being a viable solution to anything.  Therefore any warriors who appear in the show can only serve a limited number of purposes: they can die - possibly buying the hero time to implement a solution; they can redeem their earlier warlike behaviour by sacrificing themselves; they can be the foil that allows the hero to show how intelligent he or she is; they can show how rigid adherence to authority is a generally limiting thing; they can make any situation worse by shooting at it or trying to blow it up; they can cause the problem in the first place by being all aggressive or just causing a misunderstanding.

The problem here, as anyone who's worked with serving soldiers or veterans will tell you, is that the military doesn't tend to produce unidimensional cannon-fodder, because soldiers who can't think or solve problems simply aren't very useful.

Of course, the biggest problem the show has is time.  Currently, Doctor Who has no time for character development outside the regular cast because it has about 45 minutes to tell a story.  Even Moffat acknowledged the need to have shorthand characters when he introduced us to the Gay Anglican Marines stationed at Demons Run.  Had that story been developed over another episode or two we might have found out more about them, but instead the writer chose to throw them in to make a point about characterisation (and a particular fandom tendency).  Given that this is the case, Doctor Who writers don't really get a chance to develop things.  Sontaran culture, for example, should have produced a race of pragmatic tacticians and forward thinking strategists.  We have no time to explore what this might mean for them, or anyone encountering them, because if we get to know them they either become the Klingons - who we now understand perhaps a little too well - or we have to realise that there's no sensible reason for the Doctor to ever beat them. 

Within the time constraints, the best the show can do is rely on stereotypes to get major details across and allow the imaginations of the viewer to fill in the blanks.  Occasionally, this is really annoying because the show tells me a story I'm not interested in when it could be devoting time to expanding on a hint I've found particularly engaging but - oh well - that's what fanfic is for.  

So we end up with Poor Bloody Strax.  The comedy Sontaran, who exists for the Doctor to bully - despite the fact that if Strax got sufficiently irritated with the Doctor, he could reach out and slap him into his 12th incarnation.  The comic relief who takes the spot normally occupied by the Doctor himself.  The useless warrior, a fish out of water unless people are shooting at him.  I'm not really surprised, because the Classic show did this to the Brigadier.

Perhaps it's unsurprising.  We're a war-weary culture.  While we're happy to support troops who defend us, we're not happy identifying with conquerors.  The weight of colonialism is still heavy on Britain's shoulders - which is why Argentina loves to remind us about our colonial past and why Middle Eastern detractors refer to us as Crusaders.  Mocking warriors is safer than agreeing with them, politically and culturally.  It's possibly why Britain doesn't do military SciFi.  Can you imagine if Stargate SG1 had been a Brit show?

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