When The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug opens,
the first thing we see is Peter Jackson, as hairy and as dirt-covered as the
rest of his motley crew, crunching a carrot and then shifting out of frame. It’s
not necessarily out of the ordinary for a Jackson film. Like Hitchcock before
him, Jackson inserts himself into all of his films, be they epics like The Lord of the Rings trilogy or
gross-out horror comedies like Dead Alive.
However, this one feels different. Unlike his other cameos which are hidden
fairly well – either tucked away deep within the film’s runtime or with Jackson
under heavy disguise – this one feels blatant, self-indulgent, and cartoonish.
It’s also a microcosm for the overarching problem with The Desolation of Smaug and the entire concept for The Hobbit trilogy. Through the success
of The Lord of the Rings franchise,
Jackson has achieved a George Lucas level of authority. And because of the
power he wields, he no longer feels beholden to any thoughts and suggestions
that go against his overall vision. What has resulted is a bloated, overwrought
series of films that feel like nothing more than unnecessary fan fiction.
The Desolation of
Smaug picks up where the first film left off, with the titular hobbit, Bilbo
Baggins (Martin Freeman), and 13 irascible dwarves led by their
king-without-a-kingdom, Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), crossing Middle
Earth to reclaim their “kingdom under the mountain” from the dragon Smaug
(voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) who, as dragons are wont to do, has taken the
dwarves’ home and all their gold as his own. As the beginning of the film
suggests, the great wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) urged Thorin onto this
journey, but still periodically abandons Thorin’s cavalcade of tiny warriors to
investigate a threat that is much more pertinent to Middle Earth as a whole – there
is a powerful necromancer (again, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) who is
rallying armies of monstrous orcs to wage a much larger war than the one that
looms over Laketown. And if these were the only two plot threads, The Desolation of Smaug might have been
a reasonably taut, exciting spectacle.
However, these two threads are only two of many that run
through the film, which very quickly gets incredibly dense with plot business,
at times clumsily shuffling between five different locations in an effort to
keep all the plates up and spinning at once. However, where An Unexpected Journey expanded J.R.R.
Tolkien’s universe by adding in material from The Silmarillion and some of Tolkien’s unpublished notes and
manuscripts, The Desolation of Smaug
completely invents whole plots and characters that play major roles in the film.
Foremost of these inventions is the wood-elf Tauriel (Lost’s Evangeline Lilly), who finds herself in a rather odd love
triangle between Kili (Aidan Turner), one of the more handsome members of our
dwarven band, and familiar face and LotR
vet Legolas (Orlando Bloom), who pines for Tauriel much to the chagrin of his
father, the wood-elf king Thranduil (Pushing
Daises’ Lee Pace, who, much like with his character in Lincoln, plays his part with insane, scene-chewing delirium). While
Legolas and Thranduil come directly from Tolkien (though I don’t believe
Legolas is ever mentioned, let alone appears in The Hobbit novel), Tauriel and the love triangle filled with heavy
yearning and disapproving straight out of some young adult novel, are
completely products of Peter Jackson’s (and perhaps co-writers Fran Walsh and
Philippa Boyens’s) imagination.
In addition, Jackson and his partners in crime
(including, to what degree I am unsure, Guillermo del Toro) also expand upon
Tolkien’s barely sketched human leader Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) – morphing
him into Bard the Bargeman, a smuggler and single father of three children who
has a complicated past. They also make him the “one just man” willing to stand
up for his fellow downtrodden citizens against the corruption of Laketown’s opulent
master (played by a muck and grime covered Stephen Fry, complete with ridiculous
comb over) and his rat-like toady Alfrid (Ryan Cage). For decades, fantasy
writers have been trying to emulate Tolkien’s work and the broad conventions
that have emerged from this imitation come full circle as Jackson and company lavishly
sprinkle them over the author’s sparse text like some unnecessary seasoning.
None of these storylines really have much to do with the central quest of the
dwarves taking their kingdom back from Smaug. And while I guess it could be
argued that they add to the manic atmosphere as the film progresses, they
ultimately take away from what is most interesting about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – THE HOBBIT AND SMAUG!
Like in An
Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of
Smaug works best when it narrows its focus to the exploits of its
hairy-footed hero. The highlight of the first film, perhaps the highlight of
the series so far, was Bilbo’s discovery of the One Ring and his subsequent
meeting with Andy Serkis’s creepy and heartbreakingly pathetic Gollum. Here in Desolation, it is easily the hobbit’s frighteningly
tense and arguably verbose encounter with Erebor’s current, scaly inhabitor in
his golden lair. The other highlight takes place with Bilbo in Mirkwood. Here,
the hobbit climbs to the forest’s canopy only to be greeted upon his return by
a pack (I’m not sure what a group of these monsters are called) of enormous and
genuinely terrifying spiders reminiscent of Shelob in The Two Towers. Martin Freeman is a terrific actor. And when he’s
given time to shine, his performance is fantastic – nuanced and heartfelt, he
oftentimes seems like a transplant from the silent film era, doing so much
comically and dramatically without ever saying a word.
