Released on December 14 to much media hype, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has skyrocketed in the box office to over $886 million in its first month. Directed by Peter Jackson and based off the book The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien, it has a larger budget (around $250 million) than any of the Lord of the Rings films that preceded it. With a star-studded cast, including Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, Ian McKellan as Gandalf the Gray, and Richard Armitage as the dwarf king Thorin Oakenshield, it has been nominated for three Oscars and eleven other awards. While only the first movie in the proposed trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has given audiences an explosive look at what is to come.

I deeply enjoyed The Hobbit. Its epic scale never ceased to amaze me, but it still managed to convey the essence of Tolkien’s original novel. While Jackson changed the book drastically to make it screen-worthy, the underlying story is still there. As a die-hard Tolkien fan, I sometimes groused to myself about the changes that were made, yet I enjoyed the references that were made to some of Tolkien’s other works. In short, while it doesn’t stick exactly to the book’s plot, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is still a brilliant movie.

Written by Will Morris’16