The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
The middle member of any trilogy typically suffers from a lack of a clear beginning and ending. Unfortunately for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, this inherent issue is compounded by a clear sense that writer-director Peter Jackson (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) does not know what he wants his prequel trilogy to be.
On the one hand, The Desolation of Smaug is a comprehensively faithful adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit. Picking up after An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug finds Bilbo (Martin Freeman, The World’s End) and company nearing the Lonely Mountain, which contains the dwarves’ lost treasure and the treacherous dragon Smaug that guards it.
This plotline suffers most in this installment because it must compete for runtime alongside three tangential storylines of varying complexity and dramatic intensity. So, the main Middle-Earth heist movie thread frequently gets interrupted by Gandalf’s (Ian McKellen, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) adventures investigating rumors of Sauron’s return, fan-service wood-elf escapades and an extended and baffling glimpse at a political revolution brewing in a nearby town.
As a result, Bilbo and the dwarves undergo nearly zero character development — hacky love interest aside — while Gandalf’s story, the one interesting and important side plot, gets precious little screen time.
All of this comes to a head during the agonizingly drawn out and crushingly disappointing final hour of the film. Even going in with appropriately low expectations, it’s hard not to be heartbroken by the utterly limp way Jackson and company draw the line for the finale, There and Back Again.
The movie builds to roughly 12 different climaxes, each more deafening and numbing than the last, before tossing in a groan-inducing tease at the end to round things out.
Yet despite the immensely problematic story and writing issues, The Desolation of Smaug represents a sizable improvement over the first film. Unlike the silly camp of An Unexpected Journey and the serious, grim quest in The Lord of the Rings, The Desolation of Smaug captures a genuine sense of giddy adventure, especially in its first two, surprisingly fast hours.
Set pieces organically build off of one another — at least until we move to the final hour in Lake-town — while the embellished combat from The Lord of the Rings blends agreeably with the generally corny, kid-friendly gags.
To his credit, Jackson has refined his swirling camera movements immensely, from the now-iconic and mandatory landscape establishment shots to vertiginous, dizzying sweeps over unfathomably deep abysses.
However, he still makes frustratingly poor use of 3-D and CGI. The greenish tint from the 3-D glasses robs most of his images of vibrancy while the inexpertly combined digital and practical effects give the film a look that’s part high school amateur dramatics and part fantasy video game.
The Lord of the Rings’ sparing use of computer graphics added to the epic scope of its vistas, while The Desolation of Smaug’s excessive computer effects give everything, the titular dragon included, a feeling of weightlessness and plastic fakery.
It wouldn’t be surprising, though, if The Desolation of Smaug ended up being the best of the trilogy. Almost all of its flaws — the shoddy flow, jumbled plot and aesthetic imperfections — are endemic of Jackson’s approach to the whole trilogy rather than problems associated with this particular entry.
For its first two hours, The Desolation of Smaug manages to capture some of that elusive Middle-Earth magic before crashing back down to Earth like that stupid dragon under the mountain.
