Before going forward, an important spoiler warning: this article assumes that you've seen An Unexpected Journey and have read The Hobbit, and takes no pains to avoid spoilers for either. As such, it will spoil not just the movie and the book, but probably also many elements of the next two Hobbit films. If you haven't read the books and want to be surprised by the next two movies, do not pass beyond this point.

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit when I was no more than eight or nine years old. The Lord of the Rings trilogy followed when I wasn't much older than that. I continue to make a point of reading through all of the books (and their appendices, at least the ones that aren't concerned with Elvish grammar) at least once every couple of years or so—even making it through The Silmarillion two or three times. I haven't read every posthumously published scrap about Middle Earth that Tolkien's son has seen fit to compile and publish, but my credibility as a Tolkien nerd should go unquestioned.

Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Social Editor Cesar Torres, Lead Developer Lee Aylward, and I will all be discussing An Unexpected Journey, the first of Peter Jackson's long-awaited Hobbit film adaptations, on Friday's upcoming episode of the Ars Technicast. In the meantime, I wanted to really examine the film as it relates to The Hobbit and also to Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, then distill the many mixed reactions I had during and after the movie into something a bit more coherent. As a fan of both, I've been awaiting An Unexpected Journey with some excitement, but more apprehension: on the one hand, it's a chance to revisit Jackson's lovingly rendered film version of Middle Earth. On the other, a much-criticized decision to make The Hobbit into three movies has only exacerbated fears that it would be a cash grab lacking in the care and craft that went into either the books or the first film trilogy. I ultimately came away disappointed in the movie, but not in the way I thought I would be.

Cut from the same cloth

Let's start with the good stuff.

The Hobbit was first published in 1937: 17 years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955, before much of the world-building that Tolkien did for those books and the posthumously published The Silmarillion had been thought out. Despite numerous (and sometimes quite substantial) edits for the book's second and third editions, this means The Hobbit at times feels a bit disconnected from the rest of the Middle Earth legendarium. There are hints of things wider and deeper sprinkled throughout the book as it exists today—there's a mention of Moria, and the Necromancer who factors into some of the book's subplots is in fact Sauron himself. However, where the events of The Lord of the Rings are often tied directly to people, places, and things from bygone Ages, the world of The Hobbit is significantly smaller.

One of An Unexpected Journey's strengths, then, is that it better integrates The Hobbit with the rest of the canon. Locations like Rivendell, identical to its Lord of the Rings counterpart, and the presence of characters not even named in the book (Saruman and Galadriel, among others, with Orlando Bloom set to return as Legolas in at least one of the next two films) make the stories feel more like they're pieces of the same whole.

The tone of the movie is also a step forward in this regard. The events of The Hobbit occur on a much smaller scale than in LOTR—the fate of the world hangs in the balance in the latter and it's hard to have higher stakes than that. The movie versions of The Hobbit's events are rendered with an epicness consistent with the LOTR movies. The integration and fleshing out of narrative threads that either appear elsewhere in Tolkien's work or are only summarized in The Hobbit itself—the war of the dwarves in Moria, the threat of the Necromancer—make the story feel more significant. There are some parts of The Hobbit that aren't really built to support all of this added weight, but we'll get into that more in a bit.

Characters who would go on to appear again in LOTR are also lighter in the earlier book—The Hobbit's Gandalf is more flighty than his LOTR counterpart, and LOTR's ever-somber Elves are merry to the point of silliness in The Hobbit. The movie version again smooths out these inconsistencies, bringing the Hobbit characters who appear in both books more in line with their LOTR renderings.

A sense of place

Another strength of An Unexpected Journey— and Jackson's Tolkien adaptations in general—is its rendering of Middle Earth's locations. The movies take locations like Erebor (which by Tolkien's descriptions seems like