Friday, December 13, 2013

The Hobbit 2: The Desolation of Smaug

There will be spoilers later in this review. There will be a clearly marked break.

The second installment of the Hobbit trilogy is a disappointment. I have been willing to give Peter Jackson the benefit of the doubt - when he added or changed things in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I always found excuses. I could always think of a reason for the change - pacing here, tension there. I am good at distinguishing between a book and a movie as two different media with different goals, strengths, and weaknesses. With some reservations, I rather liked the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Without a doubt, Jackson and Weta Workshop greatly improved the quality of all fantasy movies by setting a high bar.

I gave the first Hobbit movie a positive review, and I still like the film, but the things I didn't like then I like less now. Radagast is Jar-Jar level bad. Darth Maul was a better villain than Azog. In general the Hobbit trilogy is starting to remind me of Episodes 1-3, and this is not in any way a good thing.

So, what is good about this movie? The music remains excellent. I like what they did with Thranduil - he's arrogant and petulant in a way that seems very right. Some of the scenery is pretty. Benedict Cumberbatch is good as the voice of Smaug, and the parts of his interaction with Bilbo that are from the book are lovely. That's about it, honestly.

In the negative column, large parts of the story were rushed, and other parts expanded to ludicrous proportions. The action scenes were repetitive and interminably long. The 3D added absolutely nothing. More in the spoiler section.

Speaking of which, spoilers follow. Skip to the end for the ranking.
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To begin at the beginning, I actually didn't mind the flashback to Bree, except that there is something wrong with the perspective scale between Gandalf and Thorin. Beorn, on the other hand, is terrible. The book has a whimsical quality to it. The first movie had some of this, a lightheartedness, a sense of fun. The Beorn section of the book has this, especially in his introduction. This movie does not have it at all, anywhere, and especially not in the scene with Beorn. The best that can be said for this part of the movie is that Beorn is there, and he delivers some pretty good lines.
The time scale of this movie is horribly compressed. Everything happens much too fast. There is a sequence of the party walking through Mirkwood that implies some amount of time, but by appearances they go from the edge of the wood to the spiders to the elf prison all in the same day. This compression loses some of the grandeur of the journey. Sure, a number of things happen, but they all happen so fast that the sense of scale disappears. The river-crossing in the wood is cut completely, which is fine, but also missing is Bilbo's banter and taunting with the spiders. Instead, that scene is just another action sequence.
Meanwhile, there are the orcs. They served a purpose in the first movie, to provide urgency. In this movie, the party already has urgency - more than they should, on the compressed time scale. So the orcs just extend the running time and add action scene after action scene. The barrel ride is the most egregious example of this. They could have gone for long, beautiful helicopter shots of the barrels drifting down to Lake Town, with Howard Shore's score driving home the epic scope of the journey. Instead, we get a long, long fight scene which, while it has some inventive parts, largely consists of Legolas performing fan service.
I don't mind Legolas being in the movie. The character belongs in that place at that time. But he's basically a jedi in this movie, right up until he conveniently forgets that he has a bow in his - and I'm not kidding here - climactic fight scene with a named orc in the middle of Lake Town. Yeah, that happens.
I've heard a lot of preemptive complaints about Tauriel (also known as "the only female elf other than Galadriel"). In some ways, she is actually one of the better characters - she has motivations and emotions. On the other hand, giving her both a potential romantic involvement with Legolas and also a strong flirtation with Kili is a bit overboard.
And speaking of Kili, what was the point of splitting the party? I suppose we will find out in the last movie if there is some reason, but I don't expect to like it.
Bard is okay. I liked his family, and much of the interactions between people in Lake Town that didn't involve the Master. The Master and his lackey were ridiculous caricatures that I would like to ignore.
Finally, Erebor. In the book, as I recall, they spend a long time on the mountain looking for the door. Once they finally find it, Bilbo goes in and steals a cup. Smaug wakes up, notices the cup is missing, has a hissy fit, flies around and tries to burn the dwarves, then destroys the door when they take shelter, trapping them inside. He then flies off to Lake Town, and the dwarves don't actually find out what happens for a while. In the movie, there are chase scenes, and then more chase scenes, and then forges and a statue that defies physics and more chase scenes. Did I mention there are chase scenes? I'm guessing that Jackson wanted to make the dwarves more responsible for the outcome than they were in the book, but he went way, way overboard. Everything in Erebor took much too long and had no point, except for the parts that were actually in the book, which is to say Bilbo's conversation with Smaug. And even then, in the movie much of that conversation happens with Bilbo not wearing the ring, which is silly - Smaug should have just killed him. But the filmmakers backed themselves into a corner ten years ago by making the Ring so obviously linked to the spirit world.
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In conclusion, this is a deeply flawed movie that erodes any trust I still had in Jackson after he thought it was a good idea to cover Radagast in bird crap. I will still see the final movie next December, but I no longer have faith that the completed trilogy will be at all worthwhile.

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