14 December 2013 Last Updated on 14 December 2013
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is not a movie.
Well, technically it is. But only technically. It’s the second act of a movie. There’s no beginning or ending of a story, only a middle.
It could be argued at this point that The Desolation of Smaug is supposed to be a middle, but that’s not fair to all the other wonderful trilogies that have successfully managed to do more than just get us to the next movie. To cite a recent example, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire did this admirably. The Hobbit is proving the naysayers right: there is little reason for this to be a nine-hour trilogy.
When we left Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Gandalf (Ian McKellen), and the Dwarves at the end of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, they were on their way to the Lonely Mountain to reclaim the mountain and the treasure stolen by Smaug, the dragon. That’s where this installment picks up, and little else beyond their journey happens here. As said earlier, this really isn’t a story. It’s only the middle of one.
The journey does keep them traveling in a path that leads to some new characters. Notably included in this chapter are the elves. The Lord of the Rings favorite Legolas (Orlando Bloom) gets added in another attempt to link the two trilogies together. New character Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) gets plenty of screen time as well in a role that seemingly only consists of the love triangle scenes she was promised she wouldn’t have.
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug actually does do quite a number of things very well. As should be expected from any addition to this series, the things that are typically great are still just as great. The cinematography is absolutely breathtaking. We’ve certainly become spoiled in this regard, but it can’t be understated how nice it is to have the ability to just sit back and be in complete awe of the shots on screen. With the story (or lack thereof) being infuriatingly monotonous at times, it’s nice to have a fallback like this.
Howard Shore also turns in a typically masterful score. Sadly it builds more on the themes present from The Lord of the Rings than it does from An Unexpected Journey. While it would have been nice to build more from both, it’s easy to respect the choice to make this one stand on its own a bit more.
Across the board, the acting in the film is pretty solid. Nobody is given the time to truly shine, and it’s much more of an ensemble film than the title and source material would have you realize.
Unfortunately, once you step away from the more technical aspects of the film, it’s easy to see that there are problems, and lots of them. If this was the first film of the franchise you’ve seen, it’d be impossible to have any idea what was going on as very little is explained again.
There really isn’t a story. The dwarves are just running from one obstacle to the next, and what time is spent not running or fighting is really just set up for the next time running and fighting. Granted, some of the action sequences are really cool, but there are so many of them that they’re just exhausting by the time the movie is only half over. It’s unfortunate as the scenes at the end, the scenes with Smaug, are really cool.
Where An Unexpected Journey succeeded in a way that The Desolation of Smaug was unable was in the character development department. The previous film was about the dwarves coming to trust Bilbo. This time, none of the characters really seem to develop in any way.
The characters do a lot of nothing. There’s a point when Bilbo does something that you realize you haven’t really seen him much. So much for it being The Hobbit. Gandalf continues to do a lot of realizing of the impending doom that will be coming. None of it is much different than in the previous installment.
At this point, it’s getting easier to see that there really is no reason that this trilogy needed to be split into three separate three hour films. Sure it does lead to some cool fan service that we wouldn’t be privy to otherwise, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a good movie. Here, it certainly doesn’t. Though Peter Jackson may say that The Hobbit needed to be a trilogy, it’s probably just about the Benjamins.
Grade: C-
Rated: PG-13 (for extended sequences of intense fantasy action violence, and frightening images)
The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens in theaters on December 13, 2013.
Source:
http://www.mockingjayhungergames.com/the-hobbit-the-desolation-of-smaug-movie-review-undoubtedly-a-trap/