The Desolation of
Smaug is packed full of intriguing ideas and interesting moments, but
nearly every one revolves around the smallest details in the film. Bilbo’s
ability to understand what the spiders are saying when he has the One Ring on
his finger, the inner turmoil he feels about whether or not to tell Gandalf
about the ring, and his uncharacteristically primordial response to the ring
being threatened all hint at the power of one of the most thematically dense
symbols in the history of literature. Even as the film finally takes on the
epic feel Jackson desperately wants to capture with Smaug, the great worm is
far more imposing and magnificent as an orator than as a combatant, the
inevitable and affectless battle quickly superseding the dragon’s unsettling, malevolent
insight as he quickly discerns the dwarves’ agenda and reveals his own
retaliation. Likewise, we learn a thousand times more from a quick conversation
between Legolas, Thranduil, and a captured orc than we do in any battle
throughout the entire film.
What it boils down to is that it seems as though Peter
Jackson cannot go twenty minutes without a lengthy, expensive yet somehow often
cheap-looking action set piece involving CGI barrels going down CGI rapids, CGI
forges molding CGI liquid gold to trick a seemingly unstoppable force, or part
CGI elves surfing on trees and battling mostly CGI orcs. Don’t get me wrong,
battles are fine, epic battles are even better. But the first rule about any sex
scene, violent scene, or action scene is that it should be about character. It
should tell us something about those involved and either during the scene or in
its aftermath, something needs to change, either in the characters or in the
world around them. Otherwise, the scene is meaningless, perfunctory and boring.
None of the action/battle scenes in The
Desolation of Smaug follow this rule. In fact, even in the most inventively
staged of these scenes – the aforementioned barrel/rapid affair – the only
thing the audience really learns is something we already knew from The Lord of the Rings: Legolas is
unbelievably (and I mean that in its literal sense) proficient at killing bad
guys.
Much like with George Lucas and his three prequels, all
of this added up to me questioning whether Peter Jackson has forgotten how to
direct. The dwarves are again a bunch of irritable, quibbling jerks who, apart
from Thorin and Balin, are really only distinguishable by their ridiculous
facial hair. Thorin himself is completely unlikable and although he’s the
primary focus of the film, the film gives you little to no reason to want to
even root for him. Why does he need
to be “king under the mountain” again? Is it the wealth that it will bring to
everyone? Does he just want it because it belongs to him? For much of the film,
we’re not even given a real reason as to why any of this stuff matters in the
larger scope of things. There’s no weight to any of it. Apart from the
perfunctory battles and unlikable characters, it all just feels kind of
comical. The CGI, though improved in some aspects (like with Azog the Defiler,
Smaug especially, and the spiders), is still pretty terrible. Though the rapids
scene is being praised by many, it quickly gets out of control with too-smooth
movements by clearly computer generated beings and jarring shots taken with a
waterproof camera that looks like family’s home movies and completely took me
out of the film. All of this and everything mentioned before coupled with
baffling choices like having every character deliver “important” lines of
dialogue like David Caruso in CSI: Miami (complete with dramatic camera push in
and everything), I was left constantly wondering if all of the accolades and
power heaped on Jackson after the success of The Lord of the Rings was just too much for him.
Don’t get me wrong, there are things to like about The Desolation of Smaug. The costumes
and sets are absolutely gorgeous and Jackson and his team’s ability to world-build
is still as sharp as ever. Likewise, though most of the orcs remain CGI
creations, Jackson has reintegrated the use of practical prosthetics used in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and it
helps tremendously, especially in one scene that I briefly mentioned between
Legolas, Thranduil, and a captured orc where a CGI monster would have made it
laughable at best. Also, the acting for the most part really carries the anemic
script. Though Orlando Bloom and Lee Pace are particularly ridiculous, Freeman
and Cumberbatch play wonderfully off one another; Richard Armitage prevents
Thorin from plunging into complete unlikeability; Evangeline Lilly is terrific
and could have easily been one of the most interesting characters in the film
if she weren’t hampered by primarily being the object of affection between elf
and dwarf; and Ian Mckellen plays Gandalf with weariness, grandiosity, and ironic
humor that reminds us why he will be remembered as the definitive depiction of
this character for years to come.
However, as much as Peter Jackson wishes it was, The Hobbit just isn’t an epic story. It
is a short book told from the perspective of a tiny creature for children. By
attempting to make The Hobbit
something it isn’t, stretching it into three films and filling it with
pointless battles and subplots that do nothing to enhance the overall story,
Jackson is producing something that is unrecognizable. Even what humor Freeman
(and occasionally the dwarves) brings to the film is undercut by graphic depictions
of beheadings and violent stabbings. Instead of feeling epic, the series feels
both bloated and stretched too thin. The action is repetitive and the constant
detours from the main plot line feel less interesting and more like
advertisements to watch the much better Lord
of the Rings trilogy. Ultimately, that’s the core problem. Instead of being
interested in creating a genuine, heartfelt adaptation of The Hobbit, Peter Jackson seems to care more about his
self-indulgent need to morph Tolkien’s work into a prequel for his own film
trilogy. When, at the end of the film, Bilbo exasperatedly asks “What have we
done?” I can’t help but hope Jackson and company are asking themselves the same
question.
6
out of 10
