[SPOILERS, SWEETIE]
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[Even Hobbits fail their Stealth role when walking on piles of gold. Who knew?]
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Well, let' start out with what went right. Jackson and his team have built a world with a consistent, expected texture and presence that not only works, but which gives him a firm foundation upon which to tell his stories. And where he's working with the source material, he does a marvelous job embellishing and enriching it. Beorn, the Spiders, the Wood King's hall (and the Wood King himself), Lake Town, the secret door, Bilbo's encounter with Smaug, even the escape by barrel all are stirring renditions given added depth and, even when pushed far beyond the original, were something I enjoyed.
As soon as Jackson deviates from the story, though, things start to go off the rails. I understand and appreciate that the dwarves in the original are largely passive, slogging characters, even Thorin. They march, they get captured by goblins, they're sprung by Gandalf, they run, they get trapped by goblins, they're rescued by eagles, they march, they get captured by spiders, they get sprung by Bilbo, they get captured by wood elves, they get sprung by Bilbo, they march up to Erebor, they send in Bilbo, then they stand by while Smaug heads off to level Lake Town.
So it's okay that the dwarves are actually doughty fighters, that they mix it up some with the orcs, even that they mix it up with Smaug a bit themselves. But that latter big set piece felt .. way too goofy. I mean, big, impressive, cinematically wild and crazy, but plot-wise just zany (and in-movie-technically highly implausible).
Also, I understand the sense that (Galadriel aside), this is an all-male cast leading to the introduction of Tauriel. Three cheers and all that. But her story line and sudden besottednes is just wretchedly executed; Evangeline Lily is fine, but her story arc is enough to make me wish that we hadn't had a specific token female character.
Also, I understand wanting to up the stakes and tension by having this orcish search-and-destroy team in pursuit of Thorin & Co., but not only is it a huge number of orcs to the purpose (for all the ones who get gacked at each step along the way), but it's one more distracting plot element amongst so many others, all to introduce yet another Big Bad Orc (since Azog is busy elsewhere) and someone for Legolas to fight with later on. (Plus, um, how the hell did Bolg have a Warg parked by the front gate to Lake Town?). It all just feels like random conflict to throw at the audience to keep the action going.
Also, I understand that the Wood Elves and the Dwarves need to have a big conflict going on. That's just canonical Tolkien. But this gets dicey in two aspects: Legolas acting like a racist jerk (in a way that's difficult to understand how he'll turn into a much milder jerk in LotR), and Tauriel getting all dewy-eyed over Kili (for reasons that would be difficult to understand under normal circumstances, but seem downright railroaded given that whole elf/dwarf thing).
One potential conflict between the current tale and the later "Lord of the Rings" is handling the Ring. In "The Hobbit" (the book), it's simply a convenient Ring of Invisibility, but that can't be the case here, especially since the Necromancer / Sauron is on the rise. To some degree that aspect is played well here (flashes of Sauron-eye and the like cropping up for poor Bilbo), but not in a consistent fashion, and Bilbo ends up using the Ring a lot less when confronting Smaug (or all the other shenanigans later on with Smaug and the Dwarves) than it feels he should — not so much because it makes sense character- or story-wise (indeed, in the original book he spends most of this time in Smaug's chamber wearing the ring), but because one gets the impression that Jackson didn't want all the Bilbo scenes in Ring-o-Vision.
(On the other hand, Bilbo's first taste of Ring Obsession vs. the Spiders is very nicely done.)
That raises the last of the "invented" bits, all the goings-on down at Dol Guldur. There's some of this that's canonical (in various appendices and other locations in Tolkien's writings), but the particulars are, I believe, pretty much invented by Jackson et al. for this film … and, frankly, they just don't work. Gandalf pokes his nose in and gets in deeper trouble than he can handle … Aaaagain. While some of the Necromancer/Sauron FX are nice (the Eye/Figure-in-the-Eye are nicely designed), unless Gandalf has some master plan in mind, his stepping into what he knows as a trap feels like manipulative writing rather than a grand plot by the Big Bad.
