Review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) by John P — 28 Dec 2014

I guess this is one way to dragon a story like this. Get it? Drag-on! GET IT? Ah well, I'm tired and just about done with these reviews as I start fresh with the New Year that is fast approaching. So the Desolation of Smaug is yet another chapter from The Hobbit book where it entails Bilbo and the Dwarves squaring off with the big bad dragon himself and the journey to get there and back again. Leave it to someone like Peter Jackson to stretch out a three hundred page book like this and turn it into a trilogy of epicness. However I am starting to admire his work, because it just keeps getting better and better with every minute that unfolds in this film. Not to mention adding new characters and stories into an already classic fantasy world that makes it all the more merrier for fans. This is the part of the movie what everyone wanted to see and that is the dwarves and Bilbo going head-to-head with their nemesis Smaug and holy crap does it not disappoint. Oh and they also encounter forest spiders, wood elves, lake people, and various other things along the way. How well does it continue to hold up?

The visual effects and the background of everything continue to amaze me. I especially enjoyed the hell out of how Smaug how the way he looked, his one-on-one dialogue with Bilbo Baggins, and the voice work that is done by Benedict Cumberbatch is absolutely amazing. There is even some great moments in here where with Gandalf trying to take on Orcs on his own only to get his ass handed to him by the Necromancer. One of the drawbacks I will have to say is that while the title is called The Hobbit, Bilbo is upstaged a bit in a lot of scenes from Legolas and the wood elves to Thorin and the dwarves. I mean Legolas almost steals the show in here along with the other chick elf Tauriel who are both bad asses to the core. The action scenes do carry on a bit too long in some spots, but in the end the payout does its job. The CG from the orcs does seem a little too much at times as well and that is mostly because in the original LotR trilogy the makeup from those orcs were a lot better and had less CG. Overall, this is another nice staple in the trilogy the sets everything up for the finale for part three.