Middle Earth as You've Already Seen It

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Directed by Peter Jackson
Two and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

One can call Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”, the second installment in his "Hobbit" trilogy, many things: ‘ambitious’, ‘epic’, ‘bombastic’, ‘cluttered’, ‘listless’… But if there is anything “Desolation” is not, it is ‘Tolkien’. With one book of modest length strained to the breaking point of a trilogy of three-hour movies, and much of the Middle Earth history provided in Tolkien’s “The Silmarillion” off limits to him, Jackson has found a great deal of vacuous space to be filled with his own cinematic hedonism. This includes, most notably, a showdown with the titular dragon that persists for a full hour and recalls, more than its source literature, the climactic final act of Jackson’s earlier “King Kong”. There's more than one reason we feel like we've done this before.

“Desolation” opens with a brief aside, wherein Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) learns of some of the underlying motives behind which Gandalf (Ian McKellen) had pressed him to reclaim the throne of the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor beneath the Misty Mountain, abandoned now save for the great dragon Smaug, who hordes the mine’s oceans of treasure alone in the dark. But from there the tale picks up pretty much where the first had left off, with Bilbo, Gandalf, and the band of dwarves on the precipice of the Mirkwood Forest, drawing near to the Misty Mountain.

The first installment had begun with this quest and lost its way, allowing itself to be derailed by a sideplot concerning an orc king hunting the group for reasons so inconsequential they can be difficult to recall. That supplemental conflict informs much of the central act of “Desolation”. While Bilbo and the dwarves endure an undesired rendezvous with the wood elves, reviving a popular character from the first trilogy and introducing a touching forbidden romance, Gandalf is assembling the early foundation for “The Lord of the Rings”, which takes place about seventy years later.

Certainly Mr. Jackson’s time spent in Middle Earth is devoted now, as it was before in his first trilogy, to the showcasing of its more gnarly creatures and to the staging of large-scale action set-pieces, though in spite of his efforts to imbue the irreverent tale with a sense of imminent foreboding, the action in “Desolation” does not carry with it the same sense of despair or consequence.

It’s worth noting that this is not necessarily a bad thing. One mustn't base their assessment of an artistic endeavor by that which it is not, though a return trip to a fantasy world like this accounts for something of an exception to the rule, because that which is missing is so readily evident. The action in “Desolation” is scaled down tremendously, and works on a more intimate level that, with fewer involved players, allows for moments of clever choreography (A wonderful moment with a careening, barreled dwarf comes to mind). The final battle of the film, between the dragon Smaug (voiced eloquently by Benedict Cumberbatch), and Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) is epic in its duration and its inventiveness, if however not in its scope.

That which is so lamentably absent, not merely from this installment but from the earlier entry in “The Hobbit” series, is the first trilogy’s sense of wonder and aw. Strange how a film with so much time to kill can be in such a hurry, or how seldom Mr. Jackson can now be bothered to stop and observe the inconsequential details that brought his first trilogy to such vivid life and grandeur – an anonymous hobbit inconspicuously picking his ear, the stream of beer snaking its way through a dwarf’s beard, a quiet reprieve blowing smoke rings in the night. Tolkien’s world is one rich in eclectic cultures and mannerisms. That Jackson’s return visit lacks a strong sense of these is unfortunate.

“The Desolation of Smaug” is, in spite of my misgivings, modestly satisfying pop entertainment, with effective movement, exciting action, and lavish vistas. For many with expectations, it will have done enough, if little more. As for yours truly, I found myself enjoying the ride, enough so that it was not until the credits that I stopped to wonder why I was ever on it.