Nerd Movie Reviews

The Hobbit: the Desolation of Smaug in 3D

The Desolation of Tolkien

I have been watching a lot of Supernatural lately.  I thought it would bug me and have avoided it to date but have discovered it actually quite fun.  I think the main thing that kept me from watching was the fact that “I’d like to buy a vowel” McG is listed as executive producer and I’d rather support a new Black Plague before his film career (for lack of a better term).  However it turns out you cannot do as much damage to your audiences upper brain functions as a TV executive producer then as the director of a really crappy movie.  (Smaug image courtesy of the Movie T Shirt category)

If you haven’t watched the Winchester brothers solve their paranormal Ghostbusters-esque mysteries than you should know about half the time the villain turns out to be the angry spirit of a long dead human.  This spirit usually died in violence or deep emotional distress, although occasionally it is some kind of betrayal or failure to uphold a principle that has angered it.  I honestly think that in the world of Supernatural these Hobbit movies would motivate the ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien to rise up from the grave and gruesomely murder everyone involved with the production and distribution, right down to the ushers at the theaters.

The Lord of the Rings movies were a true hommage to the spirit and story of the series.  Peter Jackson took the rather dense and florid prose and crafted a wondrous tribute that cut out all the dross and left us with a glorious experience.  In the Hobbit it appears he took all that dross and cultivated it in a fermentation tank, growing it to massive proportions and rancidity.  He then took his product and injected it into a fairly light children’s dungeon crawl, bloating it to elephantine size and mobility.  Bottom line, like trying to wear a condom as a stocking there just isn’t enough material to cover the subject.   Tolkien never intended the Hobbit to be as critical and important as any of his other books and in truth seemed to want it to just be fun.

(Note-if any of you blowhards want to tell me that a lot of what is in this movie came from the Silmarillion let me remind you that TOLKIEN DID NOT WRITE THE SILMARILLION!  After his death his son collected all his notes and composed them into another money grab.  By the way, if you are looking for a challenge try actually read the Silmarillion.  It is some of the worst writing ever and if you manage to finish it be sure to stop by the mens room of your local Greyhound station to collect your prize as the Most Boring Person of the Year)

That being said it is a distinct improvement over the first Hobbit.  It is more cohesive, has (some) improved character development, and none of the CGI looked like animated Colorforms glued to the inside of the camera lens.  However, where this film is a distinct improvement is not in what it has, but rather in what it has not.  Let me illustrate:

No singing.

I guess Peter took a moment to actually watch his first film and realized that the dwarfs singing was not going to win any Grammys or start a new musical revolution.  Perhaps he heard the gestalt consciousness of humanity screaming in pain as he subjected us to his slow motion eardrum assault.

No Aragorn.

This film wears the characters and situations of the LOTR films like a teenager pasting his pubes to his face in order to simulate facial hair so he can get into a nightclub.  I suspect the producers have had many serous meetings over the fact that the title of these films does not actually have the words “lord”, “of”, or “rings” in it (fortunately the word “the” is covered) and based on the assumption that we are all complete inbred idiots feel the need to constantly remind us of the fact that this movie comes from the same source material.  This is done with the grace and subtlety of a car battery electroshock treatment to the testicles and gets increasingly annoying as the series progresses.  Rumor has it that Viggo Mortensen was approached with some flimsy pretext for including him in this story but wisely decided that was just stupid.  Would that Orlando Bloom had made the same decision.

No Gollum.

See above, but I could easily see them shooting a scene where Gollum leaves the Misty Mountains in despair searching for his precious.  You know, in case we forgot that he later throws Bilbo under the bus with Sauron.

No mismatched voices.

Remember how in the last film the Goblin King sounded suspiciously like an Oxford professor rather than an actual goblin?  I don’t know about you but that voice really took me out of the movie.  In this film the voice of Smaug sounds as completely evil and bad ass as you could ever hope to have happen.  Props to Bernard Cumberbatch on that.

Less Radagast.

It’s ironic that Radagast’s color is brown, as he is the literal turd in the punchbowl of this series.  Like George Lucas with Jar Jar Binks Peter Jackson finally listened to the audience and opted to keep his presence to a minimum, although again like Lucas he still opted to crowbar a cameo in as a big F you to the audience for not falling in love with this animal excrement sodden countenance.

Less Azog the Defiler.

I guess the producers decided since they already had one ginormous super villain with a cool, evil cultured voice in Smaug they didn’t need to keep shoving a character who had no actual part in the book back in our faces.  Like Radagast he makes an appearance but then hands off chasing of the dwarves to one of his hench-orcs.  For the record most of the villains the dwarves encountered in the book were just rolls on the Wandering Monster Table, but again I guess our soft brains would never accept a goblin army just showing up at the end of the story to steal gold without some connecting master villain.  Also this way they can have the battle include a mighty duel where Thorin is almost killed but manages to vanquish Azog (SPOILER ALERT (maybe) note-in what will undoubtedly be a black hole in the next movie when they redo the end of The Return of the King with Thorin as Aragorn, Thorin is mortally wounded at the Battle of Five Armies and dies.  Anything else will infuriate me).

