Review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) by Ronald B — 27 Jun 2016

After starting on an unexpected journey, we jump back a year to the forced inclusion of the village of Bree. After an excessively familiar camera-dolly through said village (Featuring an excessively familiar director eating an excessively familiar vegetable) we arrive in an excessively familiar tavern, but instead of four hobbits, we get one dwarf, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage).

After getting some unpleasant looks from seemingly unpleasant patrons, Thorin has a "chance meeting" with Gandalf the Wizard (Ian McKellon). Backstory is explained (For those of us less familiar with Tolkien's work, or for those who do not remember the previous movie) and we get back to where An Unexpected Journey left off: Thorin, joined by Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), and the whole company of dwarves (Too many to name check here) going "there" (To the lonely mountain), which is what the first two-thirds of this movie depict: Getting there, at least when the story doesn't switch to Gandalf's exploration of the various Nazgul sites and paraphernalia.

However, unlike An Unexpected Journey, there is much less backstory explained. After that, the pace is shaky, but not as shaky as An Unexpected Journey, and it all makes sense in the grand scheme of Middle Earth.

Before they venture into the forest of Mirkwood where they meet elves new and familiar, they lodge with a skin-changer named Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt). Beorn then aids them because he hates orcs more than dwarves.

In Mirkwood, things get weird, and after Legolas (Orlando Bloom) rescues the dwarves, we get a little LOTR foreshadowing, and then dwarves imprisoned. After Bilbo frees them, what follows is an exciting action sequence out of a minor event in the book.

After business at Laketown, we finally get to "there" in "There and Back Again," which is truly most of the excitement of this three-movies-for-one-book story. The visuals throughout are of overly-fake-CGI-villains chasing the group, so much so that it is too easy to tell real sets when you see it.

The spectacle here is the dragon himself, Smaug (Voiced and motion-captured by Benedict Cumberbatch), whose enormity falls utterly short of the marketing campaign. It is also worth it to endure the first two hours of this three-plus hour Act II of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit.

The scenes where Gandalf explored Dol Guldor were cool LOTR backstory, but that kind of story felt better left to another, non-film medium, like a comic book series (Star Wars does it for smaller stuff that's canon).

Howard Shore's score proves to be as strong as ever in these pre-LOTR sequences, and also does its job in the parts of The Hobbit that are actually from The Hobbit. Don't worry parents, your kids will get their crude humor fix, but not as big a fix as An Unexpected Journey had.

Overly long, and excessively not original-source-material, The Desolation of Smaug will desolate your need for a solid Hobbit movie from a bloated adaptation of a fairly small book.