Our tour of the particularly strange little corridors of filmed adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth stories now takes us from the Soviet Union and its hallucinatory 1985 TV version of The Hobbit, north to Finland and that country's 1993 adaptation of both The Hobbit AND The Lord of the Rings, a TV miniseries gathered under the overall name Hobitit, or The Hobbits.

For a bit of background, I'd like to turn things over to the blog's frequent commenter, Vilsal:
First of all, it's based on a highly successful play. When it was adapted for television by the public broadcaster YLE, someone sensibly decided there was no way of doing the large-scale battles with what they had, so they focused on the Hobbits as the name implies. Still, the songs and almost all the actors are from the play.

Secondly, most of the the actors are very popular in Finland. It's one of the reasons this series is remembered fondly. The actors' parts were also entirely shot in studio with the backgrounds added using chroma key, which had not been used much in Finnish television. [Editor's note: this being the case, it's dumbfounding how much better the technology looks here than in the Soviet Hobbit, which did much the same thing to comically bad effect]

Thirdly, there's never been an official release on video or DVD and likely never will. Yle showed it twice in the nineties, but never got the rights to release it on home video. Currently, they can't even show it on television.

To switch things up a bit, and since it's only fair (if I can take three separate days to review Peter Jackson's films, I should be able to spend a little extra energy on a nine-part TV series, after all), I'll be going episode-by-episode, including links to the English-subtitled version so kindly uploaded by YouTube user JouninEnsio.

Episode 1 - "Bilbo"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

In the final chapter of the final book of The Lord of the Rings, it is made very clear that in the years following the main events of the story it became quite a popular tale that the elder hobbits told to their children, so it's quite pleasing that the creators of this series elected to frame it as a story being told by hobbit statesman Samwise Gamgee* (Pertii Sveholm), who took part in the very same grand adventure during his simpler youth. It's less pleasing - it's downright terrifying, in fact - that Sam looks so cripplingly unhappy in his old age, ringed by a huge head of hair that makes him look like a suicidally depressed version of the Cowardly Lion. Oh, and that's the other thing: he's so sad. And the mordant lighting around him makes it seem like everything is miserable, and only by ripping this story from his tormented soul and throwing it to the children around him can he manage to survive to suffer another day; the hushed, gloomy surroundings are right out of The Turin Horse. I know it's Finland and all, but this is an unrecognisably far cry from the warm, comfy setting Tolkien wrote about.

Sam's story is very much expository in nature, and it's not very elegant, either: first we get a brutally detail-light story about how the Dark Lord Sauron made an evil ring that controlled the good rings that the elves wore - too bad if you didn't catch all of that, folks who didn't read the books, 'cause we're not stopping - and then later that ring was lost and found by a young man from a diminutive race of fisher people, and it made him go insane and murdery, and then one April hundreds of years later, a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins (Martti Suosalo) was traveling to kill a dragon when he fell into the cavern where this miserable fisher person, now called Gollum (Kari Väänänen) lives with his magic ring of doom.

And now, finally, the story allows itself to take a much-needed breath and actually get to the job of dramatising incident rather than just flying through exposition; and instead of condensing all of The Hobbit into 23 minutes, as I'd sort of hoped for, it's really just the famous "Riddles in the Dark" chapter, in which Gollum and Bilbo trade riddles back and forth for a solid 12 minutes, until Sam returns to gloomily promise, almost with tears in his eyes, that the story will continue next time. Which is okay: "Riddles" is a fine piece of tense cat-and-mouse thrills for young fantasy fans, and the much-reduced focus promises a more intimate, character-driven story, and while we might come to Tolkien for the sprawling epic fantasy, that actually makes this choice more, not less, interesting.

The main problem - and oh, is it a problem - lies in the conception of the characters: Suosalo's Bilbo is a reprehensible simpleton, lolling his eyes and talking with aching slowness, like he doesn't know what the words mean; Väänänen's Gollum is less threatening and mysterious than he is gross, all flabby and thick like a wrestler gone to seed, smacking his lips so loudly that it's hard to pay attention to anything else, and snarling and shouting mindlessly. Spending all that much time with this pair quickly ceases to be anything but pain, and it's so very easy to side with the hobbit child who is pissed off that Sam has wasted all this time without getting to the actual story.

I might also point out that the moody jazz music is so wildly out of place that I don't quite know what to do with it.

On the other hand, writer-director Timo Torikka has already started to impress me, even with this flimsy two-hander: he captures the dank gloominess of the caves with terrific flair, and I particularly loved a late moment where Gollum's claw is shadowed on Bilbo's face, a wonderful visual that expresses tension and danger found nowhere in their actual conversation.

