The Desolation of Smaug: Movie Review
Written by Jonah Librande, Former Student on Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Think of your favorite place to play when you were a child, but imagine it is now a Walmart. Actually, you don’t have to imagine it, because that is how it feels watching Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The posters tell that Martin Freeman is the “star” as the Bilbo Baggins, but the person you’ll see the most of is Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in the film’s fantasy setting. While the book is somewhat dreamlike and relaxed, the movie tends toward action-packed, and you should go in expecting as much.
In this installment of the Jackson Milk-O-Rama, the movie has been broken off from the last film to maximize profits. The movie starts with a brief visit to a moody shapeshifter that seems to barely avoid speaking in clichés. They then travel through the treacherous Mirkwood, fighting off the fauna only to get captured by surprisingly malevolent elves. The adventurers escape to a town on a lake, restocking their supplies before traveling to the Lonely Mountain for an utterly climactic confrontation with the dragon Smaug (pronounced, in the movie, as smuh-AOW-guh).
It took me a while to pin down what really bothered me about this movie, but I realized it is the lack of whimsicality. The book The Hobbit is a fantasy book, not an action book. We get to see something altogether different from the daily grind. The movie seems to forsake this in place of a shot of hardcore adrenaline right into the vena cava. Sure, it might deliver well on the action, but the certain ‘magic’ that the book had is sacrificed for it. Instead of Tolkien’s flowing narrative and vivid view of Middle Earth, we instead see a chubby midget kill Orcs from a barrel. Where’s the magic in that?
Jackson can also afford to know what is a movie, and what is filler. The movie runs for a whopping two hours and forty-one minutes. This is in addition to the two hour, fifty minute runtime of the first movie, which is absurd. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was three movies, one for each book, which proves that the material in one book can be covered in one three-hour movie. Worse than that, Jackson is the guy who proved it! What reason could he give for these absurd runtimes? The content better not be his excuse, because it is certainly not his best work. Much of the material is extraneous, such as the multiple cameos by characters in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and some strange relationship between one of the dwarves and an elf. It doesn’t add more; it stretches the actual content too thin and bores the viewer with something that was decidedly not intended by Tolkien.
If my hand was forced, and I had to give this movie a rating, the absolute best I could give it would be a 5/10. I went in hoping to see the broad-scope and majesty of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but I instead found myself in the one movie that could bore me with too much action for too long. There was a chance, somewhere along the line, where the film’s creators could have realized that The Hobbit was never about action, and changed course. Sadly, they kept their action film, and I would suggest you keep your money and see a different movie.
