Entry posted by Jean Valjean
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Before I watched this movie, I made a point of not seeing a single trailer. I walked out of the theatres and changed the channel whenever a trailer for The Desolation of Smaug came up. Therefore, I can respect anyone who doesn't want spoilers for this film and I will try to avoid them as much as possible, even though there are things in here that I would love to talk about specifically. The first part of this review will consist of general impressions on how the film felt, and the second part will lead into specific examples if I find that I simply can't help myself, in which case I will certainly warn you in advance of when you should stop if you aren't interested in hearing more about the film.
First and foremost, Smaug has a lot of action. If you went in expecting fireworks, you will definitely get the show you've been looking for. The concepts behind the sets are brilliant and the fight scenes are choreographed as only Peter Jackson could choreograph them. He's my ideal action director, seeing as he manages to compose action scenes that blend complexity, ingenuity, fantasy, and adrenaline all together while still making it all comprehensive and easy to follow. That's exactly how I like my action.
Their job of portraying Smaug, while not perfect, was very flashy and tremendously realized, so I think I think that visually most people will be pleased here. Everything about their fantasy is big and larger than life, made as cool as they could possibly make it, and they know how to revel in their fantastic elements. It's every bit the event film people would expect it to be and it reminds me a lot of The Avengers. In short, it's a popcorn flick.
That praise set aside, I do take certain issues with the film. People have been praising it as being better than the "boring" first installment of this trilogy, when I personally have to disagree. It starts off right in the middle of things and the film really doesn't have an actual ending. It's the cinematic equivalent to a sentence fragment, and as my uncle said, "It told the story it wanted to tell, but it wasn't a movie." He's right, since by the time the credits start rolling it feels like one big transition, like a television episode leading up to the season finale.
To make matters worse, there are five different plots going on in this film and not a single one of them is resolved. At least in An Unexpected Journey, the subplot of Bilbo's struggle to find acceptance within the group had its closure by the end of the film and they ended a note with just enough declining action to feel like it had concluded itself. With Smaug, however, I didn't get that, and to make matters worse there was definitely a subplot they added that wasn't in the book that could have easily run its course before the film was over. As it stands, this film doesn't feel like it has enough character of its own and is defined completely by the the upcoming third installment that will have to fill the gap left by the cliffhanger ending. Instead of feeling like The Hobbit, part II, it feels like part I of part III. It simply isn't a standalone film that stands as its own as a distinct phase in the telling of The Hobbit, and I think that Peter Jackson of all people could have got away with adding another twenty minutes to the movie to add some closure to the matter of Smaug before rolling the end credits. To be honest, I don't think a whole lot of people would have complained about having twenty extra minutes of an extraordinarily imagined dragon, and he could have ended on a far better climax that would have made for a more artistically sound movie experience.
This is, however, the smallest of my issues. The second-largest issue I have is that I'm questioning whether Peter Jackson was truly the right director for this film. He managed to get The Lord of the Rings perfect. I'm still amazed by those films. I am not, however, utterly amazed by The Hobbit so far. Normally with a movie of this magnitude, I can imagine the big names getting together and saying "Alright, if we're going to do this, we're going to do this right. We can't mess this up!" It doesn't seem that Peter Jackson is as determined now to get the "it" feel as he was before. Part of it is the excessive CGI, which truthfully bothers me more here than it did with the Star Wars prequels.
Yet, I think that the major reason why Jackson hasn't captured the feel that to me says "this is The Hobbit" is because he's directing this far too much like it's The Lord of the Rings. he's trying to capture all the same scale and all the same grandness of Return of the King, when it doesn't really work that way. To me, The Hobbit is supposed to be much, much smaller. As brilliant as these action scenes are, I knew they were contrived to fit in there. It feels like they're taking the book and going overly Hollywood with it, and as such some of the simple joy behind the adventure loses its charm and instead feels manufactured. It seems like Bilbo's adventure was anything but a simple fairytale, but rather a giant, sprawling epic with five different plots intertwining all together, and where everything is larger than life. There is nothing that is small and nothing that is subtle. I'm a little disappointed that this film never stepped back to take a breather. This is The Hobbit, not Lord of the Rings. I guess Jackson proved that you don't need a war for the fate of Middle Earth to find reasons to include fight scenes in your movie, but at the same time I have to wonder if could means should. I think not. I could have lived with it if Smaug was the only larger-than-life component of this film and if they had changed nothing about the way they portrayed him, but everything else could have been a little less packed and a little less grandeur. They could have taken joy in the subtler things that the book had to offer. In fact, I could have seen this film taking on a bit of inspiration from Matilda and A Christmas Story, which would have done far more justice to Tolkien's way of telling this tale.
