What I learned from watching The Hobbit
As the band of weary travelers leapt, ran, and tumbled away in dazzling fashion from a caveful of goblins in The Hobbit, I was convicted. I’m a late Gen-Xer, and I’ve seen plenty of impressive cinematic special effects in his life, from Forrest Gump to Independence Day to The Matrix. But The Hobbit’s multilayered motion of monster-laden ladders crisscrossing over a dark abyss, its wildly imaginative fight scenes and the depth lent by my 3D glasses convinced me that we humans have crossed a significant line: we now have the creative capacity to fashion new worlds.
I was certainly entertained. And it cost a lot to entertain me. Warner Brothers budgeted $530 million to produce the new trilogy. New Zealand granted the studio $25 million in tax rebates and changed the nation’s labor laws to secure the magnificent setting. And the first film has already raked in more than $800 million across the globe.
We humans love this kind of immersive entertainment. We love to enter into Middle-earth, the center of the earth or the far reaches of the galaxy. Why? And what do we forget back home while our imaginations take us elsewhere? Our too-long unemployed neighbors? Our shot-through set of gun regulations? Our swiftly heating planet?