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Episode 2 - "The Road"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Anytime one is watching an adaptation of a particularly familiar book, there's always a question as to how long it will take to accept that it's going to be its own different thing: for me that came pretty immediately in this episode, right about when we meet Bilbo 60 years later, and he is made up to look like some insane doddering madman; it is as far from Tolkien as can be, but I defy anybody to tell me it's not captivating.

In fact, "The Road" is such a profound improvement over "Bilbo" in every regard that I can hardly think of it as the same series: Torikka's gloomy, pensive style has even more chance to flower here, and the atmosphere starts to get laid on real damn thick, but with great success: turns out this is basically The Turin Horse - stately underground home Bag End has been re-imagined as a rickety shack in the middle of nowhere - and accepting that reveals The Hobbits to be quite an extraordinary dive into foreboding, expressionist design and atmosphere.

The episode covers basically the first two chapters of The Fellowship of the Ring: at his 111th birthday, Bilbo annoys his friends and relations by vanishing mid-speech with the help of his magic ring (and does it actually explode in smoke like that every time? Because it has twice now, and if that's its signature, I doubt it's very good for stealth), before leaving all his belongings to his nephew Frodo (Taneli Mäkelä). Grim, threatening wizard Gandalf (Vesa Vierikko) - who, to his credit, is first seen joking with hobbit children - takes many years to discover that the ring is actually a totem of pure evil and sends Frodo and Sam on a mission to destroy it. At the rate we're going, nine episodes isn't going to be sufficient to get one-third of the way through the complete story.

Still, I'm impressed. In particular, I'm crazy for Vierikko's Gandalf, even in this small dose: he's imposing and genuinely menacing in a way that most versions of the character don't attempt to be; his treatment of quivering Sam in particular lacks all of the subdued humor of Tolkien's character, but it works for the world presented here. Besides, for all that it isn't Tolkien, the feeling of the series is terrific: the happy Shire is a crazy world of Expressionist lines and charmingly unconvincing models, Bilbo's party appears to populated with grotesques out of Dickens, and like I said, Bilbo's make-up is deliciously warped: hardly "well-preserved", but arresting to watch, and that counts for more.

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Episode 3 - "The Old Forest"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

And now we stumble across the issue that was always going to crop up in an attempt to reduce the thousand pages of The Lord of the Rings to eight chunks of 22 minutes: there's a lot of plot to cover and at a certain point, you don't get to be elegant about it. If something that runs this short can be accused of being "episodic", that is exactly what happens: first the four traveling hobbits - Frodo, Sam, and Frodo's kinsmen Merry Brandybuck (Jarmo Hyttinen) and Pippin Took (Jari Pehkonen) - get lost in the ancient forest just outside their homeland, where they are rescued by mysterious Tom Bombadil (Esko Hukkanen), then Gandalf goes to the small town of Bree to make demands of an innkeeper there, Barliman Butterbur (Mikko Kivinen), then the hobbits show up someplace that looks exactly like the woods but apparently isn't where they are attacked by a ghost, then Gandalf is trapped by traitorous wizard Saruman (Matti Pellonpää). I think it's fair to say that if you haven't read the book, there is literally no way to follow everything that happens here.

But I've got to say, it almost doesn't matter: only when Saruman shows up without the least explanation of who he is or why Gandalf sought his help, do the threads start to show.

Prior to then, the episode manages to barrel through through pure imagery: a phantasmagorical depiction of the old forest and the barrow-downs (which aren't named as such, or even depicted that way) that waltzes right up to the door of outright horror, if not all the way in. Certainly the scene of the four hobbits captured by the barrow-wight, their faces greyed over and looking as waxy and dead as a corpse, is the kind of visual that is designed solely to unsettle and terrify.

Not for nothing does the episode open, not with mopey old Sam (our depressive narrator doesn't show up at all, I am happy to report), but with the hobbits hiding from a ghostly black rider, though given how mordant the first two episodes were, this doesn't even register as something exceptionally strange or scary; it's the second appearance of the rider, tormenting poor Butterbur, in which the creature is filmed with a different shutter speed, so that he movies erratically and inexplicably, that he really seems like a creature of pure evil.

This tinge of horror is barely enough to propel things through a script that really doesn't make any sense: Bombadil is already not one of the more explicable elements of Tolkien's legendarium, and his truncated appearance here is all the more confusing; meanwhile, the relationship of different places and characters is thrown out entirely. It's just plot points happening all in a row: but they are such unnerving plot points that the show can get away with it.