That is to say, Bilbo's adventure was small enough that, when it was revealed that his ring was the Ring, it really opened a big door for a much larger story that made what happened before seem like a silly little thing in the past. The Fellowship of the Ring opened with a lot of simplicity that really showed the essence of who Bilbo was. Now, Smaug and the Hobbit trilogy thus far have done an excellent job of getting the right feel for its main character. Everything about Martin Freeman feels consistent with Ian Holm's Bilbo, but they could have focused on that more. Yet, The Hobbit trilogy is now feeling more like it should be called The Ensemble Cast of Larger-Than-Life Characters Trilogy. There's so much going on that it's easy to get lost and lose focus on the evolution of Bilbo Baggins. When there was a war for all of Middle Earth going on in The Lord of the Rings, it made more sense to have such a strong ensemble cast, but the point here is to focus The Hobbit on the hobbit! I want to see the evolution that the series takes as it turns into a story about one man to a story about the whole world, but they're really rushing it.
I suppose that's the problem with living up to the standards set by The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There's a pressure to repeat that success, and a certain set of expectations is there, whether spoken or not. I think Jackson feels obliged to make The Hobbit in a similar way as to how he made The Lord of the Rings. He's changed some elements of his style, of course, but if you look at the books, the difference in style between the series is even more significant. The Lord of the Rings is ultimately more mature reading that can, at times, get a little dry, and the films reflected that. The Hobbit was a book that was written for kids that was just deep enough adults could also enjoy it, whereas this film seems like it was made for adults, albeit young adults, and made just innocent enough that kids could also watch it. To be honest, though, I think that this film should have been made so that it was rated G. That's probably the simplest way I could describe the difference between what this film is and what I feel it should be in terms of directing style. It's PG-13, but it should have been G or PG at the very most. I think most people can instantly figure out what sort of vision would accompany that rating.
My biggest issue of the film, however, which is probably my most objective criticism, is that it undoes the tone set in the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. For those of you who saw An Unexpected Journey, which I'm assuming you have if you're reading this review, then you might have noticed that the Ring was played up a bit. They weren't too subtle about its future importance. In this film, nothing about that changes, and since he uses it as several times its importance is hinted at even more, if "hinted" is even the right word.
Here is where I start dropping spoilers, so if you don't want any of those, then this is where the review ends.
if you don't care about spoilers or if you have already seen the movie, then here's the issue: literally every single time the ring is brought up, it's treated as pretty ominous. You can hear it whispering to Bilbo, and you can see it effecting him already. There are already times when he doesn't act like himself, and it's always when he's wearing the ring. They already hit this point home in the first movie where Bilbo kept the ring a secret from Gandalf, but they did it again in Smaug to make it absolutely clear that the ring was the most important secret in the whole film and something Bilbo would drop out of character for. There was some whispering thrown in for good measure. For crying in the night, even Smaug takes his steady time to recognize that the ring is powerful and far more precious than gold, suggesting that its true nature is so extraordinary that its relevant even to a great dragon like him. In the book, it was treated as just a cool little trinket, but it's not treated that way in the movie at all. There's nothing cool about it, and as far as the narrative is concerned, it's only ever ominous.
Furthermore, Gandalf should know that the ring is important by now. He should have been perfectly aware that Bilbo was hiding something from him. Evne if he doesn't question that now, he will have to question it later. After all, Gandalf clearly knows now that Sauron is truly coming back to power. This knowledge seems to devalue the narrative of The Fellowship of the Ring, where Sauron's return didn't completely surprise Gandalf but wasn't something he was expecting, either. Now Gandalf is entirely aware of Sauron. He feuded with the other powers that be to look into the situation at Dol Guldur in the first movie, and now he went there himself. What did he find? Everything he could have possibly needed to know. He didn't just hear rumors about Sauron, but he fought with Sauron himself. As flashy and as awesome as that fight was, you would think that if Sauron was strong enough to kick Gandalf's butt he would also be strong enough to raise an army. Wait, he did that as well. What other evidence does Gandalf need in order to dedicate everything of himself between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring to preparing for the war for the future of all of Middle Earth? He saw Sauron on top of Sauron - literally. Okay, that moment, if you know what I'm talking about, was pretty cool. Still, there was nothing subtle about it at all. The backdrop of The Hobbit is revealed, making the revelation in The Fellowship of the Rings merely redundant, and it also completely messed with the plot. Are they planning on giving Gandalf a bump on the head or something?
