WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THESE FILMS
For my
special video of the month, I am doing a comparison of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and
explain why The Lord of the Rings: The
Fellowship of the Ring is better. For the sake of not having the names take
up half of this text, I will call them An
Unexpected Journey and The Fellowship
of the Ring.
THE PROTAGONIST – Bilbo
Baggins is the protagonist in An
Unexpected Journey and Frodo Baggins. For the first fifteen to thirty
minutes of An Unexpected Journey,
Bilbo is very whiny and got on my nerves. I never got into him, either. I did
not hate him, but I did not care about him. There was also no intensity with
his character. He was not a horrible protagonist, but he was not a very good
protagonist. He also does not rank at all with Frodo, because Frodo is a very
good protagonist. He is not even an adult and he is immediately put on a task
to go do something huge. Even in this first film, he is very strong, likeable, and
faces huge challenges. I felt a large amount of intensity with Frodo and is
portrayed by Elijah Wood than Bilbo is portrayed by Martin Freeman, although
Freeman is still great as Bilbo.
THE USE OF GANDALF – We have Gandalf the Grey in both of these films, but he dies in one and
lives in another. I felt that Gandalf helped the story better in The Fellowship of the Ring because of
the challenges he has to attempt at and the use of his death. An Unexpected Journey tries too hard to imitate
that to the point of which it becomes bland and bad. He also does not have as
many challenges in An Unexpected Journey
as he does in The Fellowship of the Ring.
The way they do Gandalf’s disappearance or absence from the group does not add anything
to the story in An Unexpected Journey.
It is just an attempt at an imitation of one of the many great things of The Fellowship of the Ring. Ian McKellen
is also much older in An Unexpected
Journey, so he is not able to bring a performance as good as he gave in The Fellowship of the Ring.
THE USE OF GOLLUM – Both films use Gollum for at least one thing. Though, the amount of
screen time Gollum has is very different in these films. He is in An Unexpected Journey much longer than
he is in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Though, I will bring up one of the only things that An Unexpected Journey improved upon The Fellowship of the Ring on: The way Gollum looks. Although he
looks fantastic in The Fellowship of the
Ring, he looks better in An
Unexpected Journey. Now that An
Unexpected Journey had its moment, we can get into why I mentioned this. In
the scene Gollum has with Bilbo in An
Unexpected Journey, I felt that it was just a way that the filmmakers could
give the fan boys their Gollum for a little while. I also felt that the scene
was drawn out more. I liked that in The
Fellowship of the Ring we only saw Gollum very slightly in the opening
monologue and a very small part of behind something in a shadow later in the
movie so we could have Gollum be excellent in a sequel. Here, in An Unexpected Journey, they already used
their Gollum in the first of the trilogy.
THE LOOK – Although this is a very minor flaw, I have to bring up that An Unexpected Journey does not look
nearly as good as The Fellowship of the
Ring. An Unexpected Journey does
look very, very good, but The Fellowship
of the Ring looks awe-inspiring and excellent. I did not even watch An Unexpected Journey in forty-eight
frames per second and sometimes the film has a big of a stale environment.
THE SCORE – This is also a somewhat minor flaw, but I must bring up the fact that
the score of An Unexpected Journey
has many flaws while the score of The
Fellowship of the Ring does not, and one other thing. The score of The Fellowship of the Ring propels the
film to become much better a huge number of times in the film, because it is
excellent. The score of An Unexpected
Journey is very dramatic at calm times sometimes and does not add anything
to the film except for a small number of times in the film. But those times are
when it came from a Lord of the Rings
film. For the score to add anything to the film, it had to take the score from
a film that is barely in the same franchise as it.
THE FIRST HALF – The first half of The Fellowship
of the Ring had a fantastic introduction to the characters and buildup to
the Fellowship with some riveting scenes and many intense scenes. The first half
of An Unexpected Journey is a
drawn-out, cheesy, slow introduction to everything. Although the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring was also
slow, and sometimes it is for the better for something to be slow, it never
went anywhere. I never started liking it anymore than just enjoying it.
THE SECOND HALF – The second half of An Unexpected
Journey has underwhelming action sequences, extra scenes that we did not
quite need, still some drawn-out scenes, and was not much better than the first
while the first half of The Fellowship of
the Ring, although it is not as good as the first, contains intense and
very fun action sequences with more character development and great emotion. I felt
no emotion with An Unexpected Journey
and felt nothing while its action sequences were transpiring. I still just
enjoyed it.
THE VILLAIN – The villain in The Fellowship of
the Ring was a great combination of basically three things. There was, of course,
the eye of Sauron, but it does not come to play at all in this film. The ring
is another one, but it is not nearly as affective to the protagonist as it is
in the next films. Lastly, there is Saruman, who believe it the primary villain
of this film. He is the bigger a villain in this film than he is in any of the
others and the biggest villain in this film. Though, it is not really Saruman
that it is the villain, because he is being controlled by the eye of Sauron. So
I came to a conclusion that the primary villain of this Lord of the Rings film is a combination of Saruman and the eye of
Sauron. The primary villain shown and showcased most in An Unexpected Journey is the big orc that has something against
Thorin Oakenshiel. We know very little about the big orc and do not know enough
to have something against him. The orc is shown too early and did not seem very
menacing to me.
WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK COMPARED TO WHAT I
THINK
I
will now talk about what other people have rated the movie.
ROTTEN TOMATOES – On Rotten Tomatoes, the Tomato Meter for An Unexpected Journey is barely Ripe at 65% and the average rating
is 6.6/10. If I reviewed the film, it would have been a ripe before because I rated
the film 6.3/10, which is actually lower than the critics, but still ripe. The Fellowship of the Ring has a very,
very ripe Tomato Meter of 91% and has an average rating of 8.1/10. My review
definitely would have been ripe, because I give it an 8.9/10, which is higher
than the critics on this one. Now I will talk about the user ratings. 83% of
users liked An Unexpected Journey
giving it a very full bucket of popcorn and the average rating for it is 4.1/5
(a.k.a. 8.2/10) which is much higher than my, and the critics’, rating. 95% of
users liked The Fellowship of the Ring
giving it an extremely full bucket of popcorn and the average rating for it is also
4.1/5 (a.k.a. 8.2/10). Surprisingly, it has the same rating as An Unexpected Journey, although the
percentage of users that liked it is 12% higher than the percentage of users
that liked An Unexpected Journey. My rating
is higher than the audience’s on this one, too.
IMDB – On IMDb, the user rating for An
Unexpected Journey is 8.0/10, which is much higher than my 6.3/10 (rounded
down to 6/10 on IMDb). The user rating for The
Fellowship of the Ring is 8.8/10, which is actually a bit lower than my
8.9/10. Now I will talk about the Metascore. The Metascore for An Unexpected Journey is 58/100, which
is much closer to my 6.3/10 (63/100) than the users’ 8.0/10 (80/100) is. The
Metascore for The Fellowship of the Ring
is 92/100, which is higher than the user’s rating, 8.8/10 (88/100), and my
rating, 8.9/10 (89/100). My rating is actually closer to the users than the
critics for this film on IMDb.
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