So that is what didn’t annoy me.  However, experienced readers of my blog will know that I revel in pointing out what sucks, so let’s talk about the things this movie did that made me dream of a better day when film audiences can electroshock writers and directors with the touch of a button in the armrest of the theater seat.  This include pretty much everything bad the first movie did that I didn’t mention before plus some.  Here are some specifics:

First off, the forcing in of every single character and reference from the LOTR has reached a saturation point, where the references start to crystallize and collect on the bottom of the beaker.  Legolas has no business in this film.  Gloin never mentioned his son Gimli.  The necromancer was a minor subplot and by the way WAS NEVER SAURON.  On that same note they brought in Galadriel to do the evil rising opening monolog like this is part of another world encompassing dastardly plot, not chapters 8-15 of a 153 page kids book.  For that matter, the forcing of gravitas into what is essentially a pretty light story didn’t do much more than distract from the plot.

All of the characters seem to suffer from some kind of super good sportsmanship brain aneurism where they have the ability to totally overwhelm their opponents at any moment but instead opt to use their secondary talents or abilities.  It’s like bringing both a gun and a knife to a gun fight and then choosing to use the a rag ball on the end of a rope you grabbed from a homeless person.  Smaug suffered from this the most.  He had about 10,000 chances to incinerate both Bilbo or the dwarves but only opted to use his fire when there was a handy wall for them to hide behind.  The rest of the time he opted to chase them or be readily distracted by other dwarves.  If you read the book (a question that I think could be put fairly to Peter Jackson) you will recall that Biblo stayed invisible the whole time he was talking to Smaug in a wise choice to not be flambeed, but here he thinks the best move is to stand in the open for his dialogue with the fire breathing dragon.  Fortunately his stupidity is matched by Smaug, who opts to just talk with him for a while.

I know why they did this, by the way.  They wrote themselves into a hole in the LOTR by making anyone wearing the Ring transport into a weird black and white alternate universe where you for some reason you cannot hear normal sound but hear strong wind and/or the screams of the damned.  Again, the people making this film don’t think we are smart enough to understand that the Ring gains in power as Sauron does, and was therefore a much more difficult and dangerous thing to wear in the later books but fairly innocuous in this one.  This is where movie scripts fall apart IMO.  When protagonist and antagonist start doing things that are clearly stupid like not use their inviso-ring or burn a thief to a cinder at the first opportunity then we the audience stop connecting to them, thus forcing us out of the story.  No one wants to identify with a character who is flat out dumb, and when the main villain shows how stupid he is the tension bleeds away.

Anyway, another thing that bugged the hell out of me was the battle between the dwarves and Smaug.  If you recall the book the dwarves more or less spent the entire time around the Lonely Mountain skulking outside while sending in Bilbo to five finger some gold.  There’s no way we can have that in this epic so the obvious answer is to have an battle resembling the illigitamate offspring of a Scooby Doo episode mated with The Three Stooges in Orbit (that’s Curly-Joe Three Stooges BTW) with the delivery doctor being the prop guy from the Three Musketeers.  How long do you think it takes to craft several dozen hi explosive grenades from raw material?  According to Peter Jackson about 30 seconds.  It also takes about 30 seconds to fire up smelting furnaces that haven’t been used in decades and pour a giant gold statue of a dwarf that sublimes directly into liquid somehow (I guess the dwarfs also MacGuvyered up a small nuclear reactor while making the grenades) to spew molten gold all over Smaug.

This fight scene is actually insulting on a couple of levels, not just the one that is a punch in the balls to a true Tolkien fan.  You see, it is established fairly early on in the film that Bilbo and all the dwarfs are effectively immortal (SPOILER ALERT again, sort of.  In the book in addition to Thorin both Fili and Kili die in the final battle.  I’m curious to see if that holds true) and that point is reinforced about 1 minute into this battle with the very first of many highly improbable narrow escape, making the whole episode a mutual masturbation session between the CGI guys and the DP.  It becomes a huge waste of time and all we are looking for is what trick the writers will have come up with for the final escape.  I honestly got bored.

However, each of these movies has to end with some kind of epic battle and Tolkien was not kind enough to write in yet another one in chapter 12 (I guess he didn’t realize his intro book was due to be made into 11 hours of film.  How lacking in foresight) so they had to crowbar in something.

I could go on but I’m already at over 2K words and have been finding writing this almost as much of a grind as watching it.  I’m going to skip the story recap.  Read chapters 6-12 in the book.  Should take you less time than the 161 minutes this film runs.  Spiders.  Elves.  Dwarves.  Bear-man.  Wizard.  Orcs.  Dragon.  Movie call backs.  Blue balls ending.

The stars.

