how long is it?

[calimac]

Recently in a comment section near you, irontongue opined that "A modest and charming book ought to get a modest and charming film."

Well, it's not going to get one.

Early reviews of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey have one thing in particular to say about the movie, besides comments on the 48fps: it's loooong. And slooooow.

How long and slow is it? One review actually tries to calculate minutes per page. And that is minutes per page, not pages per minute. (Another review and another and an American one too.)

According to IMDB, the movie is 169 minutes long: that's 2 hours and 49 minutes. That's almost as long as Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring, part 1 of his Lord of the Rings, which in theatrical release (the short version) was 2 minutes short of 3 hours. According to the reviews, Jackson's Hobbit part 1 covers the first 6 chapters: that's almost exactly one-third of the book. Although the original 3-movie plan for The Hobbit was to have the third movie cover events between The Hobbit (which takes place first) and The Lord of the Rings, it now appears he's just splitting The Hobbit up into three movies: the taglines for the sequels on IMDB correspond to the plot that way.

If the two subsequent movies are the same length, the totality will be 8 hours and 27 minutes. More likely, it'll be longer: Jackson's LOTR sequels were longer than his first one. (Meanwhile, Tolkien's successive volumes were consecutively shorter, if you exclude the Appendices.) If The Hobbit movies increase in size at the same ratio that the LOTR movies did, the total will be about 9 hours, plus or minus 15 minutes, depending on whether you take the ratio of the theatrical versions or the extended editions.

The Hobbit in the standard paperback is 273 pages of text (287 - 14 forematter). In the same edition, the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings total 1283 pages if you exclude the Prologue and Appendices, 1442 if you don't. That's approximately five times as long a book, but it didn't get five times as long a movie.

The Lord of the Rings movies, then, worked their way through the book at an average rate of between 1.88 and 2.58 pages a minute, depending on the page count above and whether you use the theatrical or extended editions of the movies. The Hobbit, meanwhile, is proceeding through the book at the stately pace of between 0.49 and 0.54 pages a minute, depending on how long the three movies turn out.

Now comes the interesting part, and trust me, I've worked this out with a calculator. If Jackson had gone through The Hobbit at the same clip that he proceeded through The Lord of the Rings in its theatrical version - already a massively slow undertaking by movie standards; the four-hour Gormenghast miniseries ran through its two huge volumes at nearly 5 pages a minute - it'd be between 105 and 120 minutes. Even at extended edition rates it'd be no more than 145 minutes. (At Gormenghast rates it'd be over in one hour.)

But! What if he'd filmed The Lord of the Rings at the pace he's filming The Hobbit? (If he'd filmed it at Gormenghast rates the entire thing would have been 4 1/2 hours - just right for the two-movie version he'd originally intended.) Determining the answer depends on both whether you're counting the Prologue and Appendices as part of the book, and on how long you expect the three-part Hobbit to turn out, but the answer would be somewhere between 40 and 49 hours. Ye gods.

Some of the Hobbit movie reviewers say that only Tolkien fans will enjoy something that slow-paced. They're wrong: only the most devoted Peter Jackson fans will. One of the frequent defenses of the LOTR films is that Tolkien fans would only be happy if they got something that was days long and had everything from the book in it. This time we're actually getting that. I don't expect to like the prospect.

From the length alone, I'm expecting this movie to be Jackson's Phantom Menace, the most tedious blockbuster I ever saw. Maybe it will induce equal cringes of embarrassment in the movie-maker's fans, and maybe the movie will slink away in shame and we can forget about it, like we eventually forgot about Ralph whatzisname. That would be the happiest outcome.

Comments

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Although we are in quite significant disagreement about Jackson's LotR, I agree with this post completely. But I don't think there's much chance of it disappearing.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I don't recall that you've ever told me your take on Jackson's LOTR. (I was probably too busy expounding mine.) I wonder if you would. I find that mine is often misunderstood: I have absolutely no objection to people enjoying and liking the movies, for instance. I found them passingly entertaining, and with a few stunningly good spots, myself.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I think I may be insufficiently familiar with your take on LOTR. I had not realized you found them passingly entertaining with some good spots.

Regarding The Hobbitt, I saw an extended preview that explained how he blew a 287-page book up to three long films: by incorporating a great deal of material from the LOTR appendices.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The movies judged on their own merits are adequate. They didn't excite me, but that's taste. They'd be better if they were shorter (so much for the claim that Tolkien fans are annoyed by the cuts). It's in their capacity as Tolkien adaptations that they completely fail in tone (they reproduce the plot, but a novel isn't its plot), and do so unnecessarily for their purpose. Those two points are the rub.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks for that clarification. I had caught the things you were displeased about but not that you thought the films were adequate judged on their own merit.

I agree with you about some aspects of the films as adaptations. The overemphasis on spectacle and battle is misplaced and out of keeping with the tone and concerns of the books, as much as that might be expected from a famous maker of horror/psychological thriller films. I was upset about Jackson's treatment of Faramir - okay, horrified. And I thought there was one crucial casting error, but not everybody agrees with me on that.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

What was that casting error? (Is curious.)