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Episode 4 - "The Prancing Pony" (lit. translation: "The Bouncy Pony", which I kind of like a lot)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

After the patchwork madness of "The Old Forest", we're settled back down to a comfortable little episode that doesn't bite off any more than it can chew: very little forward momentum, and only two locations, the inside of a little inn, Barliman Butterbur's "Prancing Pony", and a green-screened field of icy hell, which serves mostly to remind us that, yes, this was shot in Finland, as proven by- are those reindeer? Holy shit, those are reindeer, aren't they? Christ.

Anyway, it's a nice slow breather of an episode, though I cannot help but notice that just shy of the midway point in the series, we've not even gotten halfway through the first book of three, and slow breathers are of questionable utility. Herein, the hobbits arrive and are vaguely put-off by the smoky menace of the place, and particularly by a dark man in a cloak, "Strider" (Kari Väänänen again). In an attempt to draw attention away from his true mission, Frodo acts like a moron, singing and dancing a goofy song, but manages to stick his finger through the ring, disappearing in the middle of a crowded room. This makes Strider - actually Aragorn, but we don't know what that means yet, unless we've read the books, as the makers of this series apparently hope we have - fly into a panic and hustle the hobbits out into the wilderness, seeking the safety of Rivendell - we don't know what that mean yet, either.

There's not much here, really, and after the orgasmic display of forbidding atmosphere in the last episode, it retrenches to a much blander, less moody place; Frodo's song comes off as downright silly, and outside of the vacant, atonal music that opens the episode (the first time that I've actually thought the score worked in the series thus far), nothing is particularly moody one way or the other. I will mention that this is the first point at which Mäkelä has made any sort of impression on me one way or the other as Frodo, with his somewhat frenzied attempts to seem normal contrasting nicely with the actor's weary, harsh face; but even more, I'm finding Sam to be the stand-out among the hobbits, a much more wiry, alert version of the character than in Bakshi's Lord of the Rings or the Rankin/Bass Return of the King - more than Sean Astin's take in the Jackson films, too - carrying around a kind of constant animalistic terror of everything that is, in truth, a pretty appropriate response to the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-meets-Legend of Zelda universe in which he lives.

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Episode 5 - "Strider"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

A little bit of brilliance and a whole lot of drudgery, and once again, we're at a place where Torikka isn't even contemplating the idea that you haven't read the books.

Things start off well: having spotted the spectral black riders in a cliffhanger ending to the previous episode, Aragorn takes the hobbits into hiding at the edge of the woods, and it's astonishing: continuing the previous episodes' dabbling in brooding horror imagery, it's little more than an exercise in suffocating black shadows driving tension, as the characters just wait, and wait. A rather nifty song is playing along with this, ponderous and dark; and then, suddenly, it all goes to hell. Frodo puts on the ring, triggering an attack by the black riders, and it's a completely failure of effects work and framing, just a bunch of nonsensical images flashing by each other. Frodo passes out, and when he comes to, it's in a room consisting of nothing but pillars and the color blue, ushering in the lowest point in the series thus far; lower even than the thrill Bilbo/Gollum episode.

It's the Council of Elrond (Leif Wager), already the most adaptation-resistant part of the whole three-volume Lord of the Rings: dozens of pages of people sitting around a table talking about strategy. I don't know that it can be solved, but The Hobbits certainly doesn't do it justice: in order to compress things, the dialogue skips about nonsensically, introducing characters and plot holes galore, and all of it in a room that would have been thrown out of the original Star Trek for being unacceptably chintzy.

The outcome, of course, is that Frodo is to journey to Mordor - a place not identified in any way at all, other than the obvious assumption (which may or may not be obvious in Finnish) that "Mordor" is the name of an evil place - accompanied by eight fellow travelers: the other three hobbits and Aragorn; Gandalf, who escaped in a way that barely gets mentioned; Legolas the elf (Ville Virtanen) and Gimli the dwarf (Tomi Salmela), who have absolutely no more personality than the words I have just typed, and Boromir (Carl-Kristian Rundman) the prince of Gondor, the southern kingdom; he is a glowering, angry sort, and while Rundman doesn't get to do much with him at this juncture, he has great glowering presence, though for some reason, he's also wearing samurai garb, top-knot and all, and has a snake tattooed on his face. Poor Boromir. A viking in the Bakshi film, a Berlin metalhead gay punk samurai here.

The episode is a grueling combination of exposition and narrative compression that renders the exposition unintelligible. Let us quickly leave it.