I will say that Smaug, up until his worthless battle against the dwarves, was in all ways truly bad ass.  Great CGI (assuming you like brown and gold), and his voice and dialog exceptional.  Two stars.  The scene between him and Bilbo was the best in the film (when you think about it, the scene between Biblo and Gollum in the last film was the best as well.  It almost makes you think that when they stick to the actual story they get the best results…).  One star.  Casting was in all ways good, although that might be a carry over from the last film.  Still, one star.  As bitter as I am about this whole series I am still a huge Tolkien fan and love being back in Middle Earth.  One star.  The barrel chase scene was kind of fun, even if it had way too much Orlando Bloom for no reason.  One star.  The spiders were kind of cool, although if you stuffer from arachnophobia you might want to take a long bathroom break.  One star.  I normally don’t give stars for movies that just suck less than the previous one, but this one was a distinct improvement over the first one.  Also no singing was huge.  One star.  Total: nine stars.

The black holes.

Oh, where to begin?  Forcing in every single reference and character from the LOTR series (guess what?  The Nasgul show up for some reason) into this film like a drug mule getting paid by the ounce for as many heroin filled condoms shoved into his assorted orifices.  Two black holes.  SPOILER ALERT a bonus black hole for making the Necromancer turn out to be none other than…Sauron!  Yes, he makes his appearance almost in the flesh for…some reason?  It’s things like that that make me wish he had won at the end of The Return of the King.  One black hole.  Apparently the sexed up inbred lowbrow apes that we the audiences are cannot see a film without a hot chick and some kind of romance so they invented a girl elf who falls in love with…a dwarf.  Yes, it’s that sad.  Not only does that not stem from anything Tolkien wrote but goes against every bit of common lore associated with dwarves and elves ever in the myth and history of this world or any alternate world you want to name.  Also completely unnecessary.  Two black holes for being extra insulting.  Remember the Black Arrow of Bard the Bowman?  How it was his lucky arrow that he had inherited from his father and never failed him?  Now Black Arrows are magical ballista bolts that at one point were crafted at will.  I don’t know why this bugs me so much but it does.  One black arrow, I mean hole.  While there was less of Radagast he was still there and a turd in the bowl doesn’t have to be big in order to ruin the punch.  One black hole.  The fight scene at the end between Smaug and the dwarves was dumb, dopey, and totally worthless.  One black hole.  Pacing was kind of awful.  The dwarves head into Mirkwood and in the course of about 1 minute go from well equipped and put together to Tom Hanks in the second half of Castaway.  In the book there were weeks of travel and a slow degredation.  One black hole.  The grenades were annoying, and WTF was the golden statue deal?  Was it liquid that was held in place by the “magic” of the dwarves or was it solid that somehow had 100,000 pounds of white phosphorus hidden inside?  Why were the dwarves crafting a giant gold bomb statue anyway?  One black hole.  The 3D did nothing except lighten my wallet a little more.  One black hole.  Trying to make the story of the Hobbit into something way more important that it ever was.  One black hole.  Continuing to stretch this story in a blatant attempt to get more money from us.  Say what you will about Harry Potter or Twilight going two parts but at least they were both based on full length novels.  One black hole.  And finally SPOILER ALERT in another case of massive cinema blue balls the epic battle of Smaug destroying Laketown (or Dale) that I was more or less hoping for ever since the last film failed miserably never happened.  The film ends with Smaug in flight towards Laketown.  Remember how in Star Wars one of the main reasons we all kept going was to finally see Darth Vader in all his glory and all we got was a 30 second scene where he utters one line and one word and then throws a Force temper tantrum?  This is on par with that, and on par with Peter Jackson channeling the energy of whatever demon possessed Lucas.  For this alone go screw yourself Jackson.  Two black holes.  Total: fifteen black hole.

So a final total of six black holes.  This has been literally my most painful review to write to date.  I really, really want to like these movies.  I love the LOTR movies and all Tolkiens books.  I actually saw this over a week ago and have been grinding through this.  My motivation to finish is at an all time low.  Should you see it?  I say with utmost grudgingness yes.  If you are a fan of the series you will need to see this, if only to see how bad it is.  However, I feel exactly like I did the first Hobbit; now that I have seen it I feel no need to ever see it again.  The LOTR movies I rewatch with compulsive regularity but this one has no replay value.  I find myself resenting the brain cells dedicated to remembering it.  See it if you are a fan and then move on.  Date movie?  Only if she is really into Tolkien and hobbits (if she is only into hobbits I hate to break it to you but you have a whole slew of other problems on deck).  Bathroom break?  Most of the scenes in Laketown before the dwarves head to the Lonely Mountain are totally expendable in spite of Stephen Fry’s best efforts.

Ugh.  I need to see something to wash the taste of that one out.  I’ll go see Anchorman tonight.  Thanks for reading, and thanks for being patient with me on this.  I know it has been a while.  Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu.  If you agree or disagree with me feel free to post a comment here, and if you have an off topic question or suggestion feel free to email me at [email protected].  Have a great night.

Dave