I thought the Faramir subplot was awful, and could have done without some of the other changes, but I did like most of the casting.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Viggo Mortensen. Kings, gods, and devils are nearly always basses in opera, for good dramatic reasons; for me, he had no presence.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

More to calimac elsestream, but I completely disagree with you on this one. I find him one of the strong points of the movie.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I know. We had this discussion when the LOTR films first came out. For me, it boils down to Mortensen not matching my personal, interior ideas about Aragorn. They go well beyond the nasal tenor, to appearance, affect, presentation, confidence.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I have; I actually didn't think that anything complimentary would be welcome. It's good to know otherwise. I can cavil about them a great deal, and I think that the third movie especially falls down. I deeply miss the scouring of the Shire, and I don't believe Jackson when he says there was nothing they could cut to preserve it; I could cut it myself enough to put that in.

That being said, they (primarily the first two) gave me a lot of the feeling that the books give me; they prompted me to re-read the books, and when I watch any of them again, I end up reaching for the books. I am a once-every-few-years re-reader, and I don't retain details of what I read especially well, so some combination of the movies themselves and the way they draw me to the books have given me more from the books, plus some delights that are just from the movies.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I actually find your reaction encouraging. The films are here, they are not going away, and I find them an impediment to appreciation of the book - not so much on my own account, where they're merely a nuisance in the way, like a tall person sitting in front of you in the theatre - but in their tendency to infect people's view of the book.

So the more people who testify that they do not find them an impediment, the more relieved I am at seeing a limit on how widespread that problem is. Your phrasing, that the movies "gave me a lot of the feeling that the books give me," is interesting. You're not saying, or at least I hope you're not, that the movies accurately capture the feeling of the book; you're saying that the movies remind you of the feeling that the book gives you, which is quite a different thing, and that is what I find encouraging.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It's not surprising that Lucius Shepard didn't like it, but you might find this brief note of his from Facebook (with typos preserved) of interest: 'Sad to say, I spent almost three hours of my life watching The Hobbit this past weekend. I won't go into depth because I'm reviewing it for F&SF, but it was way too long (takes about a hour to get out of the Shire), boring and lifeless until the end when Gollum and Bilbo do the riddle scene. Two more movies in this series? The next is callled The Desolation Of Snaug, After seeing the first of the trilogy, I'm desolate enough.'

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Oh my. I hope that Jackson learns not to do things like this -- I mean, the LoTR movies were long, but at least they were long books and had enough plot in them to justify having three long movies (whether or not you agree with Jackson's choices of plot to put in). I've got my grandson reading The Hobbit, which means I'm rereading it, and it's a lovely book, but slight. I would have expected 1 (one) three-hour movie out of it (or maaaaybe two two-hour ones), and would have been quite satisfied with same. At least Martin Freeman works as Bilbo according to the reviews you linked to. That's something.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

My thesis above is that anything much longer than one two-hour movie is too long for an adaptation of this book.

[anderyn.livejournal.com]

Well, with Jackson, I would be okay with one 3 hour movie, given his predilections, but -- yeah -- two hours would be enough to get the whole story in, if done right. I am still going to go see it, as the family is chomping at the bit, but I'm not going to be expecting anything wonderful, given the reviews you linked to.

Oh! My other grandson (the one in Texas) requested the LoTR trilogy for his Christmas present. I'm thinking of getting him the boxed set, with The Hobbit included. He's ten. I was quite pleased to see him into classic fantasy. Griffin, who lives with me, is not quite up to LoTR weight, but he's enjoying the heck out of The Hobbit. Bruce said that if I hadn't given him the one-volume Red Book edition as a wedding present, he'd have sent that down to Texas, but he's not giving that away. :-)

Um. Scattered thought -- I know you mentioned in a previous post that you think the movies will mar the collective visualization of readers, but I am not sure of that. My visualizations managed to survive the Brothers Hildebrandt calendars and the Rankin-Bass movies just fine, and I don't see Aragorn as Viggo Mortensen, etc. Maybe it's because I read the books thirty years before the movies came out, or because I'm not a visual reader (i.e., I don't visualize characters in my head while I am reading) -- but it's a data point I thought I'd share.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I hope your grandson enjoys the novel. He's younger than I was when I first read it, and I now think I was too young, but then, I didn't already know the plot, so if he's already seen the movies that may make it easier for him.

As for visualizations taking over: their effect on Tolkien fan art has already been city-flattening in its impact. Perhaps you are that rare individual so iron-minded as to be able to win at the game in which the object is not to think of an elephant, but most of us are not so equipped. I'd known the book intimately for a decade when the Bakshi movie came out, and it still took another decade to entirely erase that wretched thing from my mind; at least Jackson's visuals are more pleasant to think of. As an example of a once-notable fantasy novel which was entirely drowned by its movie and has never recovered: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.