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