We also know from The Fellowship of the Ring that Gandalf knew about Bilbo's ring. Either he knows about it already, in which case shame on him for letting Bilbo just blatantly withhold that information from him, or he will learn about it in There and Back Again. With what he knows now, he should know the moment he sees Bilbo's ring that it's the Ring. He really has no excuse. The importance of the ring is clear not just to the audience, but to the people within the movie.
There you go in a nutshell. That's the biggest problem with The Hobbit. It really assumes that you've seen The Lord of the Rings first and that you were part of that generation when it should have considered future viewers and made this under the assumption that this is the first the viewer has ever seen of Middle Earth and that this movie should be seen before Lord of the Rings. That, and it now created some major plot holes concerning who knows what and when they know it and creates inconsistencies with Lord of the Rings. I'm officially going to be one of those snobs who likes the book better.
Since I'm in a section full of spoilers, I have a few other miscellaneous criticisms. First, Legolas had awesome parcour ninja skills that he seemed to lose between this movie and The Lord of the Rings. His eyes were also rather disturbing and unreal. I'm not sure why they made them that way. Why not just make him look the way he looked in the past movies?
Second, that romance between Tauriel and Kili was incredibly awkward to watch. Perhaps it was their last-ditch effort to intrudice something in the film that felt smaller than everything else, but it was completely unnecessary. If I was an executive, I would have fought against this. I know that this will be the subject of a fan backlash and will become infamous in the future. Not as infamous as Jar-Jar Binks (who I enjoy, by the way), but still generally seen by the online community as a mistake. It was, after all, awkward. There's really no other word for it. I mean, a dwarf-and-elf romance that has no reason for happening whatsoever except for fanservice? It really has no place within this movie.
Third, I feel that this film could have used songs in it, like the first one. I thought "I See Fire" was going to be within the film itself. That it wasn't disappointed me. As I made it clear before, I think that this should have had a G-rated charm to it that it didn't have. Adding some songs to the movie would have been an excellent way of making this far more youthful and innocent than The Lord of the Rings. and also keeping a more consistent tone with An Unexpected Journey.
Fourth, I think that Smaug could have been done more justice. As I have said, he is the most perfect thing in this film. They didn't pull that old horror movie technique of only partially showing him. We got to see him in all his glory. His design was flawless and he was a spectacle to look at. I loved the way he moved and I loved the way he held himself. They also made him in such a way that he really could pull off some of the action scenes he was in. However, as far as the character went, I think they missed out on something. He is clearly very wise, but there were times when he simply acted incredibly stupid, and also times when his character was meant to be highly dangerous but he had moments of ADHD for plot convenience, such as in the very end when he decided to ignore Bilbo and the dwarves for the sake of hurting their feelings and killing the people in the town instead. That's pretty lame. Seriously, he could have been far more intimidating that what he was. As a familiar voice said earlier this year, "He wanted to exploit my savagery! Intellect alone is useless in a fight." Smaug, however, wasn't the type who was brilliant, ruthless, and would not hesitate to kill each and every one of them. And you know, maybe they could have passed that feline part off, but they just didn't deliver it with the power they could have. As charismatic as he is, Smaug is no Hannibal Lecter. If they were going to give him the type of personality that wouldn't pounce when he had the chance, at least give him some moments like Hannibal's that are going to make people want to rewatch those scenes and quote them again and again and again.
Finally, the final chase between Smaug and the band of misfits through Arabor was at times disjointed. The action was, for the most part, well-shot and I could tell what was going on, but often times I couldn't tell where the characters were. I really wanted to get for myself a sense of what Arabor was like, and where one location was with respect to another, but I didn't get that. It's a bit of a shame, because spacial context would have made the visual splendor of the rooms far more satisfying.
Spoilers end here.
Those are my praises and those are my issues. It's clear that The Desolation of Smaug does have a lot of problems and, artistically, can only receive so much critical acclaim. Still, even though it's not the best-made movie, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's an event film. It is, as I have said, a fireworks show, and in every way it delivers on that. If you were planning on watching it because it was going to be a simple, straightforward kind of entertainment, don't let these issue get in your way. I knew was going to watch in no matter what, too. Just be prepared not to come out convinced that you just saw a masterpiece that was everything it should have been.
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