The Desolation of Smaug
I’ve been avoiding writing this review , because I’m going to have to say things that I don’t want to say. It actually borders on physical pain for me to commit these words to the digital record, so this review is going to be kind of short. But in the end, it’s my role as a reviewer of all things nerdy to speak the truth as I see it, and the truth is this: The Desolation of Smaug kind of sucked.
There were some good parts, of course. Smaug himself was fantastic. Jackson preserved the dialogue from the book almost wholesale, which was the correct choice, as it needed no rewriting. Cumberbatch served up a set eating performance on the scale of Jeremy Irons, and it was fun to see he and Martin Freeman playback and forth in roles other than Sherlock and Watson. The CGI in the scenes with the dragon was flawless – in particular the scene where Smaug crawls over the dwarves, dropping coins on them.
Thranduil was also great. There really isn’t anything in The Lord of the Rings to explain why the elves in The Hobbit were a bunch of drunken shitheads. Jackson did a good job of providing a reasonable explanation for the difference in demeanor between the novels, though he did focus on them a bit too much. The scene with Thranduil’s scars added a bit to the story without detracting from the text. Unlike basically everything else in the film. Especially Legolas. No more fucking Legolas.
If I were to talk about what was bad in the movie, we’d be here all day, so I’ll try to just cover the highlights. For starters we have the dwarf elf love story. No, just no. The acting for this was just terrible, and the writing even worse. This was a love story on the scale of true love between thirteen year olds – three minutes of conversation leading to declarations of undying love.
Bombur’s barrel- ride was equally ridiculous. It might have fit if the overall tone of the movie was more fun, rather than filed with the same gravity as Lord of the Rings. One or two bounces would have been fine, but the scene played out like an old Hudson Nintendo game, bouncing on bad guys in your barrel until you get a power up and enter spin mode.
The whole scene in Lake Town was confusing and mostly unnecessary. The political situation between Bard and The Lord Mayor made no sense, and seemed completely arranged to turn Bard into Aragorn. Then suddenly the Mayor’s men just start chasing Bard because he was out on the street – why in the hell did that even happen? Nothing changed that would suddenly make it a crime for Bard to be on the street. They knew where he lived, why not just go there and arrest him, instead of standing on the street asking questions for some mysterious reason?
The worst sin, however, was the completely misplayed tone of the film. It took the few overly dramatic parts of Unexpected Journey, blew them up, and got rid of all of the heartwarming team building parts. The tone of the Hobbit is supposed to be much more innocent than The Lord of the Rings, and by injecting the “epic” feel of the trilogy, we see just how much stretching the story into three movies weakens it. This film really had me feeling that it should have been two movies and not three. There really isn’t anything worse to feel about a movie than the sense that it should never have been made, and that was what I was left with after Desolation of Smaug. It was no Phantom Menace , but it was worrying enough that I’m very nervous about the third installment. Lets keep our fingers crossed.
I thoroughly hated the movie. While I don’t necessarily like any creative license, I can generally overlook them when this kind of a novel is filmed. However, this movie is such a disappointment, Jackson should have just rewrote the whole thing and not even bothered with any direct story points.
Original Tolkien lore, themes, or plot points that are completely changed:
Orcs do not willingly go into or function in sunlight. The half orcs of the White Hand created by Saruman on the previous trilogy were an exception.
The mountain orcs in The Hobbit do no appear again until near the end of the movie.
Beorn is not a lone figure but part of a race of men that have populated the region between The Misty Mountains and Mirkwood for centuries.
Bard was a captain of Archers. Though there may have been political intrigue in Laketown, Bard was no common peasant that partakes in smuggling.
The Wood Elf King was an isolationist, pure and simple. In fact, all elves are basically isolationists. The races of Middle Earth are splintered from Ages of political intrigue.
Legolas does not appear in The Hobbit, though he surely would have been somewhere within the Kingdom, and therefore could have appeared without being named. He certainly did not appear in Laketown.
Bilbo was very stealthy and was not directly discovered by Smaug. There was no battle with the dragon within the mountain.
The White Council moved against Dol Guldur, not Gandalf alone. Sauron fled as his fortress of Baradur was prepared in secret. The purpose of Dol Guldur was simply as a distraction so he could prepare Mordor for his return.
There are many other smallers changes, many of them springing from the major points above. All of these make this film completely different from the story it used to be.
As such, I don’t care to see the last film at all. Frankly, I’m sick of action-fests that ignore character development, plot and good story telling. Can you imagine if Jackson remade The Godfather? There’d be constant gun battles, and hordes of buttonmen would pop up to be skillfully dispatched by the main characters. Of course, there’d be a female mobster included that is “badass”. I’m nauseous at the thought.
I also wonder that almost every review of this film that rates it highly uses verbage such as “awesome, badass, and cool”. Are the hordes of film patrons that simple? Sadly, it is truly the case and the entire reason film is so poorly made. I kept getting the eerie feeling I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean in Middle Earth.
If you haven’t seen Desolation of Smaug, do yourself a favor and don’t bother. I’ll never watch it again, even on the telly.