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Episode 6 - "Lorien"
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

For comparison's sake: the first five episodes, that is to say, a touch over half of the nine-episode series, brings us to almost exactly the same point as the end of the first of six discs of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings extended editions. Which is to say, a great deal more story lies ahead than behind, and it was apparently with this episode that the filmmakers realised exactly what that meant, because the more-or-less lingering, slow pace of everything to this point is immediately and abruptly shitcanned for an episode that blasts through a huge amount of story with hardly a single pause. The nine guardians of the Ring are walking through a forst, when old Sam pipes up in voiceover to mention, "and then we we captured by orcs in Moria", and we cut to them fighting in cave, as violently and carelessly as if a reel had gone missing. Gandalf walks offscreen and falls into a pit of lava, courtesy of a truly, outstandingly bad visual effect. Then everybody is outside Moria - which has not to this point been defined as anything but "the place with orcs and lava pits" - without a worry, headed off to the magic elf woods of Lorien, where the story finally stutters, if not exactly slows (the episide isn't even five minutes gone, at this point).

In Lorien, the Fellowship is greeted by the elf queen Galadriel (Heidi Krohn), who appears a face on the surface of a pond, because why not; she gives them advice and sends them on their way, and this takes several minutes. Then things speed up again: the heroes can't decide if they want to go east to destroy the ring or west to fight with Gondor, and Borormir terrifies Frodo into fleeing east with Sam.

That's about two-fifths of The Fellowship of the Ring crammed into 22 minutes, and with that kind of reckless rushing, there is absolutely no place for anything but plot: the characters are, at this point, simply not a concern, though Mäkelä tries his very best to invest something deeper than "run here, now run there" into his performance of Frodo; tragically, this involves adopting a froggy voice, I suppose to demonstrate that Frodo is being corrupted by the Ring, but that level of character detail is not permitted at this stage of the game.

More dismayingly than the way that the story has basically started to collapse at this point, we are granted barely a trace of the pulsating mood of gloom and misery that made the earlier episodes so distinctive; instead of fake but idiosyncratic models covered in a swath of bleak fog, we get process shots of normal-looking trees, and all the actors do their business in full lighting; how the Shire, meant to be the haven of all things good and lovely, can be shot and sound-designed like a savage wasteland out of Bergman, but the vast wild looks so pedestrian, is altogether beyond me. There's one really fantastic moment: before Gandalf dies in Moria (so, not a very big window), there's a shot of the eight other members of the fellowship gathered together, lit fairly warmly for a cave, that cuts to a deep blue shot of Gandalf standing alone; it is a well-considered moment in an episode desperately wanting them.

Two things that I hadn't really attended to until I saw the actors in full light: the hobbits aren't any shorter than any other characters: not trick photography, not even judicious editing. And Sam - who has quickly, even instantaneously, devolved from being the panicked, but electric character of episodes two and three, to being a yammering moron - has an '80s hair metal perm. I was too distraught upon realising this to check back for it in earlier episodes.

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Episode 7 - "Mordor"
Part 1 | Part 2

A definite course-correction after the last two episodes, though whatever inspiration Torikka found in the opening sequence of the book that caused him to lavish such attention and energy on it apparently did not apply to the rest, for really by this point it just feels like he's going through the motions (I cannot entirely fault him; the first part is my favorite, too). At least we're comfortably back to slower, more coherent storytelling, covering just a small portion of the story: Frodo and Sam scaling a treacherous mountain range, and encountering the vicious Gollum - Väänänen is far more restrained and tolerable than in the first episode - whom Frodo blackmails into guiding them deeper into Mordor, using the power of the Ring. It still takes us through quite a huge portion of the second book in the trilogy, The Two Towers, but unlike the preceding episode, it only includes the important bits and doesn't attempt to explain every plot point in two seconds.

Although, there is a pointedly bad moment when old Sam, telling the children his story, rather blandly mentions that while he and Frodo were risking life and limb, everybody else was doing other stuff. And Gandalf's not dead, it turns out. It's a short moment that goes on forever, and it rather misses the point of adapting a book: filming a man describing the contents of book in a few sentences is sort of the very definition of un-dramatic.

That's just one massive error in an episode that doesn't really commit any others (the closing song is a bit too twee for my tastes, but that is, of course, just me), and has some genuine good points beside: the interplay between Frodo, Sam, and Gollum, some of the best character-based material in the whole book, works out well, with all three actors doing solid work, though only Mäkelä rises above solid; unfortunately, whatever paranoid energy Sveholm brought to Sam earlier in the production seems to be failing him now, though he is of course given rather different content to work with at this point.