(Plus, it's the one time ever that people ignore Gandalf — "meet me there and don't go in!" — where it turns out … that ignoring him was the right thing to do.)
Worse, aside from being a big set piece (Big! Spikey! Castle!), there's not much to the whole thing. We get next to zero personality or character from the episode, just a lot of Gandalf grunting and Big FX. What should be an amazing and noteworthy exercise of power feels cramped and manipulative.
The final big misstep was the ending. Frankly, the movie didn't feel long at that point, and the action was clearly rising to the big confrontation between Smaug and Bard at Lake Town. But the cut-off, as presented, was premature. Dramatic structure requires some level of victory, only to having things turn into defeat (or, at least, a recognition that the biggest struggle is yet to come). Luke & Co. have escaped from the trap on Bespin, but the Empire remains and Han needs to be rescued. Helms Deep has been won, but a far greater challenge lies ahead against the forces of Mordor. Hobbit 2 has had no such victory / respite; driving off Bolg hardly counts, and there's no sense of victory in having survived (or even "driven off") Smaug, since the (gooftastic) giant gold statue plan was a bust. As a result, after frenetic action and desperate measures, things just …
… end.
Now, with all that, remarkably, I didn't dislike this movie. There's a lot here to recommend it in texture and concept, and a lot of individual moments, visuals, speech, facial expression music. And, fergoshsakes, it's a HOBBIT MOVIE. It would have to be truly wretched for me to reject the whole thing.
But …
… there are some significant missteps here that definitely get in the way of unalloyed enjoyment for me. I can understanding wanting to expand the book to two movies — and even the desire to go to three. But the material that was made up from whole cloth to do that extension simply doesn't cut it. And that's a darned shame.
A ★★★½ review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
What went wrong with “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”? Well, let’ start out with what went right. Jackson and his team have built a world with a consistent, expected texture and presence that not only works, but which gives him a firm foundation upon which to tell his stories. And where he’s working with the source material, he does a marvelous job embellishing and enriching it. Beorn, the Spiders, the Wood King’s hall (and the Wood King him…
http://boingboing.net/2013/12/13/the-desolation-of-tolkien.html makes a note I forgot to include: the "disappearance" of Bilbo as a growing, interesting, focus-of-story character.
I'm over Peter Jackson wizzing all over the works of JRR Tolkien.
I just know that someone is going to edit the whole mess back into one movie, and I look forward to that. But I am so beyond burned out on trilogies for trilogy's sake.
+Clinton Hammond I wouldn't couch it in that way. I think Jackson loves and even respects the material. He just doesn't love wisely … especially in this case.
Like JJ Abrams "respects" Star Trek… Or a baby "respects" a diaper…
If Peter Jackson respected the work of JRR Tolkien he'd be paying the family fairly.
+Brittany Constable I think a pair of movies would have been just about right.
+Brittany Constable after the crapfeat that was the first movie, my plan is to torrent the blue ray extended editions when they're released, watch them I once, delete them and wait for a faneditor to carve The Hobbit out of this Peter Jackson wank-a-thon…. Like "Spicediver" did with Dune 😉
+Clinton Hammond I have no big problem with the JJ Abrams "Star Trek" stuff, either.
"Paying the family fairly" is a Warner Bros / New Line issue, not something Jackson is responsible for.
Nice dodge… If Peter Jackson was so invested, if he cared so much he'd MAKE it happen… He doesn't care… The way he rubs his stank all over the stories makes that obvious.
Honestly, I think the love and respect for the material is what kills the movie. Adaptations are hard, and movies just do not have a lot of space. I've been down that road, and it usually goes something like this.
Reasonable, non-fan person who's just trying to make a movie: We need to cut this, it's dragging things down and it doesn't make sense in our context.
Fanwanky writer: But that's my favorite part! I lurve it so! We have to find a way to squeeze it in!
I've actually been on both sides of that conversation, and neither is particularly fun. You want to respect the source material, but the movie has to work on its own merits.
Maybe you'll be interested in reading this… I donno.
http://www.worldcrunch.com/mobile/#a:10299&id2=3
+Brittany Constable Sure, I can see both sides of that. And there are factors at work in a movie and its pacing that simply aren't there with a book, and adapting The Hobbit is going to carry with it the world-building baggage of the LotR movies (and rightfully so).
