Review: ‘The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug’

Here we go again, yet another nearly three-hour journey through the world of Middle Earth, as filtered through the sensibilities of Peter Jackson, filled with swords and monsters and walks over mountains and sorcery and all that other good stuff. This time we got “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” and what can we say about this movie that has not been said already in one way or another in one of the four previous Hobbit-Lord of the Rings related movies?

I can say this: enough already! And I did not say that before about the original trilogy based on The Lord of The Rings, because those movies were interesting and compelling and filled with danger and excitement and newness, and now all of these years later I just don’t give a shit about a bunch of dwarves and their quest to reclaim their homeland because we already saw a huge battle of good versus evil for the entirety of Middle Earth. I didn’t care about these dwarves a year ago, I don’t care about them now and I won’t care about them a year from now when the final (thank GOD!) Hobbit movie is released.

Yet here we are, we sat through another one of these things, despite the fact that the magic is gone. Splitting a 300-page book into three separate three-hour movies seemed like a bad idea when it was first announced, and now that we are two-thirds of the way through these movies…it still does not seem like the best idea ever. Really, if need be, the story of Thorin and his dwarf buddies could have been told over two movies, that would have been acceptable, but goodness gracious this was so not necessary. For example, there’s a ten to fifteen minute sequence in the movie in which the dwarves are captures by elves and we get to see Legolas again and his father whines and complains about something and refuses to help Thorin and just acts like a dick. And it is so boring!

Now this “Desolation of Smaug” movie is not nearly as boring and plodding as “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” Like other “second movies” in a trilogy, this one gets to skip most of the character introductions, because that was all handled previously, and now they can just jump straight into the action and get this tory going fast. But also like movies intended to set up a third film in a trilogy, this movie has a particularly annoying sudden stop, a cliffhanger ending designed not to provide satisfaction for watching the nearly three-hours that came before it but instead to try to entice people to watch the next installment. This isn’t a movie, it’s an advertisement.

Can this movie really be reviewed? I mean, we all know what these movies are all about at this point. Did people need convincing to go see the fifth Harry Potter movie? Were there folks who got in on the Twilight series on the fifth and final movie? This is another Hobbit-based Peter Jackson movie, it has all the fun action he is known for, all the beheadings of monsters that we’d expect from these borderline PG-13 flicks, all the bloat and overly long tangents of all Peter Jackson movies of recent years, state of the art special effects, forced perspective, it’s all there. Did you expect something different this time around? Did you want to be surprised by something in “The Hobbit?” Because that ain’t happening. Been there, done that, people.

Actually, they should have trimmed all of this down to one movie, maybe three hours long, but still one movie. Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins is pretty much the only thing with real life in these movies, and “The Hobbit” is Bilbo’s story anyway, not Thorin’s, so the dwarves could have been moved back to the background where they belong, and we should have just followed Bilbo and focused on him, as opposed to adding things to this story from other published works of author J.R.R. Tolkien or straight up just inventing characters to insert into the film. I get that Peter Jackson and his co-writers came up with a female elf for this movie because “The Hobbit” is one big ole sausage fest, but this character adds nothing to the overall story other than adding a female presence that really doesn’t do too much anyway other than fall in love with a dwarf (Elves and dwarves?! Why I never!)

All the Smaug the dragon stuff was pretty cool, I guess. But that’s all in the last twenty minutes of the movie anyway. You gotta get through some chase scenes and miles of exposition to get there first.

Oh well. See you same time next year.