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Episode 8 - "Mount Doom"
Part 1 | Part 2

J.R.R. Tolkien was writing novels, of course, not plays, but he managed to hide within The Lord of the Rings a few truly great gifts to an actor, of which none comes close to bettering the inner dialogue between the two split halves of Gollum's personality; Sméagol, the hobbit-like being who feels gratitude and humility towards Frodo, and Gollum the thieving murderer. Played right, it's a brilliant character moment - Andy Serkis basically owes the fact of his career to the scene - and it's how the penultimate episode of The Hobbits opens, with Gollum/Sméagol watching over the sleeping Samwise and Frodo on the very edge of Mordor, fighting with himself. And bless him, Väänänen nails it - not a single moment in his performance as Gollum till now, and nothing of his Aragorn but the first scene comes anywhere near this level. Best of all, he's able to find a way through the sequence without having to rebuild the character from scratch; it's still the same over-the-top monstrosity as before, only funneled into something much more real than he's done before.

It's a rock-solid start to one of the best overall episodes of the series, focusing with singular intensity on the interaction between Gollum, Frodo, and Sam, advancing the story only minutely: a petulant Gollum takes the hobbits to the front gate of Mordor, which is impassable; he then takes them through a back tunnel, where a trap has been laid. And here is the real weak spot in this installment, which sputters right into flailing nonsense: unable to show a giant spider, the filmmakers have to resort to Frodo being attacked by a vague something called Shelob, and the whole thing is pieced together so abstractly that for a solid minute, it's quite impossible to tell what's going on, until Sam starts moaning that Frodo is dead. That this comes at the very tail end of the episode is deadly.

Still, there's so much it gets right: it even restores to Sam much of his lost dignity, with one of the book's other great gifts for an actor, Sam's speech about being inside a story; Sveholm underplays it beautifully, not hammering home the maudlin yearning of it, but simply trying to comfort himself. He also gets a second fantastic moment, one that, if I can be so heretical, improves on the book: reciting the "Oliphaunt" poem to cheer himself up while crossing a terrifying bridge. In The Two Towers, the poem just appears, Tolkien having it lying around and seeing no reason not to. The Hobbits gives it a real character-driven purpose, and it becomes a genuinely moving moment, not just a bit of frivolous, time-wasting rhyming.

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Episode 9 - "Liberation"
Part 1 | Part 2

After "Mount Doom" proved to be such a sensitive, satisfying character piece - proof of how you can make something genuinely good even faced with the striking limitations of The Hobbits - it's downright criminal that the final episode should be such a washout. It's the same problem the series has been facing throughout: too much content in too quick a time. In this case, all 300+ pages of The Return of the King in a half-hour. Rankin/Bass, you have my apologies.

What this means, in practice, is that Sam mopes about until Frodo just... wakes up. Then the two of them climb up Mount Doom, which is about three feet away from the exit to Shelob's tunnel, meet Gollum at the top, the ring goes in the fire, and in the episode's one truly elegant note, the sound dies away as a huge fireball fills the sky, then fades to black, and Sam jolts awake in bed.

And then this kicks off a feverishly over-stuffed 13 minutes in which Gandalf, Merry, and Pippin all show up, the hobbits return to the Shire, and we get a severely truncated version of the Scouring of the Shire, the very moral backbone of the entire story of The Lord of the Rings. So, points against the later, much more expensive adaption on those grounds. But is it worth including such an important sequence if it's going to be dealt with so briefly, with so little consideration of the meaning of it all? Not mine to say; I just know that after being so warmed by the last episode, this one left me ice cold and a little surly. The acting is weak - Hyttinen and Pehkonen's Merry and Pippin are stiff as boards, and even Vierikko's superlative Gandalf has little to do - and rather than ending on a rich, emotional note, it just kind of fizzles out with a montage.
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So, what about the whole entire series, now that we're done? A limited, qualified success, I'd say: the worthwhile episodes barely outnumber the really bad ones, and if nothing else, Vierikko's performance, though it is extremely small, is unbelievable good - a better Gandalf than Ian McKellen, I am almost willing to say, though there's so little evidence to work with. The script throughout is a maddening combination of the very rushed, the very stretched-out, and too many logical gaps or outright errors (for example, Bilbo talking about his glowing sword while gazing at a very clearly non-glowing Sting). But the peculiar atmosphere of the early episodes does a lot to get through that.

How about I leave it at this: as a fan of Tolkien I am glad that I watched it, as a fan of cinema, I don't really care, and as both, I don't intend to watch it again anytime soon - but that is not to say I will not watch it again ever. There are charms here, beyond a doubt, and it's far from the most ineffective Tolkien adaptation that's ever come around. But then, as of 1993, that wasn't much of a high bar to clear, was it?