I would have been disappointed with a Hobbit cut down to a single movie. I agree with Jackson's desire to broaden the settings to include more detail of "what was going on beyond Bilbo's eyeballs" — heck, even Tolkien made changes to the tale in later days to tie it to LotR. There are very good reasons for pretty much everything that strikes me as problematic that PJ did in this film. It's not the reasons, but the direction/execution for addressing those reasons that I think were less than successful.
Tolkien changed a few lines in one chapter of The Hobbit so that Bilbo acquiring the Ring was more consistent… He didn't add chapters and characters and idiotic rabbit drawn sled chase scenes. He surely didn't add thinly veiled endorsements of drug use….
I totally agree with +Brittany Constable on this one, Hobbit should have been one movie, not three. Even two I think would've been too much, IMO.
Frankly, I disagree with the adding of material that was beyond Bilbo's eyeballs because The Hobbit is supposed to be written by Bilbo. It is his story and all this added stuff is just noise. Even the world-building is redundant. The beauty of The Hobbit, in my opinion, is that the LOTR series did all the world-building for us, so now all that is left is the story, we don't need the world building.
I would love to see a fan-edit where all three films are cut down to a single film, even if that film was 3h long.
+Clinton Hammond Christopher Tolkien's lament invokes sympathy, but authors often feel that way over adaptations of their work. That those adaptations have been so successful as to overshadow the original is less common.
On the other hand …
_"Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time," Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. "The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."_
… strikes me as a bit much. The original works remain, as lovingly (or obsessively) curated by C Tolkien, and will provide "aesthetic and philosophical impact" to those who seek them out.
Try to find a copy of the books that aren't slathered in images from the movies … Chris's solution to turn away strikes me as not enough.
+Clinton Hammond So the books (presently) have images from the movies on the covers? Woe!
Of course, I just picked up an audiobook copy of The Hobbit with Bros Hildebrant picture of Smaug on the cover.
In another dozen years, there will be different cover imagery.
It's indicative of how the movie imagery supplants the original with a glut of garbage marketed to the population… Tea cosies and tablecloths and tourist package deals and socks and bogroll, all with Peter Jackson's Middle Earth all over it…. All the way to the bank, bypassing the estate of the family that creates the world in the first place…. That high pitched whine is JRR spinning in his grave.
It remains my hope that Peter Jackson chokes on it.
YMMV
That happens to every damn book that gets released as a movie. I refuse to buy any book with a movie poster on the cover just on principle, and sometimes it seems like an impossible task.
I’m really surprised you used The Empire Strikes Back as an example of “some level of victory.”
The good guys lose in that movie. Full Stop.
Luke loses his hand and finds out the Big Bad is his dad.
Han’s trapped, frozen, close to dead, and lost.
The few people who survive scramble to escape the clutches of the Empire, manage to do so, and THAT is the ONLY bright spot in the whole thing: no one important is technically dead. That’s it.
@Doyce – Don’t underestimate the value of “escape”. Indeed, that’s the victory condition for the entire movie as spelled out in the opening crawl: the Empire is seeking the Rebels in general (and Luke specifically). By the end, not only have the Rebel forces escaped, but even though the Empire had its mitts on Our Heroes, all but Han have gotten away (Luke’s flight being a particular victory against all of Vader’s plans). It’s not a happy victory, certainly, but the final scene aboard the medical carrier is not one of desperation and defeat and loss, but resolve and action.
It may be delusional, but it feels like a victory, in a way that the end of Hobbit 2 does not, cliff-hanger or not.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
+Brittany Constable I go to some effort to do the same, regardless of the movie/book.
Two words (or one?): Rankin-Bass. Except for the Elves.
+Scott Randel I dearly love the R-B "Hobbit". The visuals are a bit 1977 trippy (yes, including the Elves), but so be it. It is, arguably, a closer tonal rendition to the original (as heavily abridged to 77 minutes) than the Peter Jackson films.
That said, I'm able to enjoy both, for their own reasons.